Education: Another Harvardman

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After three months of searching, the Kennedy Administration last week dragged its favorite talent pool, Harvard, to fish up a new U.S. Commissioner of Education. He is Francis Keppel, 46, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His new task is one that other top educators spurned, though most of them are eager to see it accomplished. It is to upgrade the U.S. Office of Education and to make it an effective federal voice in U.S. education.

The Office of Education needs upgrading, say critics, because the Federal Government is flying blind in education. Congress now earmarks some $2 billion a year to aid education, but no one agency coordinates the hundreds of programs that spend the money. Though fearful of federal control, U.S. schools and colleges need authoritative appraisal of a confusing multiplicity of proposed academic reforms (teaching machines, language labs, "new math"); yet the Office of Education's research program is too small to be of much use. The Office has less influence in Congress, for example, than the National Education Association. Keppel's predecessor, Sterling McMurrin, pointed out after quitting this fall that an N.E.A. blizzard of telegrams to all Congressmen was what scuttled the college-aid bill he supported.

Sculptor to Dean. The Office of Education is a tiny arm of the Health, Education and Welfare Department. Its chief job is to dispense about $649,000,000 a year in appropriations as Congress directs. Few of its 1,153 employees are first-rate, and none are high-paid. The commissioner gets only $20,000 a year, compared with $48,500 for the school superintendent of Chicago. Urgent suggestions that the office be made a Cabinet-level department have come from former HEW Secretary Abraham Ribicoff, former Harvard President James B. Conant, and many others, but HEW's new Secretary Anthony Celebrezze wants the improving done "within the present framework."

Keppel's credentials are impressive. Almost singlehanded, he has lifted the once low-grade Harvard Graduate School of Education to national preeminence, overtaking Columbia Teachers College. Son of Frederick P. Keppel, who was dean of Columbia College and later president of the Carnegie Corporation, Francis Keppel got his only earned degree (A.B.) at Harvard in 1938; nonetheless he is today ranked as a top educator without a doctor's or even a master's. He started out studying sculpture at the American Academy in Rome, but concluded that as a sculptor he was not good enough ever to be great. He returned to Cambridge, Mass., to take on a job as Harvard's assistant dean of freshmen. After a wartime stint as an Army education officer, he was suddenly plucked out of Harvard's administration by President Conant to become, at 37, dean of the dormant School of Education Trade School to Liberal Arts. He went to work to eliminate the trade-school atmosphere, put real scholars from science and the humanities on the education faculty. To earn Harvard's pioneering Master of Arts in Teaching, students now get a rich dose of liberal learning, plus "intern" teaching practice in public schools. Future administrators sit under such old pros as Professor Herold Hunt, former school superintendent of Chicago.