Education: The Inspector General

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No change? As the huge enterprise cranks up this week, it splutters far and wide. Despite ceaseless new construction, the nation's unremitting birth rate leaves the schools short of 195,000 teachers and 140,000 classrooms. Another 1,300,000 bright-eyed youngsters invaded the schools last year, and this new school year of 1959-60 begins with 1,843,000 more children than the schools have room for. One-third of the schools are potential firetraps ; some are still using gaslight; nearly 75% of the high schools are too small to pay for anything resembling a nuclear-age curriculum. And though wise men urge the country to spend at least twice as much money for education, the U.S. maintains an "educational deficit" estimated at anything from $6.8 billion to $9 billion yearly.

If money is a nightmare, even more vexing is the oddly uneven quality of public education. Compared to Europe's state-run systems, U.S. schools seem an anarchist's brainchild. With their genius for decentralization, the Constitution's writers left education in the laps of the states, which handed it over to local communities. Today nearly all responsibility is vested in 198,108 members of 49,477 school boards. The schools they command reflect vastly different standards. The . teachers they hire receive grossly varying salaries. The results range from splendid to shameful.

Some studies show that public schoolers outdo private-school graduates in top colleges. But only a fraction of public schools turn out students of such high caliber. Some of the brightest graduates (nearly half the top 30%, or 200,000 yearly) do not go to college at all. Too many bright students do not even finish high school. And despite compulsory education, millions of Americans never glance at a book from year to year (only 25% say they do). Some 8,500,000 can barely read.

Revolution. Criticizing the schools is no new habit. Ever since it took root in the mid-1800, the "common school" has been under whiplash criticism. When educators urged a broader curriculum than "the Bible and figgers," opponents cried that "every county in the state will need an insane hospital." When education began to reach sizable proportions in the 1880s. alarmists predicted the downfall of parental authority by "a crime-and-pauper-breeding system." In just one of his dozens of leaflets, Maryland's polemical Pamphleteer Francis B. Livesey blamed public schools for "the Negro problem, the servant problem, the labor problem, the tramp problem, the unemployment problem, the divorce problem, the eyesight problem, the juvenile problem, the bribery problem and the pure-food problem."