Nation: Boon from the Beadle

• Share

Like a Dickensian orphan, the Teacher Corps has teetered on the brink of starvation from birth. The program to send federally recruited, federally paid teachers into the nation's worst slum schools came into being in 1965, almost as an afterthought to a larger education bill. Congress left the program's gruel bowl empty of dollars until the following year, then handed it a subsistence diet that was due to run out last week and seemed most unlikely to be replenished.

At the eleventh hour, however, Congress gave the Teacher Corps both operating funds for the present and prospects for a prosperous future. Its surprise benefactor was the House, which earlier had played the beadle. Much of the House's opposition to the Teacher Corps had centered on the old issue of federal control over local education. After the program was dropped from an omnibus school bill this year, it was sent to an education subcommittee headed by Oregon Democrat Edith Green, a former schoolteacher whose firm ideas about education often differ from those of the Johnson Administration.

Willing Compromise. Instead of axing the corps, as the White House had feared, Mrs. Green overhauled it to satisfy both herself and the House Republican leadership. The Green version maintains the program's aims but transfers administrative responsibility from Washington to state and local agencies. This was the Republican approach to the larger $3.4 billion elementary-and secondary-school bill, a proposal that the Democrats had defeated in a spirited dispute. This time, however, the Democrats were willing to yield federal power because the alternative was no bill at all. In money terms, the compromise freed $3,800,000 for the corps's immediate needs and provided a three-year authorization of $135 million that provides for annual expansion of the program through fiscal 1970.

The Green measure breezed through the House, 311 to 88, was approved by the Senate in a voice vote, and signed by President Johnson one day before fiscal 1967 ended last week.