Education: Forthright for Federal Aid

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Lying dormant but very much alive on the front stoops of both political parties approaching the 1960 campaign is the nettlesome issue of federal aid to education. The dilemma posed by segregation in Southern public schools, the bogy of federal control following U.S. aid, make the issue hard to handle. But burgeoning school populations and stretched-to-the-limit state and local support make it an issue that must be faced. This week the Democrats made the first try.

"We believe that the moment has at length come when the Federal government must provide some significant share of the cost of education," declares the Democratic Party's brain-trusting Advisory Council this week in a 30-page report entitled Education and Freedom's Future. Mixing a facts-and-figures look at America's schooling needs with political sallies suitable for 1960 platform use, the report is the work of a committee headed by William Benton,* onetime Senator from Connecticut, adman (Benton & Bowles), vice president of the University of Chicago (1937-45), publisher (1942-45) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The report's recommendation: federal expenditures for education of $1 billion a year at once, rising in four "stages" to $3 billion or $4 billion a year.

The bulk of the money, says the council, should go to public schools in "annual grants to the states, on a per pupil basis": $25 per pupil the first year, eventually reaching $100 per pupil annually. "Matching" grants by the states would ensure that the U.S. supplemented but did not replace state and local spending. At one point the report proclaims that, "most certainly Federal support for education should never be allowed to slow the carrying out of the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court on segregation." But in its concluding recommendations the council more than nods to the Southern wing of its party in urging that the per-pupil grants to states have "no strings attached except that such funds should be used for public elementary and secondary education, what is 'public' to be defined by the states."

Other Education and Freedom's Future recommendations:

¶ Expansion of the College Housing Loan Program to include all kinds of campus structures, with sufficient funds to double present U.S. college capacities.

¶ Creation of a federal-state cooperative scholarship program to award annually 25,000 scholarships worth up to $1,000. usable in any accredited U.S. college or abroad "where desirable," for up to four years. The U.S. and the states would split the costs fifty-fifty, and in the fourth stage the total number of scholarships would be 100,000.