Federal Aid to Education: I

(This is the first in a series of three articles on federal aid to education. The rest of the series will appear tomorrow and Tuesday.)

Before the Eighty-First Congress checks out of Washington in 1950, the chances are that it will have passed a bill giving substantial aid to American education. The Democrats are pledged to such legislation, and President Truman has been championing it for some time. A considerable segment of the Republican party also favors educational aid appropriations--in fact, a bill sponsored by Senator Taft got through the Senate last April, and probably would have been passed in the House, if it had reached the floor before the summer adjournment.

The Taft bill would have passed out 300 million dollars to the states for elementary and secondary schools. Each state was to get a minimum of five dollars for each child; and the poorer states were scheduled to get more--up to nearly 30 dollars per head in Mississippi. Taft figured that he had the biggest bugaboo whipped--federal "dictatorship" in the little red schoolhouse. He said, in debate: "The only function of the federal government would be that of an auditor.... It will have no more to say about the exact method by which education shall be administered."

In other words, it was a federal handout with no strings attached, and practically everybody was for it. Among its backers were Walter Lippmann, General Eisenhower, Drew Pearson, President Conant, and Walt Disney. But House Speaker Joe Martin thought it would cost too much, and with the assistance of some similarly disposed Representatives, was able to keep the Taft bill from ever reaching the floor of the House.

It's almost certain that another Taft bill would have little trouble in the present Congress. And it's almost as certain that future legislation could go farther than last year's proposal. It all depends on how hard the Administration and other Democratic big-wigs push. The budget provides room for 300 million dollars and one million for a survey of colleges to find out the "most practical means of providing additional opportunities for capable young people who could not otherwise afford a college or university education."

The first target of the proponents of federal aid will be elementary and secondary schools--as in the Taft bill. Just, before Christmas, Truman's assistant, Dr. John Steelman, said that this part of the educational world has "the highest priority." This evidently means that colleges will have to wait, so far as Administration plans are concerned. That's all right with such backers of federal aid as the National Education Association, which lobbies for hundreds of thousands of schools-teachers. And the colleges will probably be content to wait, figuring that if the grade and high schools get it first, higher education will only he that much closer. The important object this year, all federal-aiders maintain, is to get a permanent program started, and that is just what Democratic leaders are contemplating. David E. Lilionthal, Jr.