Wasteland, U.S.A.

As Congress debated last week on federal aid to education, a fresh flood of reports swamped Washington with evidence of the sorry state of the nation's schools. Items:

P: Of all high school graduates in the top 30% of their class, only half ever go on to college. About one in five of the students in the top quarter does not even stay in high school long enough to graduate.

P: Two out of three high school students do not take chemistry, three out of four avoid physics, seven out of eight get no trigonometry or solid geometry. Some 100,000 seniors attend high schools that offer no advanced mathematics, and 61,000 go to schools that offer neither chemistry nor physics.

P: Last year 14 states did not require even a single course in science or mathematics for a high school diploma. While 27 states maintain special supervisors for physical education, and all 48 have supervisors for home economics, agriculture and "distributive trades," only two states employ a mathematics supervisor, and only six have supervisors for science.

P: Though public high school enrollments have gone up 21.6% since 1947, U.S. colleges turned out only 4% more graduates trained to teach mathematics and only 15.1% more trained to teach science. And of those so trained, only six out of ten went directly into teaching.

P: Fewer than 15% of U.S. high school pupils are taking a foreign language; half the U.S. high schools do not offer a foreign language at all. While 40% of all Russian high school pupils study English, only ten out of 25,000 U.S. high schools offer Russian. Meanwhile, the number of college graduates qualified to teach a foreign language has dropped 30% since 1950. In this field, said Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Marion Folsom, "we find ourselves the most backward major nation in the world."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.