Report Card

P:Educators who hold that the nation's schools have turned into public-supported playrooms (see above) got some sharp if incomplete statistical support from a survey of Texas schools by a group of ten Texas school superintendents and school-board members. Of the schools giving answers to various questions of the survey, 112 out of 232 allow private music and/or dancing lessons on school time; 188 out of 220 give credit for band time, physical education, chorus, etc.; 166 out of 218 allow athletic teams to eat up school hours with practice sessions. P:More than half the nation's 23,746 public high schools are too small to do an effective teaching job, a special committee told the American Association of School Administrators at its annual convention in St. Louis. More than 13,000 high schools with 200 or fewer pupils are staffed by ten or fewer teachers who can do little but provide the bare basics of education. The costly solution: consolidating school districts wherever possible, to produce bigger schools and better facilities. To do otherwise, summed up the committee, would be "a false luxury this country cannot now afford. Reorganization of school districts is an imperative national need."

P:Fresh from raising $27 million in ten years, the University of Notre Dame announced plans to raise another $66.6 million in the next decade, will lay out $27 million to boost faculty salaries by 75%, allot only $18.6 million to new buildings. Meanwhile, the California Institute of Technology started a $16.1 million fund-raising drive to improve salaries, erect new buildings. P:Urging a Harvard University audience to bridge "the gulf between scientific and nonscientific cultures," England's Sir Charles P. Snow, physicist and novelist, mapped the abyss by noting: "I've often asked distinguished English writers and the like a rather simple question, such as 'What idea, if any, do you have of the second law of thermodynamics?', and an air of goggle-eyed stupefaction comes over the party. When my wife married me she thought a machine tool was something very small and bright and had a sort of red jewel in it."

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