School Message: Learn to Teach

THAT reform, not money, is the keystone of Richard Nixon's domestic policy was demonstrated again last week with the President's first message to Congress on federal education policy. Rejected outright was the New Deal-Great Society doctrine that the best answer is the one that carries the biggest dollar sign. Nixon proposed no new comprehensive spending plans, no additional substantive programs. Instead, he declared that the U.S. must learn how to teach; Americans must conduct a "searching re-examination of our entire approach to learning."

The President argued that the greatest need was to find out why--despite large expenditures in recent years --schools have not been able to improve appreciably the performance of children from poor families. He asked Congress to set up a clearinghouse for research, the National Institute of Education. Its first job: to study how to improve compensatory education for the poor. In the same vein, he endorsed the Office of Education's "right to read" program, announced last September, to improve literacy by upgrading research and developing methods of teaching reading skills found to be inadequate among many students. He also asked for a network of experimental centers to study the education of prekindergarten children. On his own authority, Nixon established a Commission on School Finance "to help states and communities to analyze the fiscal plight of their public and nonpublic schools."

Mediocre Results. The 8,000-word message, in preparation for almost a year, was designed at least in part to answer Administration critics who contend that Nixon puts economy ahead of education. The White House drew on the 1966 Coleman report, a Great Society-sponsored study conducted by educators and other experts. One of the Coleman theses was that quality education, as usually measured in terms of school buildings, libraries, laboratories and numbers of teachers, often bears little relationship to the school's effect on children. But, old school building or new, a far greater impact on classroom performance was found to be made by a child's family and home background. Certainly Nixon was on firm ground when he argued that not enough is known about the learning process, that education research should be accelerated, that some federally subsidized programs that seemed so promising a few years ago have thus far yielded mediocre results or worse.

Yet Nixon's approach is also vulnerable to attack. His new Commission on School Finance will doubtless report --in a year or so--that many urban and rural districts are starving for dollars and that local revenue resources are inadequate. For a new Administration to request such a study is one thing; Nixon's took 14 months to decide that it needed to think the whole thing over.

It is also questionable whether the programs already under way are as feckless as Nixon makes them sound. The Administration's own statistics show that special aid for impoverished pupils significantly raised the reading levels of 19% of those tested. For those youngsters, at least, somebody must have been doing something right. There is also some doubt about whether all local school districts have been using federal funds for their intended purpose. Nixon's Commissioner of Education, James Allen Jr., announced that a study he had conducted confirmed that in some cases money meant to aid special "enrichment" programs was used for ordinary operating purposes in slum schools.

Variety of Judgments. Many educators argue that the Federal Government simply has not put up enough money for a long enough period to achieve the kind of results Nixon talks about. "As we get more education for the dollar," Nixon promised, "we will ask the Congress to supply many more dollars for education." Allen, who supports the basic thinking of the message, added the caveat: "We are not going to find any panaceas in this business, but we had better start now, because we cannot afford to go on putting large sums into education while the reading levels go down, down, down." To which John Gardner responded: "We all can arrive at a variety of judgments about our schools, about what works and what doesn't. But whatever else they need, they need money, and this is especially true of the schools in the inner city." The main danger in Nixon's essentially sound approach is that it could become a rationale for doing little until some mysteries of the education process are solved--if they ever are.

The President and Congress finally ended their seven-month battle over the Labor-HEW appropriation bill for the current fiscal year. The final outcome was a compromise: Nixon got a $700 million cut from $19.7 billion he had vetoed as inflationary; the Democrats in Congress ended up with $760 million more than the President had originally proposed. Actual spending will come to just over $19 billion, since Nixon was given the right to withhold 2% of the total.

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