a person is regularly employed, however, presents a difficult administrative problem. It is hard to define and to obtain accurate information. Employment status, moreover, is likely to change frequently, and the question would arise as to when the child would be eligible for those periods when neither parent is regularly employed.

I should also note in candor, sir, that the department has not yet had time to complete its estimates of the cost of the proposal which covers a very broad area to which precise and technical eligibility or other requirements apply.

On this basis that nearly 70 percent of children on AFDC rolls are of school age, we believe that there are about 2 million children who would be eligible, but as I will have to note in a moment, sir, some of them will live in districts that may not meet eligibility requirements.

Now, in view of the several rather difficult administrative factors, chiefly the average number of children of school age for each parent drawing unemployment compensation, and also the loss of eligible children by virtue of their residing in ineligible school districts, we are not yet able to assess your cost estimate, sir, of about $218 million for these amendments. And there are other areas of analysis that have not yet been undertaken, but we think doubtless should be.

That is, since the rate of payment would vary widely from State to State, a projection of costs by States instead of on a national basis should be made. And as I understand it, there are in addition to the 39 so-called major areas of substantial unemployment that were shown in the Congressional Record of February 20, smaller areas of substantial unemployment, and there would be some additional cost to serve those areas.

Also, sir, as you noted, there is the problem of an offset in the potential entitlement which is very difficult to predict. Even within major areas of substantial unemployment, there will be school districts where eligible children reside but in which they will comprise less than 3 percent of the total average daily attendance. In States like California, New York, Pennsylvania, and others there may be school districts within a given county or a given labor area. Again we have a problem there that I think we ought to pay a lot of attention to.

In view of these as yet unresolved problems we think it only wise to give the Morse-Dent proposals for the amendment of the impacted areas programs the most careful investigation in the coming months. We will do this with a view toward formulating proposals, Mr. Chairman, which will adequately recognize the Federal Government's role in improving educational quality and opportunity for the children of our slums and rural depressed areas.

This is not to say that the Department is indifferent to the immediate needs of the 4,200 school districts now receiving Federal payments under Public Laws 815 and 874. As you know, the temporary provisions are due to expire on June 30, 1965, and these temporary provisions last expired on June 30, 1963, and weren't subsequently extended until December 18 of that year, and the appropriations indeed were not appropriated until the current calendar year. We can well understand the anxieties now felt by school administrators over the impending expiration of the Federal impact program.

Uncertainty in educational planning, brought about by the inability of many school districts to contract expenditures for which there is no legal assurance of receiving Federal financial assistance, should be avoided wherever possible. Accordingly, we would not object to a 2year extension by the current session of the Congress of the expiring provisions of Public Laws 815 and 874.

Thank you, sir, for your patience in permitting me to present this information.

Senator MORSE. Mr. Keppel, I only have two or three questions to ask, but before I do, the chairman wishes to make a brief statement for the record expressing his disapproval of the administration's decision to drag its heels on these two pieces of legislation. It is not very often that this committee lags behind the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, particularly the Office of Education, but we are so far ahead of you on this one that you look pretty bad. You apparently have overlooked the doctrine of judicial notice. When facts are so glaringly clear we lawyers say the court just takes judicial notice, but you, the Secretary, and President-let us put the responsibility where it belongs, right on the shoulders of the President-are not taking judicial notice of one of the serious domestic needs that confront this country; namely, the plight of the elementary and secondary schools.

Now, this committee has worked cooperatively with the administration under both President Kennedy and President Johnson, under the administration of Secretary Ribicoff and Secretary Celebrezze to meet this great domestic need in the field of education. If anyone can point out a greater need in this Republic, the need to do something about the educational crisis, I will be glad to hear what it is.

I believe that we cannot continue long in this country with a continuing breakdown of the educational processes and remain very secure. I believe that the school system of this country is one of the three greatest defense weapons we have. The economy is another. Our Defense Establishment is the third.

But if you weaken the educational structure of society, you weaken the economy of the society, and you have a society that fails to take care of its self-defense protective measures. That society is not going to last for very long.

The elementary and secondary schools in this country are in a sad, sad plight, we all know. We have had great legislative problems in recent years trying to get through a general aid to education bill for elementary and secondary schools. No one is better informed than you are, Commissioner, as to the problems that have prevented the passage of that farseeing program of the late President Kennedy in connection with S. 1021 of the 87th Congress and S. 580 of the current session.

I know, as a result of my many conferences with him, both while he was in the Senate and on this committee and when he went to the White House, that President Kennedy agreed with the chairman of this subcommittee that as important as aid to higher education is, of greater importance is aid to the elementary and secondary schools. We all know the major emotional blockade that has prevented over the years a general aid bill. I remember very well in the 87th Congress how hard we all worked together to get S. 1021.

The legislation that is before this subcommittee this morning is a bill that takes a segmentized approach to this great crisis. As I said in the hearing yesterday, it is not going to resolve it, but it may help it.

You mentioned the need for future study as to the bills cost. Let me say, Mr. Commissioner, if costs were doubled from $218 million that I estimate in the statement I have already made on the floor of the Senate and inserted in the record of this hearing, it would amount to nothing in comparison with the problem that it seeks to solve. If the cost were tripled, we ought to pay it and be glad to pay it willingly in order to get the benefits that this bill is bound to deliver into the slum areas, into the depressed areas, into the unemployed areas, into the areas where we are pouring out millions of dollars of welfare funds for parents who are, for one reason or another, unemployed or unemployable.

I am just aghast to understand an administration that is given an opportunity to come forward to support a bill but which says to this subcommittee this morning through you, "We are going to stall." I know there is an election coming on, but I expressed myself on this issue of stalling on needed legislation on the floor of the Senate the other day, and I express it again here this morning. Here is one Senator who is never going to hesitate to carry out what he considers to be his trust for any reason of political expediency. I think we ought to pass our legislation when we have the opportunity to pass on it, and when we can take judicial notice of the fact that the need is clear. We would not waste a dime by enacting this legislation, but it would save a lot of young people in my judgment from wrecked lives, and in so doing you would save the taxpayers in my judgment many times per year what the costs of this bill would be per year be it x, y, or 2 dollars. If you sat in my position, Mr. Commissioner, and you saw the administration spending now about $2 million a day in an undeclared war in South Vietnam, in obvious violation of the international law obligations of this country, when you have watched your Government pour down the international rathole over $5 billion in South Vietnam, when you see a Government pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a wasteful program in connection with foreign aid, which your Comptroller General has in report after report proved to be a program in many respects that is shockingly wasteful and inefficient and not only that, but the cause of a great deal of corruption around the world, you do not find yourself very much moved by an administration that thinks you ought to stall for further study and investigation an elementary and secondary school bill which seeks to do something about some of your underdeveloped areas in your own country. I want to say to this administration that the underdeveloped ghetto areas of New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago and every other metropolitan area of this country should be of much greater concern to it than underdeveloped areas anywhere else in the world. As I said on the floor of the Senate in a speech the day before yesterday, the time has come for us to take care of the economic needs and interests of the American people first.

Now, I fully realize the position that you find yourself in, and I fully realize that there is nothing that I can say from this chair this morning that can in any way change the course of action that this

administration has struck out for itself, but let me say I use the words "struck out" in a double meaning. They sure have struck out, and they have lost me, not only on this issue but some of the other issues. I sit here not as a Democrat first but as a Senator first, and I will never substitute any partisan expedient program for what I consider to be the best interest of my country, either before or after an election.

I fully realize that the testimony that the administration has given through your lips this morning weakens the chances of our getting action on this bill before the adjournment, but I tell you what else it does. It will magnify many times my determination to see to it that the country knows what the objective of this bill is and knows who is responsible for pulling the switch on it, and who is responsible for the "go slow study" approach. Sit here for the 20 years I have sat here, and you know what that tactic is. It is a stalling tactic. I have had to fight it year in and year out.

I simply want to say, Commissioner, that as far as I am concerned, the facts are so clear as to the need for this type of legislation that I am going to continue to take judicial notice that we ought to go ahead with it. I hope when the election is over the matter will be reassessed. As you know, or ought to know, I shall do everything that I can to see to it that the President is reelected-I do not think it is going to be difficult, but I shall certainly support him--but that does not mean I approve of his tactic on this piece of legislation and/or on some other pieces of legislation. I cannot support the policy of this administration to give away in effect hundreds of millions of dollars of the largesse of this country in connection with the foreign trade program that is being negotiated now in Geneva and elsewhere. If one thinks we are going to get any fair treatment from alleged allies in the field of foreign trade or in the whole foreign policy program, they could not be more wrong. I am not going to sit here to vote for that part of the administration's program that in my judgment is doing such a serious economic disservice to the people of this country, and I am not going to support the administration's position on this education bill.

I am going to continue to do what I can to see to it that the country, as a result of these hearings, knows what the facts are as the record will show, and it can be the judge.

I do not know how we are ever going to do what needs to be done to meet this crisis in elementary and secondary schools if we do not make the kind of segmentized approach that this bill makes possible. You cannot just put these things aside. We have these schools. They are in a deplorable condition. We have a bill here that seeks to do something about it, and we are told by the administration we are going to postpone it until we study it some more.

There are some things that one does not have to study. One does not have to study the facts as to what the plight of these schools at the present time happens to be. We ought to get in there and pass some legislation and get some money into those school districts so that these kids in these school districts will have a chance of being saved from delinquency and from unemployment and also be saved from the development of an antisocial attitude and an antidemocratic attitude. You cannot witness what has been going on in Harlem and the

Bronx and Rochester and other trouble spots of this country without realizing that education has failed, has failed, as far as those young people are concerned. That should not surprise anyone. I do not see how you could expect the type of schools we maintain in those ghettos and slum areas to develop people that really believe in the democratic process. I think when you get to the bottom of some of these demonstrations you are going to find that you have got thousands of young people in this country that really do not understand, have not been educated to an understanding of what we mean by democratic freedom.

I am sorry that I have found it necessary to make these statements of unalterable opposition to the administration's position on this bill, but that happens to be my trust, too. And when I find the leaders of my own party following a course of action that I think is as inexcusable as the administration's position on this bill, this chairman intends to never hesitate to say so.

I have two questions I want to ask you. As I understand your testimony, you approve in principle the approach of the bill but feel that a fact study may provide you with a better measure than those given in the bill of the need and the effect upon the school districts in which the children of those families go to school. You are suggesting, for example, that such a measure as the number of children in an area who are in families having an income of less than $1,000 or $1,500 a year might be better suited for your purposes than the ADC criterion? Is that a fair statement of your position?

Mr. KEPPEL. Yes, sir, and techniques by which the target could be precisely found.

Senator MORSE. We have heard in these hearings, Mr. Commissioner, that a straight 3-percent eligibility factor should replace the 3-percent and 6-percent figure that is now applied in the impacted area law. What would be your views on that suggestion?

Mr. KEPPEL. It would seem to me, sir, that with regard to a method of counting such children, for example, under AFDC, our position with regard to the 3 percent or other eligibility factor would be different and more favorable than I think it is with regard to the way in which Public Laws 874 and 815 have been put together originally. I realize that this is a subject for debate, Mr. Chairman, but this is our tentative thinking.

Senator MORSE. Well, Mr. Commissioner, I hope when we reconvene next year I imagine this will be the last time I will have the pleasure of having you before this subcommittee in this session-it will be on a bill on which we find ourselves more in agreement than we find ourselves this morning.

Mr. KEPPEL. I profoundly hope so, sir.

Senator MORSE. Thank you very much.

(The prepared statement of Mr. Keppel follows:)

PREPARED STATEMENT BY FRANCIS KEPPEL, COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, DEPART

MENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE

Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee on Education, the 2 years of the 88th Congress have marked the most productive period in American educational legislative history, bar none. The credit for this exemplary record of the