Mr. BRADEMAS. I do as well, but the whole point of the Newman report is that we are moving in precisely the opposite direction, that is, away from diversity in higher education and toward uniformity. Second, I realize that there are different associations and organizations speaking for higher education, but, as you know as well as I, there are a lot of different organizations and associations representing elementary and secondary education, too. So, I don't quite understand your citing historical origins or present diversity as a rationale for your proposed National Foundation for Higher Education.

William N. Cannon, vice president of the University of Chicago, and I discussed this question last week when Frank Newman told us about his report. Mr. Cannon gave me exactly the answer you gave. I said, Bill Cannon, are you seriously telling me that the only reason that we ought to stimulate change in higher education, as distinguished from seeking to stimulate change in elementary and secondary education, is that higher education is today characterized by diversity while elementary and secondary education is not?

Mr. Cannon also went on to argue in effect, even as you do today, that because something is already in place, in this case-in your view and his elementary and secondary education, it ought not to be changed or, in any event, was not the appropriate target for change. That higher education is all of this argument was by way of trying to explain why we should have a Foundation for Higher Education but not for elementary-secondary education I find the reasoning very faulty. Dr. MARLAND. Mr. Chairman, may I make a brief comment on this? I think the element of consistency between these points is in the heterogeniety of higher education, but at the same time a tendency the Newman report pointed out, to gravitate toward certain common denominators. There is a need for a single entity that can relate to the whole of higher education for the purpose of encouraging the reverse of that process and of supporting new modes and new institutions.

It is the creation of a place to which one can come, people who want to innovate and reform can come and if they have a well conceived project get help to put it into effect. So it is a pragmatic conclusion, essentially, that the history of higher education gives you a different existing pattern which requires a different source of support for the people in it who want change.

Mr. BRADEMAS. I won't trouble you longer on this question. I simply observe that the answer you have given me in justifying the foundation in one area-higher education-as against a foundation in the other, I think you will find in rereading the record, is to cite both the historical fact and the present situation that there is a great heterogeneity in higher education which does not exist in elementary and secondary education.

I simply think there is another point of view that, I may say respectfully, says that this description may not be altogether accurate just looking at the facts. You are one of the great school superintendents in the country, Dr. Marland, and what you did in Pittsburgh, for instance, in giving leadership to help make it possible for public and parochial schools to live side by side and in common cooperation is not what you find in every big school system in this country.

Dr. MARLAND. That is where technical assistance and leadership come in. Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BRADEMAS. That is not my point at all, as I am sure you appreciate. You have justified a case for a National Foundation for Higher Education but not one for elementary and secondary, for instance, not on the grounds that reform is more pressing and urgent in higher education that it is in elementary and secondary but, rather on a recitation of the proposition that the existing higher education system is more diverse than is our elementary and secondary education system.

Now this is a big country, and there are all kinds of elementary and secondary schools in it as well as all kinds of colleges and universities. So I would hope you could come up with a much stronger argument for your case than this one.

Dr. MARLAND. I may not have made the argument well but I think I failed to emphasize that you have 50 centers for reform, if you will, hopefully for research and development.

Mr. BRADEMAS. I would hope not.

Dr. MARLAND. This is the fact as it is, Mr. Chairman, the Constitution as you well know establishes the State as the responsible agency of political government for the control of the schools. Our effort for elementary and secondary education, which is a charge to the States, is through the States, as distinct from higher education. Each State has its own research and development headquarters, each State has its own network to its school systems. The universities have nothing of that kind, in fact they find ways (and quite properly) to continuously differ. In the elementary and secondary schools you have 50 centers for R. & D. in charge of reform and

Mr. BRADEMAS. Smile when you say that, Dr. Marland.

You don't really expect me to take seriously the proposition that each of the 50 States in the United States of America in the year 1971 has its own center of research and development in education?

Dr. MARLAND. Modest though it may be, Mr. Chairman, and widely variable indeed. I would have to say that a few States have superb centers for R. & D. Some have extremely weak centers but nonetheless they are there and they are real and we have to deal with them. NIE would use this very vehicle, as the Secretary has stated, for delivering through these systems the product from a higher level of R. & D., if you will, into the classrooms. There is no such network, no such vehicle, no such delivery system for higher education, and we propose to create one.

Secretary RICHARDSON. Mr. Chairman, along this line you can look at it in the context of the ways through which the Federal Government supports education.

Take, for example, the proposal we are now in the process of drafting for education special revenue sharing that would take a lot of existing categorical grants programs and reduce them to five major headings. The assumption here is that we are dealing with this developed governmental system for the provision of elementary and secondary education that the Commissioner has referred to, so that you can, therefore, divide the money into big chunks and rely primarily on this system to use the money.

We are groping still with how best to design a Federal role for the institutional support of higher education. But in the meanwhile, lacking this structure through which Federal funds can for the most part

be disseminated, be distributed, we think that we ought to create a vehicle to distribute money on an institutional-by-institutional basis where the institution itself is interested in bringing about change. So it seems to me you can't look at this distinction in terms of what has developed in fact in the way of distributing support that the Federal Government can use.

It exists to a far greater extent than elementary and secondary education because this has largely been a public responsibility for 150 years. Whereas, in the case of higher education, while it has become increasingly a public responsibility in the last decade or two, we still do not have this institutional matrix through which to distribute Federal support.

I think this is another way of maknig the same point. We will be returning to it, of course, in hearings on the foundation.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Yes; gentlemen, I thank all of you very much indeed. If I have been somewhat aggressive in my questions, I hope you will appreciate it is really a better understanding.

The Chair would like to announce that on Friday of this week we shall be at Princeton University visiting, in connection with this legislation, the Educational Testing Service, and that on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, we shall be in New York City meeting Mayor Lindsay and Chancellor Scribner and Frank Keppel and Harold Howe II, Robert Dentler and other educational authorities. We hope to pursue with these gentlemen some of the questions we have been pursuing with you and we are very grateful indeed to you for having come today and for having been so generous with your time and your views.

Secretary RICHARDSON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, we appreciate the opportunity.

(Whereupon, at 5 p.m., the Select Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Education and Labor, adjourned subject to call of the Chair.)

SATURDAY, MARCH 20, 1971

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION,

OF THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR,

New York, NY.

The subcommittee met at 10 a.m., pursuant to call, at the Center for Urban Education, 105 Madison Avenue, New York City, N.Y., Hon. John Brademas (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Brademas, Scheuer, and Hansen.

Staff members present: Jack G. Duncan, subcommittee counsel; David Lloyd-Jones, staff; Martin LaVor, minority legislative associate; Christina Orth, assistant clerk.

Mr. BRADEMAS. The meeting will come to order.

We are very pleased to accept the gracious hospitality of our friends here in New York, and in particular, of Dr. Dentler and the Center for Urban Education.

We are meeting here in New York City today for the further consideration of the bills H.R. 33 and H.R. 3606, to establish a National Institute of Education.

The Chair might just make, for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with the purpose of this legislation, a short opening

comment.

On the 3d of March 1970, President Nixon, in his message on educational reform, proposed the establishment of a National Institute of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which would serve as a focal point for research, demonstration, and innovation at every level of American education.

This proposal of the President represents, the Chair believes, one of the most promising enterprises in American education to come from an American President in some time.

The Chairman makes that observation as a Democrat-and adds that he joined a number of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle to introduce the bill to establish this Institute.

The administration, a year, or more, commissioned Dr. Roger Levien, of the Rand Corp., to make a study of the structure and purposes of the proposed NIE.

The study is about ready to appear in final form, and on Tuesday next in Washington, the subcommittee will be hearing from Dr. Levien. In the meantime, our subcommittee has been hearing, both in Washington and elsewhere in the country, the views of leading authorities on education.

We are very pleased today to hear from three, not only nationally but internationally known, experts in American education.

The first of our witnesses is an old friend who has served with very great distinction as the principal Federal official with responsibility for education, as the U.S. Commissioner of Education, Dr. Harold Howe II who is now serving as vice president of the Ford Foundation, in charge of the Division of Educational Research.

Dr. Howe, we are very pleased indeed to welcome you here this morning, sir, and we look forward to hearing your views on the proposed National Institute of Education, and of putting some questions to you.

STATEMENT OF DR. HAROLD HOWE II, VICE PRESIDENT, FORD FOUNDATION, DIVISION OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

Dr. Howe. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It is extremely pleasant to be here. It is like old home week for me. I can recall many interesting discussions with you and your associates several years back.

I would like to say that I have written the chairman a rather long and somewhat analytical letter about the proposal before the committee, and I would like to ask that that be entered in the record of the committee. I won't read it.

(The letter referred to follows):

Hon. JOHN BRADEMAS,

THE FORD FOUNDATION,
New York, N.Y., February 2, 1971.

Chairman, Select Subcommittee on Education, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C.

DEAR JOHN: Thank you for your letter of January 7 inviting me to comment on the proposed National Institute of Education, which your Subcommittee is presently considering, and enclosing the draft Preliminary Plan for the Proposed Institute prepared by the Rand Corporation.

I strongly support the basic idea of a National Institute of Education to focus increased federal energy and resources-both human and financial-in an expanded program of educational research and development. Such an Institute is greatly needed because of four related but distinct problems that have long plagued federal research efforts in education.

The first of these existing difficulties is the fragmentation of education research within the federal bureaucracy. A variety of federal agencies within and outside of HEW currently support educational research activities. A new National Institute of Education could provide coordination among existing federal research programs concerned with education, and I hope it will be assigned such a role. The NIE proposal makes sense in its own right, but if it is to be truly effective it must help to get the Federal government's education research house in order. Only when here is an overall Federal research policy for education in which the research efforts of OEO. NSF, NFAH, the Labor Department, and other agencies play purposeful parts in an overall research strategy for the nation. will there be truly significant progress on the education research nad development front.

A second problem with federal research efforts is that they are frequently changed to meet short-term budget problems or short-term political decisions regarding priorities, thus reducing the likelihood that research activities will be allowed the continuity necessary for meaningful results. Tough problems facing educational research today are not amenable to quick and easy solutions. A good research program will require a persistence and continuity that has not been present in most federal education research efforts in recent years. I would expect the proposed National Institute of Education to be able to resist short-ter: cycles of political priority and to function as an effective problem solver over the long haul. Provision for a five-year term for its Director and continuity for its governing board will help to guarantee this capacity to keep working on important problems.