and here they are thinking of the whole problem of Federal aid We must deal, therefore, with a situation in which opportunity is a birthright attached to certain families and certain geographic areas. A child born in those favored places has opportunity plus; one born outside has opportunity minus. The interesting thing on page 3, and following, is that that is essentially the same conclusion which has been reached, so far as I know, by every body of men who have really studied this problem. And so I would conclude that it is a profoundly disturbing fact that the United States, which above all other nations has stood for equality of opportunity, fails to provide such opportunity at a key point. Certainly if you do not have educational opportunity, equality of educational opportunity, a decent chance to get a reasonable amount of schooling and education, we can't expect that people will start the race of life from a fair beginning. We know that there are some things that tend to make conditions unequal. We don't have the same brains. We don't have the same inheritance from our parents, either psychological or financial, but we have always hoped that at least we were equal before the law, and we were equal in our chance to get a schooling. And to me it is a profoundly disturbing fact that that is not the case in the United States. There is abundant evidence to support the fact that gross inequality rather than reasonable equality of opportunity characterizes public education today-it is characteristic of public education today. That should be profoundly disturbing to every intelligent American citizen. This situation constitutes the most serious internal threat to the American way of life which exists today, because there is nothing which will weaken the country so much as to have cleavages develop that are based in inequalities in opportunity, and which prevent us from capitalizing our potentially most valuable resource, namely, our human resources. So much for the first point. The second point is that there should be Federal aid for education since the gross inequalities in educational opportunity which exist today are primarily due to similar inequalities in the financal support of educaton. I would be the first to recognize that money is not everything in providing schooling or perhaps anything else. But when there are such terrific, such gross, inequalities as I will show you in a few moments, then we must, I think, all of us who will face the facts, agree that there must be enormous differences in opportunity provided. And we do know, as a matter of fact, from visiting schools, from testing them, that the poorest schools, financially, generally are inferior on any test you put them to-length of school term, quality of teacher, or tests of the children. These poverty-stricken schools are not in anywhere near the same class as those that are well financed. Let us look at these tremendous extremes that I have been mentioning. Literally, there are 60 to 1 differences in the amount of financial support behind the school systems in different parts of the country. That is revealed here in chart I which, on this axis, the vertical axis, shows 100 percent of all children who are in school. And this horizontal axis indicates the amount of money back of each classroom. We use classroom instead of pupil because after all it is the classroom that is the basis of organization and financing. You CHART I.-Distribution of classroom units according to levels of expenditure don't educate just one child. You organize a classroom, and hire a teacher, and heat the room, and therefore we thought it would be more meaningful to put the data we are presenting on a classroom basis. I might say that this study was a result of 4 or 5 years of research. In toto it cost some forty or fifty thousand dollars. Most of the money was provided by the General Education Board. Other groups cooperated, such as the United States Office of Education, Na tional Education Association, American Council on Education, and other agencies. As we were saying, chart I shows that some children, this top 10 percent, have all the way from $6,000 down to $3,000 and $4,000, back of their education for every classroom. This means that for 30 children gathered together in what we call a class unit, there is $6,000 a year available in some communities; $5,000 in others, and going on down. At the other extreme, some schools districts have only $100 per classroom per year. That means for 30 children the board of education has $100 or less to hire a teacher, buy books, provide for such supervision as is provided, for instructional supplies, heating the room, cleaning it, if it is ever cleaned, and so on. Of course what they do is either throw several groups of children together and have 100 or more children under one teacher, which is the case actually in some instances, or run the school only for a few months or weeks, and call it a year. And you have all the different levels in between. To give specific facts, there are 20,000 children-or there were when this study was made-in classrooms financed at $6,000 or more per year; $6,000 or more for every 30 children. There were 38,000 children in classrooms costing less than $100 a year, literally less than $100 a year. That chart brings out two facts: One, the enormous, the shocking, disparity in the amount of financial support back of the education of children. As we said earlier, money is not everything, but can anybody doubt that these children generally get a far inferior educational opportunity than these up here? You would have no trouble recognizing the difference between $100 and $4,000 or $5,000 or $6,000 schools. The first point, as we said, is that there are these shocking differences that belie our espousal of the idea of equality of opportunity. Even more disturbing is not the differences, perhaps, because it is all right in a democracy to have differences, but the fact that there are literally millions of children in school systems that can't possibly afford a decent educational opportunity-all of these down in this area. I don't know what you would say would be necessary as a minimum to finance the education of 30 children. Would it be $500 a year, $1,000, $1,500, $2,000? I don't know. Say $2.000. After all, that would provide a teacher a salary of about $1,500 a year and leave $500 for other expenses, which is about the usual ratio. If we take that as the standard, that means, then, that 62 percent of all children are below even that mediocre standard. I should mention one thing. These figures are for the school year 1939-40. There have been some increases in school expenditures since that time. However, in a great many States they have just been barely enough to offset the rise in the price index. Unless the school system is spending 55 percent more than it was in 1939-40, it is not holding its own, or, putting it another way, it does not have the same purchasing power as it had in 1939-40. Per capita income and average wage of workers have gone up considerably more than 55 percent. At any rate we collected data bringing the situation up to date. This was a much less comprehensive study and it was collected on a different basis, but it is recent, and it is on a per-pupil basis rather than classroom. And what it shows is this: Take New Mexico for |