Article by United States Commissioner of Education Earl James McGrath, Too Few Teachers! Too Few Schools!
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OCR Page 1 of 10TOO FEW TEACHERS! TOO FEW SCHOOLS!
The serious threat to the nation's current school construction
program, caused by the acute shortages of steel and other critical
materials, underscores the steadily mounting pressures which our entire
public school system is under.
This year the enrolment in our elementary and secondary schools
was around 800,000 more than the previous year. Next September, a
further increase of 1,700,000 is expected. This will bring the total
enrolment to a figure one-fourth greater than that obtaining at the
end of World War II.
We have neither teachers nor classroom facilities to take care
of this tidal wave of youngsters that is bearing down upon our public
schools. Already the situation in the elementary schools is critical
to the highest degree. Classrooms are so overcrowded as to make
effective teaching almost impossible.
In a vast number of communities classes are being held in school
basements, apartment house basements, churches, garages, empty stores,
and in some instances even trailers and tents. And, in many instances,
children are going to school on a two-shift basis.
The most desperate need, at the moment, is in the so-called
defense areas. Here existing school facilities are literally swamped
by the hundreds of thousands of children whose parents have moved into
*By Earl James McGrath, U.S. Commissioner of Education, Federal
Security Agency, Washington, D.C., published in The Colorado School
Journal, Vol. 67, No. 5, February 1952, pages 6-8; The North Dakota Teacher,
Vol. XXXI, No. 9, May 1952 issue, pp. 8-9, 28-29; The Alabama School Journal;
The Schoolmaster and Woman Teacher's Chronicle, Vol. CLXI, March 21, 1952,
pp. 410-411. Published in Georgia Education Journal, Vol. 46, No. 5,
Jan. 1953,pp. 10-11; published in part in North Carolina Education,
Vol. XIX, No. 1, Sept. 1952, pp.18-19,52; Education News, Bi-
Monthly Bulletin of the Commonwealth Office of Education, Australia,
Aug. 1952, Vol. 3, No. 10, pp. 9-11
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