Statement by Commissioner of Education Earl James McGrath Before the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor

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For Release Upon Delivery STATEMENT By Earl James McGrath U. S. Commissioner of Education Federal Security Agency Before the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor, 9:30 A.M., Thursday, April 3, 1952 I am Earl J. McGrath, Commissioner of Education, Office of Education, Federal Security Agency. My statement and the statements of my colleagues who will follow include many statistics and some dollar signs. These facts we report are based on the First Progress Report of the Nation+wide School Facilities Survey authorized by Title I, Public Law 815, of the 8lst Congress. As we deal with facts, figures, and dollars, Mr. Chairman, we are actually dealing with flesh and blood and mind and spirit. We are talking in terms of bricks and chalkboards, glass and concrete; but we are thinking in terms of public school children--more than 26 million of them. We are talking not merely about dollars, but about what those dollars mean to the immediate and the long-run future of this Nation. We are talking about firetraps, dilapidation, over- crowding, part-time schooling on two or three shifts per day, and what these things mean in educational ineffectiveness. We are talking ebout the difference between an enlightened and intelligent Nation and one in which ignorance and functional illiteracy prevail. We are asking whether the United States of America is going to be content while some of its children are denied their educational birthright. Two general approaches to the problem of providing adequate educational opportunity for all American children have in recent years been before the Congress; Federal aid for the maintenance and operation of (more)