Rural Relations

Miss Addie Sullivan is the daughter of a hill farmer too old to work his Ozark Mountain farm. In the morning she makes breakfast for her father, works at some of her daily barn, chicken-run, and truck-garden chores before walking a quarter of a mile to the Calamine, Ark. frame school where she teaches all eight elementary grades. The school has no electric light (the nearest power line is eight miles away), no running water.

Miss Addie started teaching 15 years ago, after one year of college. Her present job pays $360 for a six-month year, but she has hopes that the Legislature will pass the proposed $2,000,000 appropriation bill for increased school budgets.

Poor Relation. Teachers like Miss Addie Sullivan, schools like Calamine's were the ABC of the agenda for the 231 educators from 44 states who gathered in Washington last week for the first White House Conference on Rural Education. There was much to be said (and done) about education's poor relation:

P: 52% of all U.S. teachers are rural teachers.

P: Their average salary is $967 a year--compared with the urban teacher's $1,937, the civilian federal employe's $2,235, the industrial worker's $2,363.

P: The 13,000,000 U.S. citizens who have never completed the fourth grade (Army literacy standard) still come from the same old place: poor country schools (most heavily concentrated in the South*).

P: Almost half of the nation's 842,000 teachers are new at the job since Pearl Harbor; fewer & fewer teachers can see any sense in working for less than a living wage.

Processional. The first White House Conference on Rural Education was largely the idea and effort of Southern-born Charl Ormond Williams, tall, greying, capable Director of the National Education Association's Field Service. Her definition of the No. i problem before the house: "Teaching is a procession, not a profession." The conference itself was a lively procession of personal appearances.

At the opening session, Franklin Roosevelt made a brief appearance (shortly after the conferees had been told that Washington charwomen receive more pay than 44,000 U.S. teachers). The President spoke in support of NEA's drive for federal aid to education without federal interference. He also told a little story about a young Georgian who, in the early '20s, had asked him to do the diploma honors at a high-school graduation. "Are you the president of the class?" asked Mr. Roosevelt. "No," replied the youth, "I am the principal." The 19-year-old principal had had one year's college training, got $400 a year for running his 250-pupil school.

Eleanor Roosevelt got a bigger hand for a neat brushing-off of portly, potent Edward A. O'Neal, hard-lobbying president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. In the course of a debate about teacher unionization, Mrs. Roosevelt asserted that, in rural communities, a teacher with an idea always risked the danger of attack by "someone from Mr. O'Neal's organization [here she lowered her voice to a pompous politico gruffiness] saying that it is a very dangerous doctrine!" It brought down the house.

So did another member of the Roosevelt household. "I've been here two days," said an Alabama delegate, abruptly interrupting his own paper on the Organization and Administration of Rural Education, "but I haven't been able to do what my people back home want me to do. They sent me up here to see Fala, and to give Fala the greetings of my sister-in-law's Scotty, Bonny Hooper." Mrs. Roosevelt left the room, reappeared. Fifteen minutes later Fala entered, got a tremendous hand.

* Southerners earn only one-eighth of the national income, foot one-sixth of the nation's public-school bill.

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