Call to the Front

Even if he had not made the speech he did. the annual convention of the powerful (613,000 members) National Education Association would undoubtedly have given Adlai Stevenson a healthy round of applause. Instead, it gave him a standing ovation, for he had told his audience exactly what it wanted to hear. President Eisenhower, said Stevenson, now proposes to spend $45 on highways to every $1 he proposes to spend on schools. "I must deny that this 45-to-1 ratio . . . represents the standards or the priority of the people of America." Thereupon. Stevenson made his recommendation. Since the national income is expected to rise $15 billion a year and since this will mean an added $4 billion in federal revenue, "I suggest, in effect, that we agree with ourselves to spend on education--say. 20% of our federal tax collections from our new national wealth."

Welcome as these words were, the N.E.A. was all set to top them. The Legislative Commission called for a federal expenditure of $1 billion a year for 1) school construction, 2) a teacher's minimum salary of $4.000, and 3) a college scholarship program for bright students.

"Because of inadequately trained teachers and poor buildings," said the commission's Executive Secretary James McCaskill. "we are depriving about 6.000,000 children each year of a good schooling."

Though federal aid has been a perennial N.E.A. theme, it seemed this year to have become something of an obsession--so much so, in fact, that some educators were beginning to talk of forming a huge political-action organization to lobby for their demands in state legislatures and Congress. "Without such an organization," said Earl McGrath. onetime U.S. Commissioner of Education and now president of the University of Kansas City, "I believe that education will be continuously handicapped in competition with the other social groups which have been effectively organized." But is political action, however nonpartisan, really a proper function for the nation's teachers? Said Oakland's Rex Turner, chairman of the Legislative Commission that approved McGrath's scheme: "I'm not afraid of these terms.

If we are ever to get better schools, we will have to meet the issue squarely on the political front."

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