A Good Crusade

In the spring of 1949, a group of businessmen, publishers, labor and community leaders, with little more in common than a deep concern over the plight of U.S. public education, issued a simple statement that was both obvious and all too true. "There isn't much of a problem," said the group, "concerning what must be done to improve the schools. The problem is to get people to do it." Last week, as the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools prepared to dissolve itself, it could justly claim that never before had so many Americans been so eager to get into the fight.

The idea behind the commission was already six years old when its first members began to operate. In 1943, alarmed by the poor showing many G.I.s were making on various army tests, Harvard's President James Bryant Conant suggested to the Educational Policies Commission of the National Education Association that a dedicated band of prominent laymen would be of powerful help in solving the coming postwar educational problems. The educators took the advice, started a country-wide search for citizens who would be interested. The first man approached: President Roy E. Larsen of TIME Inc., who was later to be the commission's chairman.*

Translated Ideal. In his introduction to a new book about the commission--How to Get Better Schools by former LIFE Education Editor David B. Dreiman (Harper; $3.50)--Chairman Larsen, son of a Canadian journalist, explains exactly why he took on the job: "To me, as a first-generation American, the public schools literally translated into reality the American ideal of equality of opportunity . . . When I learned--a scant 30 years after graduating from high school--that the schools were in trouble, I felt that I must do what I could to help." As Larsen had already found out, the schools were indeed in trouble. In 1949, 250,000 pupils were on split classroom shifts, and half of all those entering ninth grade in New York State alone were dropping out before finishing high school. The nation was short 450,000 classrooms and 150,000 elementary-school teachers.

As fulltime executive director, the commission hired Henry Toy Jr., a Du Pont executive who had started a citizens' council on education in Delaware. Toy began with a staff of eight in Manhattan. Though the commission had an advisory board of educators, it insisted that no member or staffman have any professional connection with education, religion or politics. Above all, it was to be a clearinghouse of information for whatever local citizens' groups already existed and an agency to guide and inspire new groups. It refused to champion any one educational line, would not associate itself with any professional organization.

For Better Communities. The U.S. soon began to feel the impact of the commission's work. It sponsored 28 regional and national workshops, put out a monthly bulletin called Citizens and Their Schools and a successor monthly newspaper (Better Schools) which eventually had a circulation of 180,000. With the cooperation of the Advertising Council, it plastered its slogan, "Better Schools Make Better Communities," on billboards, books of matches, bread wrappers and license-plate tabs clear across the country. It answered up to 3,500 pieces of mail a month, sent out over the years 700,000 pieces of information. It published 15 handbooks on how to do everything from start a local citizens' group to the proper way to deal with newspapers ("Do not give a reporter a story and then say, 'This is off the record . . .'Do not confuse the reporter or editor with the publisher . . . Do not check constantly with the editor. Frequent telephone calls asking when your story is going to be used could defeat your purpose").

In 1949, the commission found only 17 local citizens' groups in operation. A year later, there were 175, and by 1955 there were 2,500 working with the help of the commission. The number of statewide committees has jumped from nine to 34. The commission was one of the chief backers of the White House Conference on Education. But its most important accomplishment was to make education a national conversation topic. The number of articles on school affairs appearing in large-circulation magazines has gone up from 128 in 1949 to more than 400 last year. P.T.A. membership has doubled to almost 10 million.

Though it is ending its official career, the commission insists that its work has only begun. A council of at least 60 citizens, all of whom have served on local or state committees, will carry on. The council's biggest task, like that of the old commission, will be to keep the nation continually at war against the appalling deficit it is running in classrooms, equipment and teachers. "For if," says retiring Chairman Larsen, "we fail to meet the deficit, the problem of how we should educate may become largely a hypothetical one."

* Among the other charter members: Director Leo Perils of the C.I.O. Community Services Committee; Mrs. Barry Bingham, vice president of the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times; Economist Beardsley Ruml; President John Cowles of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune; Pollster George Gallup; Mrs. Bruce Gould, co-editor of the Ladies' Home Journal; Executive Director Lester Granger of the National Urban League; Pundit Walter Lippmann; Mrs. Eugene Meyer of the Washington Post.

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