Sixty Years Ago The Education Debate Was...

Globalism. Inflation. Teacher Quality. Teacher Shortage. Local Control.

My first Substack - Education is the Weapon of the Privilege - was about the history of education in America. I wrote it to call out the MAGA and Moms for Liberty historically ignorant claim that the federal government didn’t really involve itself in education until 1979.

My second piece was on the rights of students with disabilities.

Which was followed up a year later by a piece on Texas v. Berra as it heads to the SCOTUS.

The McGovern Archives

I spent last week in the McGovern Archives at Dakota Wesleyan University home to the McGovern Library, the McGovern Museum, and the McGovern Center for Leadership and Public Service. It is where George McGovern signed up to do his part to liberate Europe from Nazism. It is where he fell in love with a girls whose friends called “Ellie,” and it is where they both began their transition from this world.

While scouring the boxes and boxes of speeches, notes, memo’s and op-eds that George McGovern wrote over the course of his lifetime - first as a history professor then as a politician and, finally, a statesman - I came across one he gave on the House floor where he served from 1957 to 1961.

Here it is in its entirety. Leave a comment and tell me what you see as still relevant today.

A Quality Education For All Of Our Children

“Mr. Speaker, the increased tension between the United States and Russia strongly points up the responsibility of Congress adn the American people to strengthen the foundations of our democracy. Not portion of that foundation contains greater strength than our educational system.

This is our ultimate weapon.

There is no more critical claim upon Congress, and upon every American citizen, than the improvement of educational opportunity for all.

The House will soon be considering an education bill, It is well to remind ourselves of the historical legacy that has given the Federal Government a shared responsibility with the state and local governments from the years predating the Constitution. As early as 1785, in the most lasting contribution of the Continental Congress, the American government provided for the ceding of the 16th section of every township in the public domain for educational purposes, and the great Northwest Ordinance of 1787 stated:

“Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government adn the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

That the Founding Fathers agreed on the need for national support of schools is readily seen from an examination of their words. President Washington stated:

“In a country like this … if there cannot be money found to answer the common purpose of education, there is something amiss in the ruling political power, which requires a steady, regulating, and energetic hand to correct and control it.”

Alexander Hamilton, the brilliant first Secretary of Treasury declared that:

“Whatever concerns the general interest of learning…are within the sphere of the national councils as far as regards an application of money.”

Washington’s successor, President John Adams, felt that:

“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expense of it.”

Said Thomas Jefferson, in words that echo in our ears today:

“a nation that expects to be ignorant and free expects that which never was and never will be.”

Less than a century later, in the midst of a tragedy of Civil War, the Congress of the United States passed in 1862 the Morrill Act, signed by President Lincoln, setting up the first land-grant colleges with the use of Federal funds and Federal money. Under this act my own state has been buttressed in its educational endeavors down the years by a great educational institution - South Dakota State College at Brookings.

Historically, the strengthening of our educational effort has received strong bi-partisan support. President Theodore Roosevelt declared that:

“The share that the national government should take in the broad work of education has not yet received the attention and care it rightly deserves.”

The late Senator Robert Taft said in 1948:

“It does not have the glamour that other things have but it seems to me we must go forward in the field of education for our people and I know of no way of going forward in that field without providing some Federal financial assistance.”

Although, as we have seen, our history disproves it, we sometimes give the impression that this is a recent issue on the American scene. It is significant that the Republican Party stated in its own platform 72 years ago that:

“The State or nation, or both combined, should support free institutions of learning.”

In 1920, the Democratic Party platform carried the plank:

“Cooperative Federal assistance to the States is immediately required for…the increase of teachers’ salaries.”

In his special education message to Congress on January 27, 1958, President Eisenhower asked for Federal funds to be used to “employ additional qualified science and mathematics teachers.”

Mr. Speaker, in my own State of South Dakota, some 81% percent of our local and state school revenue is derived from property taxes. We rank 4th in the Nation in this effort and first in the Nation in the percent of personal income going to state and local property taxes. We do not have to take a back seat to any state in our strivings to meet our educational needs. Yet I must also point out that in 1959 only 11.8% percent of our elementary-school teachers in South Dakota had the minimum of four years of college while 31% percent had less than two years of college. We also know that from 1957-1963 our school-age population in South Dakota will increase by 15% percent. There is no guesswork involved - the children are already here.

That this is a national problem is illustrated by the mobility of our population. We are a people on the go with over 35 million of us changing address each year. Thus, the effect of education offered in a given school may be registered in a state far removed from where the education was acquired. For instance, 1950 census figures show that some 347,000 native-born South Dakotans are now living in other states while 181,000 of our citizens were born in other states and have since migrated to South Dakota.

The continuing in ability of state after state to keep up with teacher-demand is understandable when we compare their salaries to that of other professionally trained people. The average salary of classroom teachers in South Dakota for 1959-60 was $3600. The national average was $5,025. It is little wonder that Dr. Arthur Flemming, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, said recently that a 100% percent increase in teacher’s salaries within the next five or ten years was “a reasonable national goal.”

As a rural state with property taxes among the highest in the nation, a classroom and teacher shortage, and a rising school-age population, South Dakota seemingly faces an insurmountable obstacle. It has been suggested that states like South Dakota enact tax laws on out-of-state corporations. It is true that a significant portion of our business is conducted by corporate-owned enterprises who pay taxes on corporate incomes earned in South Dakota in other states where they maintain the home offices. South Dakotans’ contribute to the earnings of those corporations, but only through a Federal support program can their share of these taxes be returned to benefit the state. We have encouraged industry to come into South Dakota to bolster the labor market - nor do I deprecate the value of their payrolls to the economy of the state - but faced with staggering financial burdens states may be forced into levying corporate taxes with the rates varying from state to state.

It is obvious that local and state tax systems, relying heavily on property tax, cannot raise taxes to the point of driving people out of home ownership or placing their communities in an unfavorable competitive economic position with other states in their desire to raise educational standards.

South Dakota, with a per capita income in 1957 of only $1,531 was spending $333 for every child in school. These expenditure among the individual states range from a high of $535 a year to a low of $164, with a national average of $340 per pupil. This gross disparity in educational expenditure between our richest and our poorest states can be rectified only with Federal support.

Let me also clear up the myth regarding the heavy cost of collecting the Federal tax dollar in comparison with that of the state or local government. The cost of collecting Federal taxes, according to Internal Revenue figures, was 44 cents per $100 in 1959. The cost of collecting state taxes generally is $1.00 per $100. The cost of collecting and administering local revenue has runs as high as $5 to $10 per $100, according to experts who have studied the problem. You will note that I have omitted administration costs of the state and federal taxes, whereas I have included administration of local taxes. We have no figures on the cost of administration at the state level, but the cost of administering 10 grant programs of the Federal Government averaging 1.2 percent of the amounts administered. This means that the cost of collecting the Federal tax dollar and the administration of Federal grant programs totals about 1.6 percent.

None of us is so naive as to believe that money alone will solve our educational ills. But the extent to which we will apply our financial resources is, in part, a measure of our purpose in other respects as well. It is not encouraging to note that we spend slightly more on alcohol and cosmetics and more than twice as much on advertising as we do on education.

Federal support bills for school construction and teachers’ salaries are an expression of the genius of our federalism. The Federal Government does what it can do best, namely mobilize financial resources through taxation, and state and local governments do what they can do best, namely, make grass-roots decisions and carry out function under the direct control and close scrutiny of the local electorate.

I would favor a federal support program for education that would enable each state to deal according to its own needs, with the shortage of qualified teachers and shortage of classrooms without dictation by the Federal Government.

Education is an investment which pays rich dividends in greater productive capacity. We can erect no better advance defense against creeping or grinding inflation than to expand, through education, the productive and creative power of our children. We can no more afford waste the potential ability of our children than we can afford to waste our natural resources. Let us move to assure them of a quality of education that will enable them to meet, with firm reliance upon the strengths of our democratic heritage, the problems of the space age.”

Global Competitiveness.

Inflation.

Teacher Quality.

Teacher Shortage.

Math & Science Literacy.

Federalism.

Democracy.

Federal Taxes.

Property Taxes.

Local Control.

Sixty F’ing Years of the Same Debate!