finances of public schools. If you want to go into a general debate with regard to the Bureau of Education you ought to recognize this fact, that the bureau is only one of a large number of Federal agencies dealing with education, while if you organize a department you will centralize the educational agencies that at the present moment are so scattered through the Federal Government that it is quite impossible for the bureau, even if you should give it adequate resources, to carry on the work.

Mr. BLACK. These other agencies are actually educating agencies? Doctor JUDD. Yes.

Mr. BLACK. While the bureau is largely a research proposition. Doctor JUDD. The various agencies carry on double functions. Your Federal Board for Vocational Education carries the double function of controlling and directing one phase of education, but it is not fair to say that it is entirely different in its character from the Bureau of Education.

Mr. BLACK. It differs in research in its own field.

Doctor JUDD. But its own field is distinctly a field that is a legitimate part of the general field of education. The advancement of one branch of education becomes of general educational significance from the point of view of all of us.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. It has been admitted that this bill of itself does not carry any authority to centralize the various activities of educational affairs. If that is true how are you going to centralize? Doctor JUDD. I think it is the theory of those who are in favor of the bill that centralization will in due time automatically take care of itself.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. I am glad to hear you say that. In other words, is it not understood among the proponents of this legislation that it is an entering wedge and is to be followed up by other legislation broadening the field and scope of this department?

Doctor JUDD. I do not pretend to represent the educational world. Mr. LEATHERWOOD. We all agree with your statement, but will you answer the question?

Doctor JUDD. I think any legislation that is enacted by the National Government will evolve and supply agencies. You are right in the statement that when this legislation is passed we will not stop thinking about the problems, but will evolve agencies growing out of the agency created.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. Is it not the present intention of the men urging this legislation to follow it immediately by other legislation if this is passed?

Doctor JUDD. The proponents of the present bill feel that if you will set up a department it will take care of itself, and it will become a leader and guide in directing any later legislation that is required. I do not understand that there are any plans formulated or determined as to what steps would be taken next if you should enact this legislation.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. I was prompted to ask the question by admissions made by some of the educators who have discussed the matter with me in my office.

Doctor JUDD. I will not say what is in the mind of A, B, or C. If the department is created it will become the center for proposals to this committee, and naturally, it will suggest enlargement, exactly as have Commerce, Agriculture, and other departments.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. I am prompted to ask that question and two or three questions I have asked at this point because I believe there is quite a misapprehension among the teaching fraternity of the country as to what the real purpose of this bill is. I have in my files several hundred letters from teachers of the great secondary schools, many of whom I have known in the past and am now acquainted with. I have pressed them for reasons as to why this bill should be passed, and uniformly, where I have gotten an answer at all, they have said they believe it would be advantageous to them from a salary standpoint. This leads back to whether or not the Federal aid question has been abandoned. In other cases, teachers have said that they sent in their letters because forms were furnished them and they were asked to send the letters. I have several hundred letters to prove they are forms, because they are word for word alike. I am wondering if these teachers are laboring under the impression that there will be Federal aid following the enactment of this legislation which will in some way advance the wages of the teachers. I do not want to be misunderstood. I believe in high salaries for teachers.

Doctor JUDD. Is the question put now whether there are people who, possibly, misunderstand this bill? I will have to answer there are such persons, even among the legislators.

Mr. BLACK. You mean among those legislators who favor the bill. Mr. LEATHERWOOD. We start with the premise that Congress generally is wrong. That is when Congress does not follow the dictates of propagandists.

Mr. ROBSION. If there is any bill that has been before Congress on which there is not misunderstanding among a lot of people and some members of Congress, I have not seen it yet, and this will not be any different from any other bill in that respect.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. The gentleman from Kentucky will agree that when you get 80 per cent out of three or four hundred letters agreeing on a question it would not be an accident.

Mr. ROBSION. I agree with this, that the gentleman from Utah had charge of the Indian war pension bill, and I had charge of the Spanish-American War pension bill, and it is not nonsensical or unusual for those who are interested in these bills to write to us about them. That is not only true of pension bills but true of any bill I have seen in Congress.

The CHAIRMAN. It is not a violation of law to write to Congress. Mr. ROBSION. The people have that right.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. I think it is entirely proper. I will say to the gentleman from Kentucky, when a man guesses he frequently guesses wrong. Most of these letters are not from the State of Utah. A large per cent of them are from the State of Kansas.

Mr. ROBSION. There is no reason why the teachers of Kansas, Utah, or Kentucky should not be interested in any bill looking to the advancement of education generally in this country.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. Absolutely; but what I am interested in and what you are interested in is to determine whether the teachers have the proper conception of the purpose of the legislation.

Mr. BLACK. It only goes to prove there is a more aggressive field agent of the National Education Association in Kansas than Utah. Mr. ROBSION. They have aggressive agents and there are agents here fighting them who are aggressive, too.

Mr. BLACK. I am not questioning their right.

Mr. SEARS. Very fortunately, not a single member of this committee is recorded as having voted for the late congressional salary grab, so called. There was not a record vote taken.

Mr. ROBSION. That is one bill in which there was no propaganda from Utah or Kansas.

Mr. FLETCHER. Do you know of any indication in this bill to get salary increases?

Doctor JUDD. No; and it is my hope and expectation that if the right kind of bill is passed it will be the most informing measure to those who may have misconceived the purpose of the bill. If we can set up a Federal agency that will do the same sort of scientific job as the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture, I think any teacher who is under a misapprehension will be educated in the right direction. It is emphatically my own personal belief, and I think it is shared by a large number of those engaged in educational work, that such an agency is the best means of straightening out misapprehensions of the relation of the Federal Government to States and localities.

Mr. FLETCHER. In what way will the 5,000,000 illiterates be affected by this bill?

Mr. MONAST. What you want centralized is knowledge, not power. You want to bring all knowledge under one head to be distributed to different sections of the country, but you do not want the power to control the schools.

Doctor JUDD. Absolutely; quite so.

Mr. MONAST. What you want is a centralized power to get all the knowledge you possibly can under this head, and then the people who want this educational department can come here and get the knowledge. But the department will not tell the people what they must do, but simply tell them what they can do if they like.

Mr. FENN. To clear up this matter, do not the common schools of the Nation depend on the financial ability of the communities themselves to pay for the schools?

Doctor JUDD. Do you mean that the schools are dependent upon the community or the State for financial support?

Mr. FENN. I mean the local communities.

Doctor JUDD. In practically all the States, and in some States to a greater extent than others, the local school funds are augmented from the State as a whole.

Mr. FENN. That is the case in my State, but the local school boards employ and fix the salaries of the teachers.

Doctor JUDD. There are a great many States that have minimum salary laws.

Mr. FENN. There are certain requirements of the State regarding higher education and educational qualifications.

Doctor JUDD. There are also minimum salary laws.

Mr. FENN. We have no minimum salary laws in Connecticut. That question would be fixed by the States, not by the department here in Washington?

Doctor JUDD. Yes.

Mr. ROBSION. Many States have a per capita allowance for each pupil, and the amount of money each community would get would depend on the number of children it has.

Doctor JUDD. There are a number of bases for the distribution of State funds, and those have been made the subject of scientific scrutiny. Much could be said regarding desirable and undesirable modes of distribution. This per capita mode of distribution is very common, but we have come to think of it as, perhaps, less desirable for administering State funds than some device that will distribute State funds in case of need.

Mr. ROBSION. Some States have a better arrangement than others. It does not depend upon the local conditions.

Doctor JUDD. It depends on the State rather than simply the locality.

The CHAIRMAN. You have a number of witnesses to present, I believe.

Doctor JUDD. First, I will introduce Dr. W. W. Boyd, president of the Western College for Women, who was president of the North Central Association at the time that this committee was provided for.

STATEMENT OF DR. W. W. BOYD, PRESIDENT WESTERN COLLEGE FOR WOMEN, OXFORD, OHIO

Doctor BOYD. I do want to bring your attention to the proposition that Doctor Judd made, that we are representing the North Central Association for a specific thing. We are not here to support this particular bill for the establishment of a department of education. We are here to get an appropriation that will carry out an investigation on one phase of education in the United States, and if I may I will briefly state how we have arrived at an agreement regarding the need for the investigation.

Thirty years ago the Schoolmasters Club of Michigan got into a discussion regarding why we had so much waste in our colleges, why the students from the high schools were not better prepared to do the work in college. That led to the organization of the North Central Association which should dovetail the high schools and colleges in better form, if possible. We have been working on that problem 30 years to find what our high schools could do for better education and the colleges have been trying to find out what they could do to solve this problem in the way of sending the high schools better teachers, arranging the curriculum, etc. We have reached a point in this study where we can not quite get the things done because we do not have money enough to do them. We are coming here asking for an appropriation. Doctor Mann of the American Council on Education, has said we will need at least $200,000 the first year and $300,000 the next year, or $500,000, to carry on that investigation. We are, therefore, hoping that, whether the fund is to be administered through a bureau or a department of education, you will introduce a bill to provide that amount of money to carry on this investigation for the adjustment of high-school work to higher education. That, briefly, is the statement that I wanted to make from a liberal arts college.

Mr. FLETCHER. What do you suppose the inefficiency resulting from this lack of investigation is costing the country at large, economically and financially?

Doctor BOYD. I do not know definitely, but doubtless it is costing millions and millions of dollars, and a tremendous waste in the human element. Students are thrown upon their own efforts and they become disappointed, and there is a loss to our Nation in dollars and cents.

Mr. FLETCHER. Has the lack of that information any relation to the reason for so many college people seeming to fail vocationally? Doctor BOYD. I could not answer that. Undoubtedly we would save very much money and very many lives in getting out to them something constructive in life.

Mr. FLETCHER. You will admit thousands of college people are vocationally unadjusted.

Doctor BOYD. There is no doubt of that.

Mr. FLETCHER. Partly from lack of information.

Doctor BOYD. Take a high school in South Dakota trying to prepare a student for college. Where is he going to college? Vanderbilt, Harvard, Leland Stanford? All those institutions are doing different types of work. How can high schools adjust themselves to the different types of requirements in the different institutions? Undoubtedly it does require a different curriculum by which the boy can arrive at the place he wants to go. South Dakota, therefore, needs a national view into the high schools of what higher education is doing. Higher education needs a general view of what various high schools can do over the country in adjusting themselves to the work of the higher institutions. That is the problem that confronts

us.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. Could not the question be solved partially by the universities having a somewhat more uniform standards of admission?

Doctor BOYD. That has been going on for years. Thirty years ago I was an instructor in a high school in Ohio and we knew the view of Ohio State University. We could get the Ohio view. We did not know the Nebraska or California or the Yale or Harvard view. We had no national view. Our regional associations cover this country. We are representing the North Central Association. Doctor Judd has correspondence from other regional associations covering this whole problem. It is only one of the problems on which we are centering our efforts.

Mr. ROBSION. You want a clearing house here in Washington for education throughout the country, not just an agency to gather information.

Doctor BOYD. We want a department of education or a Bureau of Education that would give us the facts better than we can find them ourselves with our limited means and limited territory.

The CHAIRMAN. I do not know that this really applies to the case, but this situation is developing all over the country, in most of the large universities-boys are clamoring to get in. The colleges do not have the dormitory facilities, the teaching facilities, or the laboratory facilities, and that is even true of the land grant colleges. The result is that the schools keep raising the standards to try to keep boys and girls out, with the result that many boys who possess the qualities of leadership are debarred because they do not happen to be bookworms. I am not minimizing the brilliant people, but there are many persons whom I could name, eminent men, who had