Would you comment on this if you had to mention the two between leadership and fund, which would be more important?

Dr. MATTHEIS. I think I would give priority in the problem area to the funds. I think this is indicated in title III, as for instance, where this is an innovative situation, and I think Minnesota and many other States exemplified the kind of leadership and thinking that is available in the States when given an opportunity. We had more projects and new ideas thrown out than anyone ever guessed we could.

I think the leadership is there not to the degree we would want, but there is plenty of leadership.

Mr. GARDNER. If the proper funds were available for the State in the same amounts that the Federal Government has been giving in grants-in-aid programs, do you think the State could do a better job of administering these programs compared with the Federal Government, and why?

Dr. MATTHEIS. It would be my opinion, Mr. Congressman, that we could do equally as good a job.

I think most studies in research and education that we come out with about equal or as good a job, but rarely can we prove conclusively that one way of doing it is better than another, but with this very important difference that we would still then be maintaining a higher degree of respect and integrity for the State and the development of State institutions and legally constituted agencies within the State to do the job.

I think it could be done equally as well with ability in guarantee to develop and continue the agencies that are existing within the States to do those jobs.

Mr. GARDNER. On page 10 of your testimony you say you strongly support Federal aid for elementary and secondary education. Would you want to change this statement if we went into a Federal tax-sharing plan with various States and the money were available to the State?

Dr. MATTHEIS. Would I want to change the statement?

Mr. GARDNER. Yes.

Dr. MATTHEIS. No, sir; I would think that the tax-sharing plan, Mr. Congressman, that is being talked about would be a satisfactory and desirable way of getting Federal dollars back to the States. I have a high degree of confidence in the way the public education has been dealt with in Minnesota, that education would receive a due portion of any Federal funds that were returned to the State on a tax-sharing program.

Chairman PERKINS. Mr. Steiger.

Mr. STEIGER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I will be just as brief as possible so we can get the other witnesses on. You made a very eloquent statement. Let me just ask a couple of things.

Archie Buckmiller, the deputy superintendent of schools in Wisconsin, made a presentation to Mrs. Green's subcommittee and title II was touched on. One of the concerns that they expressed was, and I will quote here "that the Federal Government seems to be bending towards even greater specificity and administrative control in its educational control programs. Descriptive detail narrows the option available to

State agencies and school districts." They went on to cite title II which says the State should consider in its guidelines the geographic library which runs counter to Wisconsin's concept of trying to provide daily access to the material through a library at each school. Have you found in Minnesota any of these same kinds of difficulties? Dr. MATTHEIS. Not particularly.

I think we have worked out these to our satisfaction in the development of our State plan. We do not have the same plan as far as the regional situation as Wisconsin does and maybe this is why we have not experienced difficulties, but I would say difficulties experienced under title II have been very, very minimal in working out our State plan.

Mr. STEIGER. You indicated in your testimony, and I share your concern about title III, and it was suggested yesterday by the National Education Association that perhaps we ought to go to a 75-percent State plan operation, 25 percent under the Commissioner of Education for the direction of title III funds. What would be your reaction to that concept?

Dr. MATTHEIS. I would not particularly support that concept, Mr. Congressman. I could see no reason why this should be of significant advantage or importance in carrying out the intent of the title.

I think it can be done on a 100-percent basis to the States. I don't conceive that this 25 percent is going to do much if anything above and beyond the intent of the law that could not be done with any 100percent funding to the State.

Mr. STEIGER. Do you share a concern expressed by some of the witnesses before this committee as well as some of the members of the committee about the idea that is contained in several portions of H.R. 6230 for educational agencies included in its definition, other public, nonprofit agencies to meet the needs and so forth? Do you think this is a good trend for us to go to outside the educational agencies?

Dr. MATTHEIS. Mr. Congressman, in responding I would say I think the trend of using these agencies is excellent. I would see, however, that the responsibility for working with those agencies should be at the State and not the Federal level.

I think that if the funds are given to the State and then the State has the opportunity to contract with various agencies, this is one thing, but to have that contracting done from the Federal level is something completely different. I would support the option being made available to the States, but not the Federal.

Mr. STEIGER. One last question.

What is your own reaction, and I am reading from your statement. I gather that you support the regional labor concept. My problem with the regional lab really is what this does to the State department because they are outside of any constitutional or legislative or any other guidelines, or requirements for salaries and so forth. Does this tend to weaken State departments because you will draw people out of them into the regional lab rather than trying to strengthen the State department of education? Is this a problem?

Dr. MATTHEIS. In responding to it and, I think, the questions was raised a little earlier, I would only reaffirm the material I said then. I have great concern about it and I did originally when it was introduced.

In sort of a self-protection for the Department of Education, I think, all of us around the country became very involved in them and in their direction and in the setting up of these regional laboratories feeling if we are part of the guiding force of it at least we would be participating in the decisions to be made within it.

I still have some concern about it. I am not sure these things could not be reasonably well done at the State level in each case. We have an upper midwest laboratory in our area and the chief State school officers of the state participating are represented on the executive group dealing with decisionmaking policies. We have some reservations about it but we had a reasonable degree of assurance that it was going to be established, so we got in there to participate in it and help direct it. However, I think we had some questions about its future.

Mr. STEIGER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman PERKINS. Thank you, Doctor Mattheis and Doctor Byrne for your appearances here today.

We are not by any means excusing you, but we are going to let you stand aside inasmuch as we now have other witnesses who wish to make a general statement. When we reconvene after lunch, you will sit at the table with the other witnesses as a panel for further questioning.

Mr. QUIE. I would like to add my word of thanks, too, for the excellent statements you have made, very provocative and you have served a very worthwhile function here.

I would also like to say for Commissioner Mattheis who is in the public eye in Minnesota.

Dr. Byrne, you have made what I think is the best statement that has been made here on this whole topic of the elementary and secondary school. I recognize that a prophet is not even safe within his own country.

I wish every member of the Legislature in Minnesota could have heard you today, and they would have been mighty impressed with the work you have done.

Mr. BELL. Mr. Chairman, from sunny California, the largest State in the Union, we have today two very distinguished guests who will be testifying, Dr. Ernest Willenberg, president of the Council for Exceptional Children, Los Angeles, Calif., would you come forward, Dr. Willenberg, and Dr. Bruce Miller, superintendent of schools of Riverside, Calif.

I would like to take this opportunity, Dr. Willenberg, to welcome you to the committee. We know of your excellent record in Los Angeles.

Mr. SCHEUER. I have three witnesses I would like to introduce. Chairman PERKINS. Dr. William C. Greer, executive secretary, Council for Exceptional Children, would you come around to the table, also?

Msgr. James C. Donohue, director, Department of Education, National Catholic Welfare Conference and Mr. John Cicco.

Inasmuch as the gentlemen from New York have to leave in just a few moments, the witnesses from New York in the order that Mr. Scheuer wants them to proceed will proceed with a general statement. Mr. SCHEUER. Dr. Niemeyer and Dr. Gordon Klopf and Mrs. Williams.

I am very pleased and honored to have such educational adventurers and leaders down here. I use that word "adventurers" in the most exciting meaning of the word.

I am sure your testimony is going to prove useful and constructive for all of us.

I might say that among the programs that Dr. Niemeyer and Dr. Klopf have participated in has been a program involving parent outreaches, and since all four of my children went to the Bank Street School and since their outreaches projected me into this great body, I feel that you really brought the parent average concept to its full fruition many years ago. With those words, I greet you, welcome you and look forward to what you are going to tell us.

STATEMENT OF JOHN H. NIEMEYER, PRESIDENT, BANK STREET COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, ACCOMPANIED BY MRS. VERONA WILLIAMS AND DR. GORDON KLOPF

Mr. NIEMEYER. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Scheuer, gentlemen of the committee, it is a pleasure to listen. Not only do we hear the spendid presentation from this particular table, but if Congressman Scheuer owes his knowledge and perception about education to the education of his own children, I am sure all of you have had children in very excellent schools.

Mr. SCHEUER. Dr. Niemeyer, would you qualify yourself and Dr. Klopf?

Mr. NIEMEYER. I am the president of the Bank Street College of Education which is a graduate school training liberal arts graduates, mostly for service in slums and slum schools in the inner cities, the big cities.

My organization is a research center which has been at work through formal research and experimental projects since 1916, trying to understand the whole teaching-learning process in the institution called the school.

I have with me today two colleagues, one on my left, the person called by Mr. Scheuer, the star witness is Mrs. Williams.

We wanted, in spite of the temptation, to talk on all aspects of the amendments and the bill, we wanted today to try to bring to this committee perhaps just a little bit deeper understanding of the whole educational aide, the nonprofessional school aide area of work.

Mrs. Williams is such an aide who has come up in the public school system of New York and is an educational aide in P.S. 1, which is down in the Lower East Side.

She also serves on the advisory committee to a study of the whole question of the training of nonprofessional auxiliaries which are being carried on at the Bank Street with OEO funding by Dr. Klopf and

other associates.

This study is attempting to follow and to give nurture to and to get dissemination among and from the 15 OEO sponsored training programs for aid scattered across the country.

Therefore, Dr. Klopf who has been at this for a couple of years brings a good deal of rather deep understanding of this and Mrs. Williams, who has served on the advisory committee, brings the under

standing that she has gained from study and also her personal experience as an aid.

I think perhaps I ought to say just one bit about Bank Street for you so you will know the background out of which we talk.

We are deeply involved in teacher training, but we are more concerned with the whole question that has been raised here today by many of you which is how do you get dissemination, how do you get change, how do you get improvement because it is very telling, the question which says "well, if a concern with a disadvantage is long overdue, where have the States been? Where have the school systems been?"

One answer, of course, and it is partly a legitimate answer, is that there have not been the funds.

On the other hand, many of us who are out in the field working in school systems and studying them find that even where there seems to be plenty of funds, the funds are not used wisely and changes are not made to try to bring about new practices that will lead toward the goal which everybody agrees is important, which is to try to bring into the American stream of life about 30 percent of the children of America who today are coming out of our schools, a large proportion of them, ill-trained for productive lives in society and many of them already doomed to what I call permanent unemployability in our society.

When you think that in the large system in which we work in perhaps 250 elementary schools, 85 percent of the children at the end of the seventh grade are retarded in reading and, I would guess, at least 50 percent of these are so retarded that they cannot possibly do successful secondary education work. It becomes apparent that this is an advance problem, a difficult problem, a complex problem.

The first point of two I would like to make today, and perhaps I can make other points in the questioning period after lunch, is first, in spite of the difficulties and in spite of the problems which you men and women are as concerned about, and certainly even more knowledgeable about than most of us who work in certain areas of the country, in spite of that, there is, and in spite of what I just said about the tremendous job still to be done, there is, as I have said in my written testimony, abroad in the land today a spirit and a movement among educators and all of the other people who are becoming more interested in education and the work of the school which gives great hope.

The first summer that Headstart came into New York, the public school program was opened and almost no children appeared. The school system realized that the schools really have never known how to get in touch with the children of really disadvantaged, disorganized, alienated, poor families, but they got to work and by the end of the first year the school system had introduced personnel who got out to the homes. They had more home visiting going on, and by the time the second summer came around a different situation occurred.

This required change. I would just like to point out the change in the educational establishment is no more difficult, but I am sure, it is no less difficult for the people in that establishment than it is for any establishment that you can think of, any bureaucracy. Change takes