place very slowly. We all have ways of working and we continue to use those ways and it takes a great deal of dynamite sometimes, intellectually and from the standpoint of funding and so on to make us change our ways of behavior.

This is a deep concern of all of our studies and work in fact, in our teacher education work at Banks Street we are concentrating now upon teams of teachers and administrators from various parts of the country who come for workshops, and we try to work with them and develop with them ideas with which they can go back to their home towns and States and bring about some of these changes which really have to take place.

The chairman would be pleased to know a team from Louisville, Ky., will be at Banks in this summer as well as Atlanta, Cleveland, Hartford, Miami, and various parts of the country.

I would say it is difficult to bring about the change but I think some change is taking place, and that leads me to the second point, and that is the support we would like to give-I am not very good on all of these titles and I get confused about them-but that part of the amendments which would permit States to set up planning and evaluation agencies. I will certainly go along with the Commissioner from Minnesota, who said that the State organization should not be bypassed. They should be used more fully. The local areas need to be used more fully.

While I support this amendment, I should like to interject at the beginning a statement in support of what we have now. I am a great believer in not letting any one establishment have the whole show. That is why I would hope that Headstart would not be put into the Office of Education and under title I. It may belong in the department, but I would hope that it could be set up in some way so that some of the influence of the people who had the original vision in OEO and Shriver, and so on, could still have an influence upon this, because we see evidence all the time of a State department having a good influence upon the local system, of the local system having a good influence upon the State and both of these being influenced by guidelines and by requirements and by encouragement out of the Federal Government, and I mean beyond money. I mean encouragement of ideas, because our profession-and I have been in education all of my adult life-my profession is just like other professions-very, very slow to change and we do need the influence from all of these sources. However, having said that, I do feel that a great deal more planning needs to be done at the State level. I think this is a capital idea that is being proposed to encourage and make it possible for the States to set up these planning, these State planning and evaluating agencies and to require that among the things which they will do will be concern for new programs, new horizons, new ventures. That leads me to the point which I hope we will be able to spend most of our time on in the time allotted us: namely, one of our interests in such planning groups at the State level and these new programs is that such bodies pledge to try to implement and devise and to implement new programs that one of the new programs which they certainly will have to get into is this program of the training of school aids, the nonprofessional personnel.

Now, for the past 2 years we have been studying in but we have also been bringing the people who are in these training programs together, people from school systems, people from outside the agency, in labor, in industry, and so on, together to find out and to learn from them and we find that certain things are true.

We find that the aid program is successful where the following conditions are obtained:

1. Where the role of the aid is not defined in a rigid fashion, but is defined in the way Mrs. Williams has had, with the flexibility, with the taking advantage of the particular interests and the ability that she has and the needs of the particular kids in that particular school.

2. We find that this does no good unless the teachers are trained how to use aids and the aids have a continuing training programthey are not dumped into taking off overshoes or picking up papers. 3. When the school looks upon the aid as a career and, if possible, a career with ladders so that people who want to, can climb up the rungs of these ladders to better positions. In the very short time we have known Mrs. Williams, we have seen this tremendous growth toward becoming a real professional. Yet she started over as a housewife who was just interested in kids and wanted to help.

4. We find that it is pretty essential, and you would subsume this, I would imagine, that the aids be in schools where the schools and the school system believes that every adult in the school is important in the life of a child, from a janitor or the custodian, the cook, up to the superintendent of schools. They are all a part of a team, all influencing the lives of children and youth. Where that attitude exists, we find that the aid program is extremely important. Where these conditions do not obtain, either in toto-and in some places they don't obtain at all though they have aids-then we find that really the advantage of this for the children and for learning seems to be very slight indeed.

Personally, I do not pretend to know what should or should not be in the legislation. But I would hope that in some way the influence of the committee could be exerted if an amendment does go through Congress and that this influence would be thrown behind stimulating in relation to the aid training program and would be toward stimulating the use of the research which has been done by this national committee that happens to be located at the Bank Street College of Education about this whole program because I come back to another point and with that I am finished.

There is no question about it that there just is not very much dissemination. Things happen that are important here and they are not even known in the same school system let alone in another part of the country. This is a problem which we should address ourselves to, we are trying to at my level, but it is a universal problem which is of great importance.

Now, I had hoped that Mrs. Williams would be able to tell you, Mr. Chairman, some of her experiences. Perhaps that would best be done if done as the result of questions, but she has gone to a lot of work to prepare a beginning statement and if you would like to have her do that, she is prepared to do so.

75-492-67-—pt. 2- 20

Chairman PERKINS. If there is no objection, her statement will be inserted in the record and if you care to summarize it, it would certainly expedite the hearing.

Mrs. WILLIAMS. Mr. Chairman, Members of Congress, I am a school aide employed at P.S. 1, by the Board of Education."

Some of my duties are, one, I am primarily a library aid, which means processing all books that come into the school whether through ESEA or through library funds and also stimulating the interest of children where they read for enjoyment and not because it is a chore. In doing this, I have been able to raise the reading level of some children and also in helping children that have remedial retardation in reading.

I had one little Chinese boy who arrived from Hong Kong who had a difficulty reading problems and he was reading at the third grade level while he was in the fifth grade. I helped him. If a test is given and a child does not know how to read-mark he cannot pass the test. Also the silent "b." He did not know how to pronounce the word "lamb," and also the magic "e" where the magic "e" becomes use.

No teacher has enough hands to give every child the individual attention they need. This was one of my duties.

Also, in the morning, receiving prekindergarten, kindergarten and first-grade children. It is very important to the parents to be able to leave these children in school with peace of mind. These children come to me in the morning, leave their mothers.

It has been a wonderful experience. We have a working community. Parents are now asking what can they do to help improve their children's reading ability, what is curriculum, something that was never asked before by parents. Also, if a child has a problem bothering them they can come to you and ask you and you can relate to them and speak to them on their level.

I also act as liaison between school and parents. I could go on forever about the things that have gone on in school. It has been rewarding to me and also I think the school has gained something from it. I would like to think that aids are responsible for this.

I will also help with the barking of the school, taking care of bookkeeping, also in ordering supplies for the school. I don't think there is anything that an aid could do except in a professional field that I could not qualify for. The only reason I couldn't qualify is because I am not a professional.

Chairman PERKINS. Thank you very much for your eloquent state

ment.

Mr. NIEMEYER. Dr. Kopf is the dean of the college and he would like to make a comment.

Mr. KOPF. I think I would like to support the amendment dealing with greater planning on the part of States.

I think a very basic ingredient to this, however, is not only more. leadership on the State level, but using some national guidelines or some national leadership in this direction to assist States in their planning.

I serve right now as chairman and follow through the national planning committee for the Office of Education and we have a team. working from all over the country working on this program. I feel

very strongly that States can have resources from national leadership, both in the U.S. Office of Education and from other States and from other institutions throughout the country. Although I support very strongly greater planning on the part of States, I think included this planning plus the leadership from throughout the country whether it is from the U.S. Office of Education or other institutions.

I think that Headstart is really one I consider the great examples or great innovations on the national level of the past 10 or 15 years in education. This was a national program and it was both initiated and implemented on a national level through local areas. To what degree some of you know more the stipulations of followthrough, this perhaps would be a combination.

Another major concern of mine has been the study of the MDTA training institute. I think you were sent copies of reports we did at Bank Street 2 years ago. The difference from the assistance at the national level, these institutes as we looked at them two different times, through national leadership, through national assistance, I think, has been very, very significant. Programs in States, cities, and the institutions as Mr. Niemeyer said, has to be a combined approach. We have to work it together, but we do need more State planning with greater leadership and richer leadership on the part of the States.

(Mr. Niemeyer's prepared testimony follows:)

TESTIMONY BY JOHN H. NIEMEYER, PRESIDENT BANK STREET COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

Ladies and gentlemen, I wish to thank Chairman Perkins for inviting me to testify before this morning on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act Amendments of 1967. With his permission I am accompanied by two of my colleagues: Mrs. Verona Williams who is an aide in the New York City Public School System and a member of the Advisory Commission for the Bank Street Study of Auxiliary Personnel in Education, and Dr. Gordon Klopf who is the Dean of the Faculties at Bank Street and is co-director of the Study. Dean Klopf is also currently serving as Chairman of the committee here in Washington planning policy and guidelines for Project Follow Through. Our plan, with your permission, is that I shall make a brief statement, and will then ask Mrs. Williams and Dean Klopf to speak, following which we should be glad to try to answer questions which members of the Committee may wish to address to us. Perhaps it would be helpful if first I said something about the work of Bank Street College of Education so that those of you who are not familiar with our program will know the experience and professional concerns from which we speak. Bank Street is solely a graduate school for the training of early childhood and elementary teachers and supervisors, and a research center which from its inception in 1916 has been seeking ways for improving the teachinglearning process. We work through highly formal research and through field experiments. As part of the latter, we have conducted for many years an experimental laboratory school, operate a day-care center for the Welfare Department of New York City, and have for the past two years been attempting to develop on the West Side of Manhattan a child and parent center (which we call simply the Bank Street Early Childhood Center because that is the name selected by the families who are working with us to develop this center as a resource for themselves and their neighbors). In the Center we are trying to carry out to its fullest the broad conceptualization of Head Start. The families in the Center are representative of the poorest and the most isolated of families which we have ever known, and yet families with very great potential for self help.

Since 1943 the College has had a close working relationship with the Public School System of New York and for all these years we have sent faculty teams into schools to work with teachers and supervisors on problems of their own choosing. The most recent and perhaps dramatic of these cooperative efforts is the Bank Street Educational Resources Center, located in the heart of Harlem,

which has been serving as a resource to three District Superintendents. Long before there was the wide-spread concern about the schools of the ghetto areas of the big city, Bank Street was deeply engaged in studying and probing at this great problem.

Finally, I should perhaps add, the College has in the past six years conducted training programs and provided consultation to a number of cities across the nation, thus giving us a picture of the educational scene beyond New York City. For the Office of Equal Educational Opportunities of the U.S. Office of Education we have been providing consultation service to school systems facing particular curriculum problems as part of their efforts to desegregate and integrate their schools. We have provided training for teams of teachers and administrators from such cities as El Paso, St. Louis, Louisville, Boston, Washington, D.C., San Juan, Milwaukee, Charlotte, and Cleveland. This coming summer, teams of teachers from Louisville, Atlanta, Hartford, Miami, and Cleveland will be studying at Bank Street directly on the problems faced by their school systems in relation to the education of disadvantaged children.

From this wide-spread involvement we can report to you, ladies and gentlemen, that, although the educational problems of this nation are vast and will require an expanding effort on the part of the federal government and the states for correction, there is abroad in the land today an encouraging movement on the part of not just schools and educators but of the related professions and the general citizenry which promises great hope. We are convinced that the school is the most critically important agency in our society for cutting into the permanent cycle of poverty. Many other things need to be done, of course, but unless we can provide the boys and girls who are now coming out of our schools doomed to permanent unemployability the skills and attitudes necessary for playing productive roles in society, the culture of poverty will continue and only grow worse.

My first point relative to legislation to strengthen elementary and secondary education in the country is to commend this Committee and the Congress upon the important first steps which have been taken and to urge that in all future legislation the vast proportions and complexity of the problem be borne in mind. School systems, just like other social systems, do not change easily. The problem of the re-training of large numbers of personnel is gigantic in proportion and slow in accomplishment. New methods and new materials for teaching the children from highly disorganized families must be developed. New resources must be found to meet the medical and psychological needs of children. Therefore, if we, the American people, intend to do the job, we will have to put into it many times the resources which we have been willing to make available to date. My first point, then, is to urge the Congress to provide increasing funds in support of the various programs which can, given enough time and money, bring about the necessary and desirable changes in our entire approach to the education of children and youth.

Secondly I should like to make some brief observations on the proposed Amendment to Title V of the Elementary and Secondary Act relating to grants for comprehensive educational planning. Because, if solving our educational problem requires a great deal more money, it also requires a great deal more systematic, coordinated planning and evaluation of education at all levels.

We strongly support the proposal in Section 523 (a) (1) of this bill for the establishment of a single state agency to develop comprehensive state-wide planning programs designed to 1) set state-wide educational goals; 2) develop through analysis alternative methods of achieving these goals; and 3) plan new programs and improvement of existing programs based on the results of these analyses.

We also urge that there be included among the new programs to be considered by such state-wide planning agencies a program for "New Careers in Education"— that is to say, the coordination of non-professionals along with professionals in a long-range, integrated approach to meeting the learning needs of children and youth.

Bank Street College of Education is currently conducting, under a contract with the Office of Economic Opportunity, a nation-wide Study of Auxiliary Personnel (that is non-professionals) in Education. The first report of this Study is the volume entitled "Teacher Education in a Social Context," several copies of which I shall leave with the Committee staff. Preliminary findings from the analyses of 15 demonstration training programs for auxiliary school