to make recommendations the State department of education had in fact stepped in.

Mr. DELLENBACK. I wish I could lean back and smugly say we have no problems like this in the State or Oregon but unfortunately I can

not.

Chairman PERKINS. Mr. Ford.

Mr. FORD. We had some testimony that touched briefly on the program that you mentioned, Dr. Bowman, in connection with the value of the Teacher Corps. Spokesmen for the Detroit educational system pointing out that the Teacher Corps provided a method for getting an especially trained teacher into those schools dealing with the recognizably culturally deprived children.

Do you see the kind of program you have been describing here with the subprofessional as a program that would benefit from having increased numbers of teachers trained through the device of the Teacher Corps in the special problems of the culturally deprived children?

Mrs. BOWMAN. Yes, indeed. In fact I believe all teachers in education, teachers in colleges and in inservice courses need to have more understanding of the problems of disadvantaged children. One of the studies conducted by the Bank Street College of Education has been in this very field-teacher education in a social context which goes beyond the utilization of nonprofessionals but does in fact reach out to the entire school staff.

It is our feeling that a basic approach to education views every person in the school building as having an impact upon the children.* If a janitor does his work well, he is a model to the children as opposed to one who sloppily goes through a perfunctory piece of work.

The top superintendent needs to understand so that he can coordinate and orchestrate others to serve the needs of disadvantaged children, not in any sense to lump together all disadvantaged children because there is as great a continuum among them as there is in any other group of children.

They are not problem children but children with special problems. The more that teachers, Teacher Corps, administrators and supervisors and auxiliary personnel can understand the life conditions under which some of their pupils are forced to live and the more that it is possible to bring not only the teachers into the community but bring the community into the classroom the more we will be able to eliminate the danger that corrodes our system of school community alienation and the more we can work toward a unified approach in terms of recognized educational goals.

Mr. FORD. Mrs. Levin, you mentioned in your comments a parallel between what you were seeking here in the several programs and the success of a relatively new program called VISTA.

I took from your suggestion that VISTA appealed to you because there is a sense of mission and dedication and, if you will, esprit de corps that attaches to a VISTA volunteer when he goes into this national program.

Many of us who support and have supported the Teacher Corps since its inception had in mind that the Teacher Corps would produce, or would attract and develop people with the same kinds of dedica

tion and precommitment that the Peace Corps and VISTA have developed and have recruited.

What I am asking both you and Dr. Bowman is to call upon your accumulated experience in this area. I would like you to consider this proposition. There are some Members of the Congress who have been suggesting although there is no legislation of this kind yet introduced that rather than pursuing further the avenues open by the Teacher Corps as it is now constructed, we might better turn the money over to the large city school districts earmarking it for teacher training. With the large cities, you set up a program of teacher training because you know what is best needed in your area. Calling upon your experience in the field to which you have directed your attention here today, do you think that this approach would be likely to produce the kind of teacher that you are going to need in these areas?

Mrs. LEVIN. On the basis of our own observations over an extended period of visiting, we have seen inservice training, handled by the establishment which has been unsuccessful in reaching the children of the ghetto. I believe that I have said that we see a perpetuation of the same kind of failure in developing qualified teachers unless there is some outside facility suggested for training which will develop in the future teachers an insight and understanding of the ghetto child and how to reach him.

If it is more of the same, it is not going to achieve that end.

Mrs. BOWMAN. I will heartily endorse what Mrs. Levin just said. I would like to add to it a response to what I think I heard as another aspect of your question and that is, in the choice between funds for voluntary programs and for funds for employed professionals in the school, should we give to the local community

Mr. FORD. No; that is not the question. You are talking about the subprofessionals who will work with what we identify, from whatever source their education came, as competent teachers in the special problems of disadvantaged children, recognizing that to use the subprofessional there must be a competent teacher for them to work with. We are talking about whether we would be more likely to have a supply of those competent teachers by the presently conceived Teacher Corps or giving the school districts an equivalent amount of money for the Teacher Corps and telling them to devise their own program themselves.

Mrs. BOWMAN. I think the Teacher Corps has contributed and can contribute even more toward developing the kind of teacher who can deal with the problem. I think the Teacher Corps is only one aspect.

This is not the panacea. This is a many faceted problem and needs many approaches. I would like to see competing systems of programs at the State, Federal, and local level-competing in the sense of each trying to outdo one another in a very effective program but cooperating in terms of the ultimate goals.

I think it would be too bad to eliminate some of the very innovative thinking and activities at the Federal level which serve to catalyze the local people to further efforts. However, I do think that without the coordination at the local level and without effective use of the resources, the training through the Teacher Corps, all of our efforts are futile unless there is coordination.

Mr. DELLENBACK. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. FORD. I do, yes.

Mr. DELLENBACK. Recognizing as we all do some of the great advantages that have come from the Teacher Corps and you have touched on this Dr. Bowman and recognizing, the immensity of the problem as all of us have recognized and touched on, let me put the question this way. Reaching then toward the goal of improving the capacity of the teachers on the firing line to really do the job effectively, could you not visualize, utilizing the same number of dollars that have gone into the Teacher Corps being placed for use in the New York educational system in a way that would improve the results for which you would reach, do you feel the Teacher Corps-if I may phrase it another way, represents the ideal utilization of dollars to be used for training teachers of the disadvantaged?

Mrs. BOWMAN. No; I don't think it is the only or even the ideal way. I think it is one important way but I think there should be many others.

Under the National Defense Education Act there have been institutes for teachers of disadvantaged children and youth which have been very effective. We at Bank Street College of Education have had teams from different school systems come for the last two summers to work with us on how the administrators, the supervisors, the teachers, the whole school system can deal with this question of the disadvantaged child, so I think we cannot pin all of our faith on one program, splendid as I think the Teacher Corps is, so that rather than thinking of the funds as very limited and asking they should be used for Teacher Corps or something else, I would rather see the funds for Teacher Corps remaining intact and more funds made available for many and varied programs because this is such a many-faceted problem.

Mr. DELLENBACK. That is neither the question I put nor Mr. Ford's. Mrs. BOWMAN. No; but it gave me an opportunity to say something about which I felt very strongly.

Mr. DELLENBACK. Since the subject is open, do you have any comment to make, Mrs. Benjamin?

Mrs. BENJAMIN. I will limit myself to large city school systems. If present methods were appropriate then I don't believe that the Congress would have had to pass the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and I think that you are working at your own cross purposes if you hope that the schools themselves will be able to generate the innovative teaching ability to redemiate their own system. granted funds for them to break out of that mold.

You

Mr. DELLENBACK. So the Teacher Corps then does represent the best role that you can visualize for the utilization of limited dollars for the training of teachers?

Mrs. BENJAMIN. I believe that is your opinion.

Mr. DELLENBACK. I don't mean to express it as my opinion. I was trying to paraphrase what I thought you were saying.

Mrs. LEVIN. I think we would like to leave the door open for other experimental programs. There are other alternatives, such as an internship made available to future teachers so they could have an exposure working in the field to develop familiarity with the community and the children in the community and the problems they have to work with. It seems to me that would lead in the direction

toward developing teachers who would then be able to go into the classroom and teach the children.

Mr. DELLENBACK. Then neither of you is saying that the Teacher Corps is the ideal solution.

Mrs. BOWMAN. It is one solution.

Mr. DELLENBACK. You are not saying it is the ideal solution.

Mrs. BOWMAN. It is one excellent solution and an excellent contribution but to bring new teachers into the situation does not change existing teachers.

One of the difficulties of bringing innovations into the school is that those who evaluate the new teachers are those who have been trained in traditional teaching behavior-the school administrators, the teacher educators, and we have to get to the root and with staff development programs in terms of an innovative approach to education and a deeper understanding of the social context in which education operates today.

Mr. FORD. Could I try to pursue you back in the direction toward my question? Apparently there is more defensiveness on that side of the table than I recognize.

Mr. DELLENBACK. I am not speaking for myself but I am speaking for those who are absent from both sides of the desk who have expressed some concern.

Mr. FORD. To put it bluntly, we have before this committee some questions relating to the very life of the Teacher Corps. The alternative being proposed by people who certainly are not suggesting that we not have this kind of trained teacher is a program of giving money instead to the school districts across the country and saying here is money for teacher training and you develop at the local level a teacher training program.

We will devise a program to recruit a type of person and then direct these people into a program in conjunction with a local school district and some teacher education facility. All of the school superintendents who have preceded you here have been asked would you rather we send teacher corpsmen to you or would you like to have the money and you would do it as you will.

You can just guess what most of them would do. I am not trying to suggest a Teacher Corps as an alternative to any of the people you have been talking about. I am asking you as people who are concerned specifically and have a considerable amount of expertise and experience in the several approaches that are being made and have been made over a period of time to the special problems of disadvantaged children to evaluate these two ways of getting at the kind of person that we are trying to train with the Teacher Corps, not this kind of person as a substitute for anything else but how would we best train a teacher and be sure we are going to get a high-quality teacher with a commitment to teach disadvantaged children.

Wouldn't we be likely to get it through the National Teacher Corps type of approach or would we be more likely to get it if we gave your superintendent of New York a million dollars and said you devise the program.

That is the basic question.

Mrs. BENJAMIN. If I am not mistaken we have something like 200 Teacher Corps placements in New York. I have not seen any one

of these people in operation. One of the reasons we are hesitating in answering your question is that we don't want to speak about something with which we do not have firsthand experience.

If you were to pose only two alternatives which seems to be the direction in which you are insisting

Mr. FORD. We can only vote yes or no and we can't vote on two alternatives, although it would be nice if there were not 434 other people over here and I could sit down to write the great bill.

The best way to get a great education bill would be if I could write the bill myself and the rest of these people would not bother me. Jim Scheuer might help me a little bit provided he did not make any suggestions beyond grammatical corrections.

The real problem is we are down to the point with this legislation where we have to take a look from the pragmatic point of view of whether we are going to have a Teacher Corps or not or whether we are going to approach the problems that the Teacher Corps approaches in some other direction.

Mrs. BENJAMIN. The Congress has made a very limited commitment to the Teacher Corps idea. It is difficult for us to support this program in the absence of seeing its real activity.

The Citizens Committee for Children has really grave questions about the continuation of inservice training in inadequate vehicles as we believe them to be presently in the New York City schools.

Mrs. BOWMAN. I will try to answer your question directly. I think the Teacher Corps should be continued. I say this as Garda Bowman, not representing Bank Street College of Education.

We have no position on this, nor is this based upon intensive study as other comments that I have made on nonprofessionals in education were based.

However, if the decision now must be between either continuing the Teacher Corps as it is or using this money in direct subsidy to the States for teacher training programs, I would like to suggest that you continue the Teacher Corps. However I feel that the Teacher Corps alone is most inadequate and that we do need more continuing and more thorough training not only of teachers but school administrators and supervisors and professionals together within systems and within regions so that they can share experience through institutes calling in many communities through regional laboratories, through more research and demonstration and through more involvement of the community.

So my answer to your question is yes, keep the Teachers Corps but build on that in the future when this is possible because there are many more needs to be met in order to achieve full and truly effective teacher education programs in this country.

Mrs. LEVIN. I should like to emphasize one point that Dr. Bowman made and that is the involvement of the community. I think it is very important for us to remember that there are people who can speak in the community for the community needs and to interpret them in a way that we don't always understand from the outside.

Mr. FORD. I would just like to make one observation. You have touched on this many times, and I don't think we are confessing to anything, that you live in one of the cities that does the poorest job under the Economic Opportunity Act.