Barden Bill

Somewhere under the determined rump of Chairman John Lesinski of the House Education and Labor Committee there rest a half-dozen bills to provide $300,000,000 federal aid to education. They are not expected to emerge in time for action during this session of Congress.

These numerous bills are all based on the undeniable premise that America's school system is in bad shape, and all propose to give the 48 States some federal money to ease the situation. Unfortunately one of these proposals, the Barden Bill, has raised such a violent religious and political row that the 25 members of the Education Committee, inspired by Mr. Lesinski's example have retired to their fences, with every intention of remaining there for some time.

This controversial Barden Bill wants to give the money to the States with the sole proviso that it not be used for so-called "auxiliary aids"--health programs, buses to and from school, and so on. Since these auxiliary aids are in some States granted to Catholic parochial schools, the Catholic hierarchy, particularly Cardinal Spellman of New York, has argued that this constitutes discrimination. If a child in a public school gets a bottle of milk at public cost, Spellman says, the government is morally obliged to give a bottle of milk to a Catholic child in his parochial school. These auxiliary aids serve the individual, not the educational institution he happens to attend. The Cardinal has not hesitated to call Representative Barden himself a "now apostle of bigotry," and Mrs. Roosevelt anti-Catholic, in the process of making his point.

But Spellman's polemic vigor has been matched by the high glee of the thousands of big and little men who have reaffirmed, for all the world to know, their support of the First Amendment. "We must have separation of the Church and State," they cry--entirely ignoring the finer points of the dispute.

Are auxiliary aids (which must not be confused with such obviously unconstitutional direct aids as building private or parochial school buildings) primarily for the benefit of the individual student or for the school he attends. If they serve the school, then the First Amendment really does apply; if they serve the individual, then Cardinal Spellman may well be right in calling the Barden Bill discriminatory.

On the whole, the supplementary services are functionally related to the schools in which they exist, and so, on the whole, they should not be granted to private and parochial schools. But this is a delicate point of law and far removed from the name calling that has been going on in the newspapers.

The whole dispute is removed to the realm of pure theory anyway by the fact that the States could, 'if they wanted, pay their basic expenses with federal funds and use as much of their own money as they wanted to transport children in buses. In other words arguing about the constitutionality of auxiliary aids is so much practice in governmental theory, and no more.

But it is more. The hubbub has worried enough Catholic-conscious Representatives into joining the economizers and the I-don't-want-any-centralized-thought-control people in sitting heavily on all Federal aid to education. Now not even the Senate-passed Thomas Bill, which differs only from the Barden Bill in leaving the appropriations entirely up to the states, is expected to get anywhere. Federal aid to education is a long way off.