NDEA: Progress Report

Educators, who are rarely given to bursts of enthusiasm over anything, may one day get down on their hands and knees to thank the powers that be for Sputnik. The launching by the Soviet Union in 1957 of the first earth satellite stirred this country into a furious educational debate, the repercussions of which are still being felt. More tangibly, the launching led to the National Defense Education Act the following year.

With legislation that would authorize a billion dollars for college classrooms closer to passage than ever before, NDEA--with annual appropriations of $90 million--seems pretty small potatoes. It was not a program to hike teachers' salaries or raise new and gleaming schoolhouses across the land; these goals, although admirable, require big league expenditures. NDEA's objectives were more modest, but in its own way the program has abetted a quiet revolution in American education.

During the first five years of NDEA the government paid out $181 million to the states, on a 50-50 matching basis, to strengthen instruction in science, math, and modern languages in elementary and secondary schools. The Office of Education reports that in this period the number of language labs in high schools jumped from 46 to almost 6,000; under another provision of the Act nearly 14,000 public school teachers received instruction in modern foreign language institutes.

One has only to take a peek at the textbooks being used in high school science and math courses these days, or to listen to a language class being taught, to realize the changes that NDEA has helped realize. But its most impressive accomplishments he in yet another area: since 1958 about 490,000 students in over 1,500 colleges have borrowed $330,000,000 under the loan program.

Loan funds have a particular appeal for financial aid officers. For one thing they are repaid, so that a loan program becomes, after a while, nearly self-perpetuating; for another they do not require the large capital endowment that marks a sound scholarship fund. NDEA funds are especially attractive, because recipients who go into teaching are forgiven ten per cent of the principal for each year of pedagogy up to five years; thus the Graduate School of Education, perenially short of cash, can actually use NDEA money in place of scholarship funds.

The University added NDEA funds to its coffers for the first time last year, when the offensive provision for a disclaimer affidavit was repealed, but officials must be wondering how they ever did without. Although the last decade has seen a sharp expansion of Harvard's own loan program, from less than $80,000 to $600,000 last year, the strain of expansion had become considerable. NDEA funds have been welcome relief, and the hope of larger appropriations in 1964-65 for the scholarship office is the nearest thing to a silver lining in a sky growing cloudy with next year's tuition increase.

Expansion of the NDEA loan fund and raising the amount available to any one institution rest, of course, in the uncertain hands of Congress. But observers report that sentiment in Washington is more favorable now toward aid to education than at any time in recent years, and officials in the Office of Education are privately elated at the string of successes they have run up.

There is hope, therefore, that Congress will move from the modest NDEA program to a large commitment to increasing educational opportunity. In so doing, supporters who are leery of the very real problem of federal control might take instruction from the NDEA example. Like any federal program, NDEA established a set of priorities, and educators must not let its emphasis on science and languages argue against support of the social sciences and humanities. But except for the abberation of section 1001 (f), NDEA has been free from the tight supervision and bureaucratic nitpicking that can hamstring federal programs. While the money for elementary and high school curriculum reform has come from Washington, the inspiration and technique have been undeniably local. In the loan program the government has simly passed the funds on to institutions, after determining their need, and--once the stated priorities were met--left them free to allot it as they wished.