CORE was able to raise some private funds, has reopened the school, and most of the teachers who taught at the Catholic school stayed on and are teaching.

Senator HAYAKAWA. Where is this?

Senator PACKWOOD. South Bronx in New York, and what you indicated about test scores and performance has been proven very true, and this school has been very successful, and the Congress on Racial Equality strongly supports the concept for which you have spoken. Yesterday we had four parents, four black women whose children go to Our Lady of Perpetual Help School. One was a Pentacostal, one a Lutheran, one a generic Protestant who goes from Protestant church to Protestant church, and one a Catholic, and each of them had had their children in one occasion or another in public schools. All of them, if they could, put them back in Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

One woman could not afford to have all of her children in Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and was very distressed about that, and indicated if the tax relief credit bill passed, she would put them all back in, and each of them by personal experience verified exactly what you said today about discipline and learning, and it was really a very revealing panel, because these were not teachers, these were not Sisters, they were not the people who raised the money for the school. They were mothers, only one of whom was Catholic.

Thank you very much for coming, Sam, and the statement that you have will be put in the record.

[The prepared statement of Senator Hayakawa and attachments follow. Oral testimony continues on p. 395.]

STATEMENT OF SENATOR S. I. HAYAKAWA

Mr. Chairman, I am delighted to testify here today in favor of proposals to provide tuition tax relief. As a former educator, I am interested in this approach to restoring consumer control over education. I must admit that I am more interested in supplying a tax break at the elementary and secondary levels of education, but there are certain aspects of college tuition tax relief that appeal to me as well. I would like to address these areas first and then elaborate on the need for tuition tax relief for elementary and secondary education.

One of the major failings of our present system of finanical assistance at the college level, as I see it, is its almost exclusive concentration on young, full-time students. The part-time student or the adult, evening student rarely receives any educational aid. But yet, as I look back over the best-remembered students in my years of teaching, those who remain most vivid in my mind are the adult, eveningclass students at Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and San Francisco State. They were school teachers, firemen and policemen, business executives, nurses, at least two retired colonels, women starting a new life when their children were old enough to take care of themselves, men in their mid-thirties and forties contemplating a change of career. These mature adults have been my most exciting students. I've forgotten most of the kids. No doubt they have forgotten me.

Adult students are mature. They are, therefore, likely to be self-directing rather than dependent. They often have a reservoir of practical experience that is in itself a resource for further learning; and what they learn is not theory to be applied some day, but something to be used at once in their situations outside the classroom.

Today, there are in the United States more part-time college students than full-time students. This trend is likely to continue as more and more people discover that education is a life-long process. If we want to encourage this lifelong learning: we should not provide assistance exclusively to young, full-time students, but to students in all stages of life. We can do this by providing tuition tax relief to all students, or, more precisely, to all who pay for their schooling.

I therefore strongly recommend to this Committee that any tax relief provided for tuition payments be extended to part-time, as well as full-time students.

A second area of education which interests me is vocational education. Until recently, vocational education has received little public attention. This is probably a consequence of the contempt with which our educational system views some kinds of work. It tends to overvalue white-collar work at the expense of other labor. Students believed to be low in academic talent are steered into "vocational" programs, while gifted students are steered away from them, as if they were too good to work with their hands or with machinery.

Such a distinction is arbitrary and invidious, inflicting an injustice both on the academically slow and on the academically gifted. Throughout all our high schools and colleges there should be maintained an active relationship between the academic world and the world in which people labor for a living.

I believe that our system of financial assistance for higher education should be neutral, biased in favor of neither academic nor vocational pursuits. Why should we encourage someone to study Latin and Greek as opposed to auto mechanics, typing, or shorthand? We shouldn't! We should let the individual make the choice independently of the availability of government financial assistance. We can do this by providing tuition tax relief to both academically and vocationally oriented students. Therefore, I think it is important that any tuition tax relief proposal reported from this Committee apply equally to all types of education.

Finally, let me discuss what I believe to be the most important part of tuition tax relief that provided for elementary and secondary education. I believe that public education at the elementary and secondary levels is approaching a crisis. Taxpayers have watched all levels of government quadruple the level of spending on education just since 1960. At the same time, the quality of education has shown no corresponding improvement. There is much public concern today about the deterioration of public education at the primary and secondary levels.

Parents seem helpless to control their children's education. Teachers and administrators are often more interested in pleasing government bureaucrats who control the funds than parents who do not directly pay for their children's education. The structure of the system stands in the way of accountability to parents. There are instances where students receive their diplomas whether or not they can read or write, while their teachers and administrators receive their salaries and raises regardless of student performance.

I am particularly concerned about the quality of public education for the minorities and less fortunate in our country. It is widely recognized that the quality of public education available to blacks is inferior to that of the overall population. The typical bureaucratic reaction to this sad state of affairs is to recommend more school integration and busing, greater education budgets, and higher salaries for teachers. I do not think more money and more busing are the answer. There is a great body of evidence that indicates that: (1) black students do not have to set beside white students to learn, although it might be to the advantage of white students to have that culural exposure; and (2) high quality education is not necessarily dependent on large school budgets. There are better alternatives.

For instance, many black youths today have lower levels of academic skills than their parents who attended school when blacks were poorer and less free. It is also noteworthy that for years, many black parents have sent their children to Catholic and Black Muslim schools where per capita spending is much lower, but where the students achieve higher levels of academic skills than their counter-parts in public schools. Numerous specific examples of this phenomenon are documented in an article entitled "Patterns of Black Excellence" which appeared in the Spring 1976 issue of The Public Interest. This article was written by a good friend of mine, Dr. Thomas Sowell, an economist now at Amherst College in Massachusetts, who, if it makes any difference, happens to be black. I ask the Committee to include this article as part of my testimony.

Another enlightening article appeared recently in the Washington Post This article focused on a Catholic school located in the Anacostia area of the District of Columbia. It is Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School, which educates children from kindergarten through eighth grade. The school has 517 students, all of whom, except for 3, are black, and 42 percent of whom are Protestant. Annual tuition at the school is $330 for parish members, whose

education is subsidized by other church income, and $505 for non-members, who pay full cost. By comparison, the annual per pupil cost in the D.C. public schools is $2,000.

But when you compare the levels of academic achievement of the students at Our Lady of Perpetual Help school and the public school students, the results are astounding. Although Our Lady of Perpetual Help spends about one-fourth the amount per student as the public schools, its level of academic achievement is much higher. Its students score at almost the national average in reading according to standardized tests. For instance, eighth grade students at Our Lady of Perpetual Help read only seven months below the national average, whereas D.C. eighth grade public school students read 21⁄2 years below the national norm. The level of achievement of public school students in Anacostia is even lower. Mr. Chairman, I ask that this article also be included in the transcript as part of my testimony.

Mr. Chairman, national data show that it costs less to educate a student at a private school than at public schools. In 1974, private elementary and secondary students were educated at a per student cost of $1,191 as opposed to $1.281 in the public schools. In parochial schools, the average per pupil cost was $310 for elementary and $700 for secondary.

How can schools with a lower per pupil expenditure provide a better education? I think the examples cited above give us the answer to that question. In all of the private and parochial schools where the students were performing better than their public school counterparts, there were several common characteristics in their approach to education-an emphasis on basic learning skills such as reading, spelling, and arithmetic; and insistence upon strict behavioral standards; and the consistent execution of disciplinary measures when necessary. It is encouraging to me that so many parents have had the good sense to seek out a better education for their children. In Chicago, for instance, it has been estimated that 10 percent of all black children go to Catholic schools. I believe that to improve black education, as well as education in general, we need to restore parental control. As Dr. Walter Williams, a black economist at Temple University, writes, "To understand how Blacks can be given more effective choice in education requires that we recognize that just because education is publicly financed does not require that it be publicly produced."

Mr. Chairman, today 5.3 million out of 49.5 million elementary and secondary school students attend private or parochial schools. Parents who send their children to these schools pay double for education, once through their taxes and once in the form of tuition payments. And as the cost of education increases, fewer parents have the financial flexibility to shop outside the public schools for an education for their children. Their plight is complicated as inflation has eaten away at real personal income by artifically pushing people into higher and higher tax brackets. Unless some sort of financial relief is provided to parents, essentially all children but those of the very rich will be forced to find their education in the public school system. As more and more private schools are forced to close their doors, there will be less and less competition for the public schools, and the quality of public education will deteriorate even further.

The future of our country depends on the quality of education we provide today. This in turn, in my opinion, depends upon the existence of independent schools competing with public schools, and upon our making it possible for parents to choose the kind of education they want for their children. There is no reason why only the wealthy should have this choice.

I think tuition tax relief is an excellent way to provide the financial flexibility for parents to have alternatives. I am encouraged at the interest that has developed in this concept in the past few years, and I hope that the Committee reports some kind of tuition tax relief bill, covering elementary through college education, to the Senate for its consideration. I thank the Committee for the opportunity to testify on these bills.

EDUCATION AND THE "GHETTO" SCHOOL: I

PATTERNS OF BLACK EXCELLENCE

[By Thomas Sowell]

The history of the advancement of black Americans is almost a laboratory study of human achievement, for it extends back to slavery and was accomplished in the face of the strongest opposition confronting any American racial or ethnic group. Yet this mass advancement is little discussed and seldom researched, ex

cept for lionizing some individuals or compiling a record of political milestones. But the story of how mllions of people developed from the depths of slaveryacquired work skills, personal discipline, human ideals, and the whole complex of knowledge and values required for achievement in a modern society-is a largely untold story. A glance at the mass of human misery around the world shows that such development is by no means an automatic process. Yet how it was accomplished remains a matter of little concern-in contrast to the unflagging interest in social pathology.

One small, but important, part of the advancement of black Americans has been educational achievement. Here, as in other areas, the pathology is well known and extensively documented, while the healthy or outstanding functioning is almost totally unknown and unstudied. Yet educational excellence has been achieved by black Americans.1 Current speculative discussions of the "prerequisites" for the quality education of black children proceed as if educational excellence were only a remote possibility, to be reached by futuristic experimental methods-indeed, as if black children were a special breed who could be "reached" only on special wave lengths. When quality education for black youngsters is seen, instead, as something that has already been achieved that happened decades ago—then an attempt to understand the ingredients of such education can be made on the basis of that experience, rather than as a search for exotic revelations. The problem is to assess the nature of black excellence, its sources, and its wider implications for contemporary education and for social policy in general. There are a number of successful black schools in various cities that exemplify this educational excellence-for the purposes of this study, six high schools and two elementary schools were selected. The high schools were chosen from a list, compiled by the late Horace Mann Bond, which shows those black high schools whose alumni included the most doctorates during the period from 1957 through 1962. The two elementary schools wre added because of their outstanding performance by other indices. Some of the schools were once outstanding but are no longer, while others are currently academically successful. The schools were researched not only in terms of such "hard" data as test scores but also in terms of such intangibles as atmosphere and school/community relations, as these could be either observed or reconstructed from documents and from interviews with alumni, former teachers, and others. On the basis of this research, several questions were raised:

1. Is black "success" largely an individual phenomenon-simply "cream rising to the top"-or are the successes produced in such isolated concentrations as to suggest powerful forces at work in special social or institutional settings? Strong and clear patterns would indicate that there are things that can be done through social policy to create or enhance the prospect of individual development.

2. Does the environment for successful black education have to be a special “black” environment—either culturally, or in terms of the race of the principals and teachers, or in terms of the particular teaching methods used? Are such conventional indices as test scores more or less relevant to black students? For example, do these top black schools have average I.Q. scores higher than the average (around 85) for black youngsters in the country as a whole? Are their I.Q. scores as high as white schools of comparable performance by other criteria? 3. How much of the academic success of these schools can be explained as a product of the "middle-class" origins of its students? Have most of the children taught in these schools been the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers, or have they represented a cross section of the black community?

4. How important was the surrounding community as an influence on the quality of education in these schools? Did this influence come through involvement in school decision-making or through moral support in other ways?

5. How many of the assumed "prerequisites" of quality education actually existed in these outstanding schools? Did they have good facilities, an adequate budget, innovative programs, internal harmony, etc.?

6. What kind of individual was shaped by these institutions? More bluntly, was the black excellence of the past an accommodationist or "Uncle Tom" success molded by meek or cautious educators, or the product of bold individuals with high personal and racial pride?

Although these questions will be treated in the course of this article, the first question is perhaps the easiest to answer immediately. Black successes-whether measured by academic degrees or by career achievement-have not occurred 1 Thomas Sowell, "Black Excellence: The Case of Dunbar High School," The Public Interest, No. 35 (spring 1974), pp. 1-21.

randomly among the millions of black people scattered across the United States as might be expected if individual natural ability were the major factor. On the contrary, a very few institutions in a few urban centers with a special history have produced a disproportionate share of black pioneers and high achievers. In Horace Mann Bond's study, five percent of the high schools produced 21 percent of the later Ph. D.'s. Four of the six high schools studied hereMcDonough 35 High School, in New Orleans; Frederick Douglass High School, in Baltimore; Dunbar High School, in Washington, D.C.; and Booker T. Washington High School, in Atlanta-produced a long list of black breakthroughs, including the first black state superintendent of schools (Wilson Riles, from McDonough 35), the first black Supreme Court Justice (Thurgood Marshall, from Frederick Douglass), the first black general (Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., from Dunbar), the first black Cabinet member (Robert C. Weaver, from Dunbar), the discoverer of blood plasma (Charles R. Drew, from Dunbar), a Nobel Prize winner (Martin Luther King, Jr., from Booker T. Washington), and the only black Senator in this century (Edward W. Brooke, from Dunbar). From the same four schools, this list can be extended down to many regional and local "firsts," as well as such national "firsts" as the first black federal judge (William H. Hastie, from Dunbar), the first black professor at a major university (Allison Davis, from Dunbar, at the University of Chicago), and others. All of this from just four schools suggests some systematic social process at work, rather than anything as geographically random as outstanding individual ability-though these particular individuals had to be personally outstanding, besides being the products of special conditions.

The locations of these four schools are suggestive: Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New Orleans, and Atlanta. Baltimore, New Orleans, and Washington were the three largest communities of "free persons of color" in the Southern or border states in 1850.3 None of these schools goes back to 1850, and some of them are relatively new; but the communities in which they developed had long traditions among the old families, and historical head starts apparently have enduring consequences. New Orleans had the most prosperous and culturally advanced community of "free persons of color" and the largest number of high schools on H. M. Bond's list-all three of which are still outstanding high schools today.

ATLANTA BOOKER T. WASHINGTON HIGH SCHOOL

When Booker T. Washington High School was founded in 1924, it was the first public high school for Negroes in Atlanta and in the state of Georgia, and one of the first in the nation. However, the black community of Atlanta had had both primary and secondary education for its children long before that. In 1869, the American Missionary Society-which greatly influenced quality education for Southern blacks-established in Atlanta several "colleges" and "universities," whose initial enrollments were actually concentrated in elementary and secondary study, with only a few real college students. The first principal of Booker T. Washington High School was, in fact, a man who had been in charge of the high school program at Morris Brown College.

Professor Charles Lincoln Harper was principal of Booker T. Washington for its first 19 years, and a major influence on the shaping of the institution. By all accounts, he was a man of great courage, ability, and capacity for hard work. Far from being middle-class in origin, he came from a black farm family living on a white-owned plantation. As a child, he attended the only available school, which was 10 miles away and which held classes only three months of the year. Somehow Harper managed to educate himself and go on to college, and later do graduate work at the University of Chicago and Columbia. In addition to becoming a principal, Harper was a civil rights activist at a time when economic retaliation, lynchings, and Ku Klux Klan violence were an ever-present threat. The times were such that many blacks gave money to the NAACP anonymously through Harper, who bore the onus of converting it into checks to mail to the NAACP headquarters in New York. Thurgood Marshall said that Harper “stood 2 Horace Mann Bond, "The Negro Scholar and Professional in America," The American Negro Reference Book (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 562.

3 E. Franklin Frazier, "The Negro in the United States" (New York, Macmillan, 1971), P. 74. Henry Reid Hunter. "The Development of the Public Secondary Schools of Atlanta, Georgia: 1845-1937" (Office of the School System Historian, Atlanta Public Schools, 1974), pp. 49-52.