The creation of NASA left education as the last remaining legislative issue stemming from the Sputnik crisis. In his special message to Congress on January 28, 1958, President Eisenhower had outlined a very limited program of federal aid to education. The chief features were ten thousand scholarships a year over a four-year period to encourage gifted high school graduates to attend college, graduate fellowships in science, engineering, and foreign language to develop more teachers in those fields, and matching grants to the states to improve the quality of math and science teaching. When critics pointed out how modest these recommendations were in view of the crisis in education, the president made clear his belief that the primary reponsibility lay with local and state officials, not the federal government. If Washington took over the schools, he responded, then the nation would “have lost a very great and vital feature of our whole free system.”1
The Democrats, who controlled both the House and Senate, responded with bills calling for much larger numbers and heavier federal expenditures than Ike thought prudent. Sponsored by Senator Lister Hill and Representative Carl Elliott, both of Alabama, the opposition measure called for forty thousand college scholarships annually for six years, along with an additional fund to provide loans up to $1,000 a year to college students. At $1,000 a year, the 240,000 scholarships alone would cost more than the $1 billion ceiling the president had placed on the HEW proposal. Moreover, the Democratic plan went beyond the simple appeal to national defense to state the goal of assuring “the intellectual preeminence of the United States, especially in science and technology.” Accordingly, it based scholarships on merit rather than need, in the belief that the nation had to do all it could to advance the education of its most talented youth.2
Eisenhower was in no mood to compromise on either the number of scholarships or the nature of the program. As he saw it, the only reason for the federal government to pay college costs was “to help the good student who otherwise wouldn’t get an education.” He wanted a program based solely on need and clearly temporary. The Democratic plan appeared to him to be the beginning of a permanent federal commitment to financing education, rather than a measure designed to meet a crisis situation. HEW Secretary Marion Folsom argued that Hill and Elliott were simply engaging in legislative bargaining, asking for a lot more in the beginning than they expected to get. The president stressed to Folsom, who would soon leave the cabinet due to ill health, that “you ought not indicate any readiness to compromise.”
Eisenhower was equally adamant on the loan issue. When Folsom said this approach had considerable support in Congress, Ike expressed his own doubts, citing the bad experience he had had with loans to medical students at Columbia University. When James Killian offered contrary evidence from his MIT presidency, Eisenhower agreed to withhold judgment on this issue. He made it clear, however, that whatever the final shape of the program, he would insist that students receiving federal help “would have to maintain high quality work” or lose their funding.3
By June the president was determined to stand firm behind his education proposals. After a conference with Folsom, Killian, and key White House aides, he insisted that administration spokesmen oppose the loan proposal in the Democratic bill, block any effort to increase the number of scholarships beyond ten thousand a year, and reject any provision that would remove the means test for a scholarship. Eisenhower felt most strongly about the last point, telling the group that “the real purpose behind legislation such as this is preventing the loss of a student with real ability, one who would not get an education without this help.”
The president was skeptical about the whole idea of federal aid to education. Under the pressure from Congress and public opinion in the wake of Sputnik, he was willing to accept a modest program of federal support, but only if it were temporary and limited in both size and cost. He really believed that education was primarily a local responsibility. When he met with a group from Huron, Ohio, who had developed a community program relying on their own resources, he was ecstatic. The Huron experience, he told former Harvard President James Conant, was “an excellent example of what a community can do itself, on its own initiative.” “And the crowning achievement,” he continued, “was when the salary of the science teacher was raised to equal that of the football coach.”4
The legislative impasse between Congress and the president coincided with a drop in public interest in the education crisis. The launching of Explorer II on January 31 reassured those who had been worried about the United States falling behind the Soviet Union in science and technology. Life magazine punctured this mood of complacency and reawakened concern over the state of American education with a five-part series in March and April of 1958.5
The most influential weekly magazine in the country, Life entitled its picture essays and accompanying editorials “The Crisis in Education.” The editors made no effort to hide their concern. “The schools are in terrible shape,” they claimed. “What has long been an ignored national problem, Sputnik has made a recognized crisis.” The pictures and the accompanying text hit at specifics—overcrowded schools, underpaid teachers, easy courses. Pointing to the lack of agreement on a national curriculum, Life commented, “Most appalling, the standards of education are shockingly low.”
Three themes ran through the installments: a comparison with Soviet education, the neglect of the gifted, and the need for greater stress on science and technology. Soviet high school students received far better training in math and science than did American youth and thus were two years further along in their studies by the time they entered college. At the same time, American schools neglected the academically gifted, thus allowing “the geniuses of the next decades” to “slip back into mediocrity.” Worst of all was the failure to prepare American students for “the technicalities of the Space Age.” “Space ships and intercontinental missiles were not invented by self-educated men in home workshops,” wrote novelist Sloan Wilson in one of the editorials. “They are developed by teams of highly trained scientists, most of whom begin (and get much of) their education in the public schools.”
The editors of Life made it clear who was to blame—the “educationalists” who placed life adjustment ahead of learning. The followers of John Dewey had created schools with too many electives and too many extracurricular activities. Instead of “coddling and entertaining the mediocre,” it was time to “recapture an honest respect for learning and for learned people.” They even found a few bright spots in this generally dim picture, praising innovations in the teaching of math and science that stressed basic principles rather than rote memorization. The editors spoke highly of James Conant’s study of American high schools and the new physics course pioneered at MIT with the help of the National Science Foundation. But truly effective educational reform could only come, they concluded, at the grass roots, when concerned citizens became involved in the revitalization of the nation’s schools.6
The president was in full agreement with Life’s approach. In a letter to Time-Life executive and sometime White House speechwriter Emmet Hughes, Eisenhower expressed his thanks by saying, “Educators, parents and students alike must be continuously stirred up by the defects in our educational system.” Convinced that federal funding alone was not the answer, Ike emphasized the need for “a return to fundamentals in both high schools and indeed in the higher grades of the elementary schools.” “We should stress English, history, mathematics, the simple rudiments of one or more of the sciences, and at least one language,” he concluded. In what she described in her diary as this “wonderful letter,” Ann Whitman noted Ike’s belief that Life had captured the essence of the educational crisis by its insistence that the nation “get away from the John Dewey frills.”7
The Life series touched off a lively debate over American education in the spring of 1958. Critics of the educational system such as Arthur Bestor and Hyman Rickover repeated their pleas for more emphasis on the basics before national audiences. Attacking progressive education, Rickover urged that schools “concentrate on what is properly their function—the education of young minds.” Writer John Keats echoed the same themes in calling for the creation of “citizens’ grand juries” to insist on curriculum reform at the local level. Even professional educators joined in the chorus. A Gallup poll showed that 90 percent of the nation’s principals, compared with only 51 percent of the parents, felt that their schools were not demanding enough from students, and more than half were already taking steps to strengthen the curriculum.8
The comparison of Russian and American schools continued to attract great attention. Educators who returned from tours of the Soviet Union gave glowing accounts of the Russian schools. Alvin C. Eurich called Soviet education “exceedingly impressive” and noted that the system turned out more than twice as many scientists and engineers as did American schools. The U.S. Commissioner of Education, Lawrence G. Derthwick, after a government tour of Soviet schools, lectured a national radio audience about the amazing degree of Russian commitment to education “as a means of national advancement.” Such statements alarmed humanists like Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro, who warned against “the Russian Revolution in American education.” Pleading the case for resisting a misplaced emphasis on science and mathematics, Shapiro feared that Sputnik would lead to “the brutalization of our people by science hysteria, by politics, and by promises of technological rewards.”9
A special report on education by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund tried to strike a more balanced note. It was issued in late June by a panel on which James Gardner of the Carnegie Corporation had replaced James Killian as Chairman. The fundamental theme was the pursuit of excellence in all fields of knowledge and human endeavor. While calling for the training of more scientists and engineers and for special programs for the gifted, the Rockefeller report stressed the need for diversity in both the curriculum and in society as a whole. “Our conception of excellence,” the report stressed, “must embrace many kinds of achievement at many levels.” The panel called for a doubling of spending on public education, with the federal government to play a new but limited role in providing the additional resources. The real challenge, it concluded, was to make “intellectual excellence” the overriding goal of the American educational system.10
James Killian agreed with the broad conclusions of the Rockefeller report and tried to have the President’s Science Advisory Committee play a constructive role in the debate over the nation’s education policy. In March 1958 he created a PSAC education panel headed by Lee DuBridge, president of Cal Tech. Killian charged this body with two tasks: advising PSAC on the current education legislation before Congress, and drafting a report on the future of American education. The focus of this document, Killian suggested, should be on the “need to create higher national standards and greater quality in education.”
Killian felt it was vital to use the Sputnik crisis to work for broad reform of American schools rather than simply improve education in science and technology. When an engineering dean wrote to request federal aid to produce more engineers as well as scientists, the president’s science adviser opposed such a piecemeal approach. “Science and technology will be strengthed if our overall education is strengthened,” he replied, “but I also feel that a sustained effort to modernize science and engineering education can serve to lift the level of all education, as indeed it must.” He stressed the same point in a speech in March, saying, “If we are to have better science education, we must have better overall education.”11
The members of the PSAC education panel agreed. In their discussions they spoke of the need to use the current sense of crisis to achieve long-overdue reforms in American education as a whole. They wanted science to “lead the way in strengthening other parts of the curriculum,” and they especially saw a need to increase scientific literacy so that the American people would be better able to deal with “the great issues of our time arising out of science.” The key problem, they agreed, was how to identify and assist the intellectually gifted without neglecting the needs of all students. The education panel opposed separate schools for those with “high talent” but favored special courses and programs for such individuals. The most important point, they stressed, was that “the government be prepared to assure the education of the most talented students.”
One point that troubled Killian was the panel’s insistence that it should set national standards to help schools across the country improve the quality of their curricula. While Killian agreed this was an important concern, he soon realized that it would bring PSAC into conflict with local school officials who resented the idea of Washington imposing criteria on their districts. The administration draft of education legislation had included a section on national standards for secondary and primary education, but Killian decided to drop this feature in June when congressional leaders persuaded him that there was “little public expression of interest in the question of standards.”12
Realizing the need for legislative compromise, Killian decided to have the education panel concentrate on developing a “white paper” that would deal with such topics as identifying and supporting “intellectual giftedness” and setting forth national standards for the schools to adopt. The white paper would take months to complete (the report did not finally appear until the spring of 1959) and thus would keep the PSAC panel occupied while the administration made the best possible bargain with Congress on school legislation. This approach avoided the dilemma noted by one member of the education panel—how to write a report “which is critical, but which enlists the support of the public school people.”13
The logjam in Congress over education legislation began to break up in early July. Chairman Carl Elliott of the House Education and Labor Committee abandoned the original Hill-Elliott measure and worked closely with HEW in fashioning a bill designed to meet Eisenhower’s limited objectives. On July 2 the House committee reported out the amended bill. In addition to relatively noncontroversial features including graduate fellowships and aid to local schools for the teaching of science and math, the measure proposed up to twenty-three thousand college scholarships a year for four years, along with an additional loan fund.
At his press conference that day, Eisenhower avoided any direct comment on the terms of the legislation. He made it clear, however, that he had “very definite ideas” about school reform and that the administration’s proposals were the result of long consultations “with every educational authority we could think of.” He admitted that years of neglect had created a need for governmental action, but he did not favor “any more federal interference or control or participation than is necessary,” reiterating his fundamental belief that “the educational process should be carried on in the locality.”14
At a meeting later on July 2 with a group of congressmen from the House committee, the president spelled out his reservations. He was willing to accept the loan fund he had opposed earlier, but only if the number of scholarships were reduced and the loans required “high scholastic competence and good standing.” He was still adamant that the scholarship program be based on the need of the applicants, not on the principle of identifying and rewarding the most promising high school graduates. “The President,” the notes of this meeting recorded, “felt Federal money should not be paid to a student who did not actually need it.”
Representative Stuyvesant Wainwright, a New York Republican who had opposed federal aid to education in the past, wrote to Eisenhower asking him to endorse the House bill. He pointed out that the measure reflected the president’s preference for “state and local participation and administration of the proposed programs” and said the loan provision “conforms to your philosophy of ‘God helps those who help themselves.’” Eisenhower replied in a public letter giving qualified support for limited federal action “to help meet emergency needs in American education” but also stressing his belief that the number of scholarships should be reduced from twenty-three thousand to ten thousand a year and be restricted to qualified students who “need financial help in order to get a college education.”15
In meetings with Republican congressional leaders later in July, Eisenhower revealed his willingness to challenge more conservative members of his own party who opposed all federal aid to education. When Representatives Charles Halleck of Indiana and Ralph W. Gwinn of New York voiced their objections to using federal money to fund college scholarships, the president countered that there was a genuine national emergency that called for the training of more scientists and engineers. Killian came to his support, citing estimates that as many as one hundred thousand of the top 25 percent of high school graduates did not go on to college. Finances held many back, and thus, he argued, it was vital to offer federal aid to help these bright students fulfill their potential. Eisenhower added that he regretted we had to spend so much on “negative” things like B-52s; here was a chance to support something much more “constructive.”
By the end of July, it was clear that the president had full control over the fate of education legislation. Given the strong opposition of many conservatives in both political parties, any chance to enact federal aid depended on his strong support. And Eisenhower made it abundantly clear that he would insist on limiting the number of scholarships to ten thousand annually over a four-year period. In a note to the budget director on July 22, 1958, a White House assistant summed up the administration’s position: “The President stressed the emergency nature of the recommendation he made to meet a national need with a program specifically limited as to duration.”16
With Congress due to adjourn by late August, time became a major factor in the final deliberations over education legislation. The Senate waited for the House, where the outcome was much less certain, to act first. On August 4, 1958, the House committee voted out a bill that called for twenty-three thousand scholarships a year based on merit rather than need. Knowing of the president’s firm views, a bipartisan group of congressmen met later that day to inform the White House that, when the bill went to conference committee, they would cut the number of scholarships to ten thousand, all to be awarded on the basis of financial need. Eisenhower replied with a public statement simply reiterating his insistence on a limited number of scholarships and the assurance that “no tax dollars are paid to any scholarship winner who does not need those dollars to finance his college education.”
While many observers foresaw a new deadlock in Congress, the legislative struggle turned out differently than anyone would have predicted. In the House, Representative Walter Judd, a Minnesota Republican, succeeded in deleting the provision for twenty-three thousand scholarships a year and transferring the amount allocated, approximately $300 million, to a revolving loan fund. The Senate still held out for scholarships but reduced the amount from the original $1,000 a year to just $250 while accepting Judd’s proposal for most of the college assistance to be in the form of loans. When the measure went to the conference committee, a realization that conservatives in the House would block any measure involving federally funded scholarships allowed Judd’s amendment to prevail. The conferees removed the scholarship provision and set up a $295 million loan fund for individual loans to be granted primarily on the basis of the student’s financial need.17
As enacted by Congress later in August, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) authorized the expenditure of slightly less than $1 billion over a four-year period. There were three main provisions. The first, on which nearly all the debate had centered, established a $295 million loan fund. Students could borrow $1,000 a year for five years, but only if they could show financial need. Repayment was due within eleven years after graduation. The measure called for special consideration for students planning to teach or specialize in science, math, or foreign languages; those who became teachers would be forgiven half of their total loan. A second part of the NDEA provided $280 million in federal matching funds for the purchase of equipment for the teaching of science, math, and foreign languages in both public and private schools. The third major section of the law authorized the spending of $59.4 million for fifty-five hundred graduate fellowships in areas relating to the national defense, including science, engineering, and foreign area study. In addition to fellowships ranging from $2,000 to $2,400 a year, this provision also granted universities $2,500 a year per student to help offset the high cost of expanding graduate programs in these areas. Finally, the NDEA also provided relatively small sums for supporting guidance and counseling programs in the schools, for vocational education, for research in educational radio and television, and for foreign language institutes at selected universities.18
In signing this legislation on September 2, 1958, the president was aware that his views had prevailed. Calling NDEA “a sound and constructive piece of legislation,” he emphasized that it was “an emergency undertaking to be terminated after four years.” He went on to remind the American people that the real challenge in American education was on the local level, and he called on everyone to take up that task.
Eisenhower had succeeded in blocking the attempt to set up a large-scale college scholarship program that could mark the beginning of a permanent federal role in higher education. Although he had been willing to accept ten thousand scholarships for a four-year period, he was happy with the Judd amendment and the resulting loan fund with its relatively short duration and its requirement that all loans be granted on the basis of financial need.19
Others regretted the outcome. The editors of Life, who had crusaded so fervently for educational reform, called NDEA “a compromise bill, good as far as it went.” The Nation was more critical, terming the measure “just good enough to be impossible to veto and just penurious and misguided enough to make an angel curse.” The editors regretted the miserly expenditures involved and the loss of the scholarship provisions; loans seemed to them an accountant’s approach to education. The only solace to the Nation was that “the bill does at last crack the ice of resistance to federal aid to education,” but it warned that “the crack is so tiny it must be widened very soon if it is not to freeze solid again.”
Senator Lister Hill was one of many who felt that the loss of scholarships was tragic. It meant, he argued, “the defeat of the attempt to give national recognition to intellectual achievement.” The editors of Science felt even more strongly on this point. The final version had dropped the clause in the original Hill-Elliott bill setting forth the goal of assuring “the intellecual preeminence of the United States, especially in science and technology.” By basing all loans on need rather than merit, and even dropping a proposal to award congressional citations to the top 5 percent of each high school class, NDEA made no effort to advance “intellectual preeminence” or reward “outstanding scholastic achievement.” Instead of mandating the government to seek out actively those who displayed “superior intellectual achievement,” the editors lamented, the law simply “makes available the machinery and the funds for those students who are qualified and who do need financial aid.”20
The passage of NDEA reflects the narrowness of Eisenhower’s view of the Sputnik crisis. Unlike his critics, he believed that there was no great national emergency requiring fundamental changes. Instead he intended to make only limited responses that would not further add to what he perceived as the true national problem, heavy government spending and the danger of a large deficit. Passage of the education legislation added less than $200 million to the 1959 budget—-$66.2 million to the National Science Foundation for graduate fellowships and language institutes and $116.5 to HEW for the loan fund and matching grants to local school districts. Compared to the several billion added to the $40-billion-plus defense budget, the spending on education was very slight. Yet, faced with a growing deficit caused by the recession-induced decline in revenues, Eisenhower insisted on this cost-saving approach.21
When the new school year began in the fall of 1958, the modest nature of Eisenhower’s educational program became apparent. Enrollments, which had been rising steadily since 1954, went up again sharply at all levels. There were now 42.9 million students in class, an increase of 25 percent over the last five years. Yet college science courses were only up slightly, and engineering enrollment actually declined. The most encouraging news came from the local schools themselves. In Miami high school students had to take an extra year of English and math; in Texas a new requirement added a year of world history to the high school curriculum, along with a second year of laboratory science. From across the country came reports of a new emphasis on science and math in the elementary grades, more homework being assigned, and the adoption of new courses for students “with high intellectual potential.”
Sputnik, rather than Eisenhower, had led to a long-overdue shakeup of American education. Those who had been criticizing American schools throughout the 1950s now suddenly were not only being heard but heeded. In a sense, the president’s faith in local action in education was being fulfilled as school districts sought to strengthen their courses as part of a response to a national crisis. But Eisenhower’s insistence on limiting federal action and balancing the budget had prevented him from playing a leading role in educational reform. The changes took place in spite of, rather than as a result of, White House initiatives. Yet even with his modest approach, Eisenhower was beginning a process of federal involvement that set important precedents for the much more extensive educational programs that Congress would enact in the 1960s.22