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The purposely vague wording of the title calls for "supplementary centers and services," and the bill carries only three broad hints as to what these would do: provide new communitywide services to schoolchildren, raise the quality of such existing services, and set up model programs. Under Keppel's theory that "education is too important to be left solely to the educators," the program accents community participation.
The most obvious possible services are bookmobiles and portable science laboratories to reach isolated students, special classes for the gifted or the handicapped. Yet it will probably take more than the obvious to meet the competition, and such an imaginative project as New York's Harkness Center, operated by 18 school districts near Buffalo seems a likely candidate. The center develops courses, trains teachers, keeps a library of 2,400 films, has a computer that does payrolls and report cards for all the member schools. St. Paul hopes to qualify with its "Operation Fresh Start," which tries to lure high school dropouts back for vocational training.
Rockland Community College in New York plans a cultural center with library, museum, planetarium and closed-circuit educational television for the benefit of neighboring towns. Cleveland's Superintendent Paul W. Briggs has plans for a center offering "almost limitless innovation, looking like no school building ever constructed before—where most talented elementary-school violinists might work in small groups with top players of the Cleveland Orchestra, where top industrial researchers could work in labs with talented children."
Fading Fears
TITLE IV provides $100 million for research contracts that Keppel can sign with any "university, college or other appropriate public or nonprofit private agency." Reason behind this provision: of the $34 billion now spent on public education, less than one-fifth of 1% is going into basic research to find new techniques and new teaching concepts.
TITLE V is designed to cope with the danger that in many cases the new bill might fall short for lack of direction at the state level. Many of the state departments of education are woefully understaffed, underpaid and incompetent. Since the workload will increase sharply under the bill, $25 million will go to states to strengthen such state agencies.
The act seeks to evoke, rather than force, improvement in local districts and the states. This responsibility should stimulate rather than stifle them. There will be fiscal safeguards against flagrant mishandling of money, but the only hint that Washington's hand could become heavy lies in a requirement that Title I projects be reviewed annually to see whether the money is having a beneficial effect. This could lead to some type of national testing so that progress can be evaluated, a specter that always frightens school superintendents. Yet one eventual result of the act may well be some form of national minimum educational standards.