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Show FEDERAL AID ? THERE'S AN EASIER WAY By Dr. Walton Manning (In the Salt Lake Tribune) Anyone who has studied the tax structure of this nation and the needs of the public school system knows that we must find some way to get more aid to the schools. There are many reasons why schools need aid; mounting enrollments, en-rollments, increased costs for enrollments are more accurate, ac-curate, the estimates of teachers teach-ers needed are filled with as much illogical and incomplete evidence as the estimates of classroom shortages. Thus one school district .with teachers they like and trust, may report that they have no shortage but some other agency says they need all new teachers 1 because none of their teachers have the exact courses required for certifications. j I And some school districts may say they need all new classrooms class-rooms but some other district, with the same kind of building, build-ing, claims they need none. Add this to the fact that only a small percentage of districts ' really report what they need I and each reports as it views the situation and you see that what we said is true: No one knows what we nei ! 1 As to the need of various States it is time to take a new look and to consider effort. I recently sent letters to similar cities in 40 states asking what my total tax bill would be on a house worth $20,000 filled with, average furniture, and on an automobile of a certain popular pop-ular makje. Replies from 21 states indicated that my tax bill for this would vary from $132 to $972 and five of' the seven states where my tax bill would be below $300 are states which are considered to need federal aid most desperately. - Calm analysis of fact shows that the present evidence with respect to federal aid to educa-1 educa-1 tion lends itself to just one conclusion: We need to 'find a way to stoo the growth of federal fed-eral spending for it is this spending which creates the real shortage of. tax money for schools. everything schools use, and need 'for better salaries are but ' a few of the most pressing reasons. Many local taxing units have extracted from taxpayers as much as anyone ought reasonably reason-ably to expect. The next move must be federal, feder-al, but it is wasteful and illogical illog-ical to have the federal government govern-ment give back what it collects, what we need is for the federal feder-al government to allow states to keep part of the money the government now takes from these states. . To put it very simply: the greatest crisis in education and the biggest single argument for federal aid is the need for money, but this same federal government is the biggest cause of this crisis, for it takes money which is needed locally. The answer is simple: either cut down what the federal government gov-ernment takes in taxes or allow each state, based on need ..and effort, to keep a varying .percentage .per-centage of the 'federal taxes collected in that state. There are many arguments being used for a kind of federal fed-eral aid which would give back to the states certain sums of money in the form of grants, etc. This is a far different thing from merely allowing the states to keep as theirs some of the money collected in their own state. We hear people say there would be no federal control but any sensible person knows better, bet-ter, for who would favor any kind of aid without setting up certain safeguards? Some people peo-ple who support direct federal aid hope the schools can be placed in a great bureaucracy so tremendous in scope and deptn that national schools, like national na-tional defense, can avoid the scrutiny of the public and ignore ig-nore the desires of Congress and the people merely by virtue cf size and complexity. If we adopt federal aid to education, ed-ucation, we run the risk of creating creat-ing a great bureaucratic structure struc-ture to govern schools in which local control and responsibility would disappear. - A uniform national plan for school aid has been recommended, recommend-ed, but there are no uniform national facts to support the plan. One of the big arguments used is the need for more classrooms, class-rooms, but no one knows and few agree as to the number of classrooms we really need. The plain truth is that we have no accurate way to gain such information and current efforts to do this show that there is no common standard in use to determine the real or actual need. WhiU MiimatM on futur |