mony from teachers, young people, et cetera. There has been a division of opinion among teachers as to whether they wanted black studies per se. Now, they want black studies taught but not a "over here" black studies. I have heard testimony on both sides. I went to those hearings. Black teachers as well as white did not say they want black studies as black studies. What is really wanted at this time is to teach black people, along with the great people in our time, about the great black people in history. This is the consensus that I heard in the last 3 or 4 weeks, teach about the great black people, not black studies per se. They just don't want a black study program overe here. I sat in those hearings for 5 days. They want it incorporated and integrated in the regular scheme of things.

No, we do not have a black studies program as yet, but we are in the process of black studies.

Mr. PUCINSKI. I was not suggesting that you should have a separate program. Surely that would only polarize the difference more, but it would seem to me that in your normal courses there ought to be integrated some historical material, some educational material.

Mrs. SMILEY. We do have some.

Mr. PUCINSKI. We recently ran a survey on student unrest in this country by this committee, and we polled the 29,000 high school principals in America. We got an exceptionally high response. More than 15,000 principals responded. It is rather significant that in most schools where there had been some form of student unrest at the high school level that disenchantment with curriculum was among the highest causes for this student unrest, which would indicate that young people are responsive and perhaps even responsible in that they want a meaningful curriculum. Invariably the young people feel that they are not getting any, and in this study we found that the lack of meaningful curriculum for minority groups, who may be particularly sensitive to this, was one of the serious contributors toward student unrest.

I sure don't want to tell you how to run your school. You have enough troubles of your own, you don't need my advice, but it would seem to me that there ought to be some better way.

We recently did a study in our committee on textbooks in this country, and we were really appalled to find the complete, total absence of any significant material about minority groups in America in textbooks that are being used in many of our high schools today. You might be able to understand that 30 years ago and as late as 20 years ago, but surely in the last 10 years any educator that does not realize the great social revolution this country is undergoing and fails to include this is really, I think, asking for some real problems in the school system.

You say you are trying to work out some programs?

Mrs. SMILEY. We are trying to work out definite programs, but, Mr. Chairman, several years ago I happened to be chairman of the Integration Committee. Prior to that I had been a member of the National Research Council for various cities, and we had been working on books. The hard thing is first to get the people, the publishers, to go along with us. They put books out and they don't just want to put books out for one section of the country. Three years ago right here in St. Louis we were pushed to get black textbooks.

Mr. PUCINSKI. I can really appreciate that as we travel around the country. I am beginning to understand more and more why there is great disenchantment by parents and to some extent by students in our educational system. We seem to be able to justify, alibi, and excuse things that should have been done years ago. Now here it is in 1970. We have been at this now for a good 10 years since the Brown decision of the Supreme Court in 1954, which is really 16 years. For us to be debating today in 1970, 16 years later, the fact that there aren't adequate learning materials, there aren't adequate textbooks, there aren't adequate lecture materials on as a sensitive subject as American heterogeneous makeup to me seems totally and completely indefensible.

Now, I know I hear educators like yourself-I am not trying to be unpleasant because you are only one member and I don't want you to feel that we are critical of you personally, but it seems to me that school boards across the country have not been sensitive to the education needs of the young people when in 1970 we still have book publishers giving us these alibis. I think school boards ought to just say, "Well, this is the material we want and if you can't produce it, forget it. We will find somebody else that will."

What they have is huge sums of money invested in archaic books, large stockpiles of archaic books, and they don't really want to come to touch with reality, and so they give nice people on the school boards all these phony excuses when the fact of the matter is they have been unresponsive to some extent. Some of the material that I have seen ostensibly designed to overcome the imbalance of the modern textbook is frankly so immature and to a great extent repeats, in a more modern way, the old Uncle Tom theory. It is totally unacceptable and this is what we found in the just completed hearings on the ethnic study centers.

Congressman Clay is cosponsoring the legislation, I am happy to say, to see whether or not we can start producing some input at the university level on meaningful textbook materials, film slides, film clips, and the various other things that will finally help Americans

understand each other a little better.

Mr. CLAY. I might say, Mr. Chairman, that Mrs. Smiley is one of the chairmen on the board that has been advocating this kind of change. If we had a couple more like her I am sure we would obtain this proposal that you are speaking of.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Like I said, I made it very clear that we were not trying to criticize Mrs. Smiley, but she is here this morning and I hope she will convey to her fellow members on the board that she has picked up some strong allies in her crusade to make the curriculum more meaningful.

Mr. CLAY. Yesterday, Mrs. Smiley, Mrs. Spotts recommended in her testimony that members elected to the board of education should be elected from districts, rather than citywide, so as to guarantee representation at the policymaking level from all areas in the city. I would like to know if you agree with that?

Mrs. SMILEY. Mr. Clay, now this is a State law that they run it citywide and I could not agree with it more.

Mr. CLAY. Of course, the law can be changed. I just want to know your personal feeling.

Mrs. SMILEY. I think the more people we have representing-like the board of aldermen, they represent people from their districts so I can't say I would be against it.

Mr. PUCINSKI. I have a sneaking suspicion that Mrs. Smiley would win overwhelmingly whether she ran a citywide basis or on a district level.

Thank you for being here, Mrs. Smiley.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Our next witness is Betty Finneran who is a teacher at Roosevelt High School and is very active in the St. Louis Teachers Union, Local 420. She is now secretary of the local union and area vice president for the national organization and also of the American Federation of Teachers.

Mrs. Finneran, we have read your statement and at this point it will be incorporated into the record in its entirety.

It will not be necessary for you to read your statement and, if it is all right with you, we will go directly into questioning as there are a lot of questions I have for you.

Mrs. FINNERAN. Fine.

STATEMENT OF BETTY FINNERAN, TEACHER

Mr. PUCINSKI. You say in your third paragraph that you have high hopes for Federal aid to education. You want Federal money to be used wisely and well for the benefit of the children, community, and the teachers. Then you say in your statement that you have doubts that it has been so used. I wonder if you would like to elaborate on that.

Mrs. FINNERAN. Well, our chief concern as representatives of the teachers, and as people who are knowledgeable about education, is that we have used the funds primarily for remedial work. We think that you need to get really to the root causes of what is wrong with education and to try to have some lasting changes, to stop experimenting and trying things out and spending massive sums of money and having them go down the drain.

The one thing that teachers want, and I think this is true of all teachers all over the country, is lower class sizes. This is the important thing. Much of the Federal money was spent here on building rooms of 20, making the class sizes very large in St. Louis.

Mr. PUCINSKI. The class size can be measured in many ways. Go ahead.

Mrs. FINNERAN. We had so many complaints this fall in certain areas of the North side about the class size that we asked some of our teachers to fill out a form indicating the actual size of their classes. Now, I have one right in front of me from Irving School. There are rooms of 43, 45, 40, 41, 44, 40, and 42. Anybody that knows anything about education knows you cannot teach children when you have such large classes.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Are these inner-city schools?

Mrs. FINNERAN. Yes, sir.

Mr. PUCINSKI. These are title I schools?

Mrs. FINNERAN. I presume they would be title I schools. I do not have that information so I do not know which ones are title I and which ones are not.

Mr. PUCINSKI. I would think you are making a good case that there are classrooms in this city with 42 and 45 children. This is certainly above tolerable limits of what a teacher can handle.

Mrs. FINNERAN. May I say another thing about class size? I have statistics from our national office. There are 116,775 students in St. Louis and we have, according to these figures, 4,010 teachers. In New Orleans there are 111,000 students and they have 4,600 teachers. In Atlanta there are 109,000 students and they have 4,452 teachers. You can make comparisons all along the line and see that we do not have enough teachers in relations to our school population.

You were talking about busing students. We have a beautiful school that is not too far from Kings Highway and Columbia. I cannot give you the exact address, but it is known as the Shaw School. It has a beautiful playground. It is used largely for office space. We have never been able to reconcile that with conditions on our north side. Mr. PUCINSKI. What are they using their title I money for in the city? You talked about the remedial education. What specific kinds of programs are you objecting to?

Mrs. FINNERAN. Well, what we really want and what we really asked the board of education to start was a program of quality education. This is the kind of arangement where you have 60 students grouped together and at no time do you have more than 15 per teacher. In that way you really give the students quality education. In addition you have the kind of supportive staff that would help train these children; the guidance counselors, psychologists, all the different aids that would help get them started in the right way. We particularly recommended this be started in the primary grades. In fact, we would like to have it started in the preschool. I think you know that it has been started in the preschools in certain areas. There are at least four schools going in Detroit, and they are working with preschool community schools so that it will be a continuous program. We believe that if you give quality education in the beginning you do not need so much remedial education. The way we are going we are going to have massive remedial programs forever.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Are you aware, though, specifically of what sort of programs they have in this city in so-called remedial education, title I financed programs? I am trying to find out what it is that they are doing here that you disapprove of other than the large classrooms. Now, if they have classrooms of 42 and 45 children, I presume that title I money is being used for something in that classroom. Do you know?

Mrs. FINNERAN. I do not know. I know that they have used money for libraries and so forth.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Do they use the teacher aides?

Mrs. FINNERAN. No. We have teacher aides in most of the north side schools, but on a limited basis. All title I schools have some teacher aides, but we do not have the massive use of teacher aides that they have in other large cities. That is one of the things that we are remiss in here.

Mr. PUCINSKI. When you take a classroom of 42, 30, or 32 children and you have one teacher, you have a very serious situation, but if you take that same classroom and you have a good teacher with a supportive staff of at least one or more teacher aides, the fact that there

are 32 children in the classroom may not be quite as objectionable because each of them still has a good deal more time to deal individually with the youngsters while their teacher aides are bringing in the supportive activities. That is what I am trying to find out here.

Mrs. FINNERAN. No, we do not have that. We do not have that kind of a program in the schools. The teachers have not been clearly advised how aides ought to be used, and they have not been used in a way that would be helpful to the total school program.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Now, you also criticized the fact that there are no black studies in the curriculum, and you heard the information given by Mrs. Smiley. Would you care to elaborate on your statement that while two-thirds of the youngsters in the school system are black, we have not responded to their needs by making black studies an integral part of the curriculum? How do you think this should be done more effectively than as suggested by the school board member that just testified?

Mrs. FINNERAN. I think they should start doing something. They have not done much of anything. Let me tell you a little bit about the history of this.

About 3 years ago I was cochairman of a union conference which we entitled "Racism and Education." The idea of the conference was to help bring to the community this problem. I personally called people in the curriculum department who have control over the cirriculum and we sent invitations. I personally called them, too, because I thought I might get them to come by that kind of an invitation, but I was refused. We had our conference. We had a committee set up afterward which was mainly chaired by community people because we wanted it to be a community project. We had petitions signed. Some of us stood out on the street corners getting the petitions signed so we could correct this problem. We even had difficulty presenting them to the board of education. Finally the president stepped away from the meeting and received the petitions. A committee was set up to study the problem. Hearings are still going on, I think, on the feasibility of a black studies program.

Through the department head of my school I have learned that it is common knowledge now that they will not be able to start anything in September.

I think you know the overall picture in Detroit, New York, and other large cities where they have already prepared curriculum which is in operation. This is a real need here.

Of course, we are particularly cognizant of it right now because of an auditorium session that was held by some black students in this community. Three teachers were fired and the teachers union is now in a position of defending those teachers. The charge is that they encouraged students to put on programs that caused disruption in the schools, but these programs were programs that were relevant to the students and to the things that they want to study. The students themselves even said that these are the teachers who took the greatest interest in them.

I think I am correct in saying that in St. Louis we have a white system on the south side and we have a black system on the north side. Some of us on the south side have really been making an effort, though, to instruct our students in some of the problems with regard to racism.