The Education Crisis In The Nation's Large Cities

Hansen, Carl F.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/1521 Copy

Description

Title

The Education Crisis In The Nation's Large Cities

Author(s)

Hansen, Carl F.

Issue Date

1965

Keyword(s)

Libraries and metropolitan areas

Abstract

More than 25 percent of the nation's children are educated in the school systems of 52 cities of 300,000 or greater population. An analysis of the special educational problems in the large cities is the purpose of this paper. Inadequacy of Fiscal Support. In these cities, the increasing number of children to be educated is met by a steadily diminishing flow of local tax money. Unlike its suburban counterpart, the city tax dollar is heavily allocated to services supporting human beings in trouble. Health, welfare, and protection services, particularly police, take great slices of the tax dollar pie, reducing still further the amount of money available to build and staff schools, to supply the basic teaching tools, such as books, visual and auditory learning aids, equipment, and to set up the ancillary services desperately needed when children come from deprived homes. The lack of space for school programs, for instance, puts many children on part-time schedules. From 1948 in the nation's capital nearly 40,000 children attended schools on half-day schedules and during the same period thousands of children were turned away from public school kindergartens for the lack of room. Moreover, every available square foot of space is used for class purposes: auditoriums, libraries, even store rooms and shabby basement rooms. The new programs now to be available under Federal financing are not going to help much unless school construction is accelerated. Library books, for example, bought with Title II money under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act will not be used well when there is no school library to put them in.

Publisher

Graduate School of Library Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Series/Report Name or Number

Allerton Park Institute (12th : 1965)

ISSN

0536-4604

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1521

Copyright and License Information

Copyright owned by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1965.

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