Abstract
IT has long been recognized in the United States that there are glaring inequalities between the educational opportunities available in different parts of the country and that the systems of financing the public schools do not take sufficient account of the distribution of financial resources. the resources of many States being insufficient for remedying these inequalities, Federal aid has been invoked again and again in the past five-and-twenty years to correct defects in particular fields—first vocational education and later rural education, teacher training, health work in schools, nursery schools and adult education— but hitherto there has been no comprehensive measure for making good the radical defects in the systems of financing the public schools. The President's Advisory Committee on Education, constituted in 1936, with special reference in the first instance to vocational education, has lately taken this matter in hand, and a pamphlet on “Principles and Methods of Distributing Federal Aid for Education” has been prepared by its research staff (Supt. of Documents, Washington, D.C. 20 cents). It starts with the assumption, based on a study of present costs, that 48 dollars per pupil per annum is not more than enough to pay for elementary and secondary education of tolerable quality in a community enjoying optimum conditions of cost and is insufficient where sparsity of the population or high cost of living enhance the expensiveness of education. It proceeds to elaborate ingenious plans for distributing Federal aid, amounting to upwards of 600 million dollars a year, designed to approximate to the ideal—to each community according to its educational needs, from each according to its means.
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Educational Finance in the U.S.A.. Nature 144, 321 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144321b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144321b0