STATEMENT OF A. D. AYRAULT, HEADMASTER, LAKESIDE SCHOOL, SEATTLE, WASH.

Mr. AYRAULT. Mr. Chairman, as Mr. Potter has suggested the central question for today's hearing is the simple one: Is the private school in the public interest?

I would like to approach that question obliquely this morning, speaking first to some more fundamental concerns.

In even the brief history of this country, our system of elementary and secondary education is really a very new experiment, and there is real reason to ask if we know what we are doing, where we are going, and to ask whether our system and our legislation reflects some clear concept of that or, in fact, do we, as we survey the scene, see instead of a patchwork of fairly immediate and expedient responses to crisis? I would like to suggest that there are three urgent societal concerns that should be in the background of our educational system.

The first is that today, all people-rich and poor alike—seem to experience a diminishing range of power and choice and control over their own lives. Even where facts really don't warrant this feeling the significant thing is that people experience the feeling of a loss of control, and this produces a general and underlying psychological malaise.

A second urgent concern would be the very special deprivations of the poor, and certain minorities, which might be considered just an extension of what I have mentioned, but I think is so much more severe that it becomes qualitatively different.

And a third concern is the popular notion of the accelerating rate of change and the applications of this for the need of our institutions to be self-renewing, and responsive to new kinds of conditions, new possibilities, and indeed, new aspirations of people.

The fact is that in a mass society the tendency is in the opposite direction. A mass society breeds massive institutions and systems which are more susceptible to stagnation and atrophy, so we have then an abruptly increased need for various mechanisms and strategies to insure this kind of responsiveness.

I would like to speak then today, primarily to the question of choice. Unfortunately, in an educational context the word-the concept is tarnished by segregationist rhetoric. We are not naive nor are we blind to abuses of choice, but I hope today we can speak of it as a simple, but indeed a very powerful, process.

More specifically, to the extent that all parents and students have a realistic choice among schools, I believe I think most of us here believe that all education will be healthier, more inventive and more directly useful to citizens and to their children. We know that it is unlikely that one could ever produce a system where there was a complete spectrum of choice for all citizens.

I would suggest, however, that the maximum extension of choice to the maximum number of citizens ought to be one of those clear, insistent guiding principles of all legislation, because where choice functions well, productive results accrue.

And second, because this is of one piece with this country's and this Government's commitment and faith in the individual.

During the years that I was privileged to work with Otto Kraushaar on his study of the American independent school, I became fascinated with choice, and the toll that many parents were willing to pay for the exercise of that in schooling.

It also was the years of the Kerner Commission, examining the violence in some of our cities and its conclusion, stated as one of its national objectives, that there was urgent need to meet, as also I stated slightly earlier, some way to give the poor the means to control and effect their own lives.

It also was the years when our national leaderhsip was proposing that in welfare, and indeed, in education, that to the extent that we abridged the right of people to choose alternate routes and control their own affairs, that we in fact dehumanize and perpetually made dependent those people.

The question is: Is it possible to use an expanded area of school choice to on the one hand increase the level of interest and involvement of parental response and responsibility in education by giving them some significant decisionmaking power in the process, and also try to ameliorate these urgent special concerns by increase of the sense of psychological power by giving more people choice?

I would like to briefly review some of the general concerns about a possible increase of parental choice of schools.

First of all, there was a time in this country when there was a fear that immigrant parents would not choose schools and education that would provide sufficient commonality of language, culture, and history to assure a unified nation. The melting-pot concept of the public school was born of this era.

With hindsight, I am not sure it was either necessary or wise public policy decision. There was much cultural diversity loss, much richness lost, by this decision. In any event, only a person who sees ghosts could fear such a choice today, a choice based on national heritage and culture.

The acute observer, indeed, of today's scene, must fear instead the increasing tendency toward homogenization from our mass media, our mass markets, and mass institutions. Today's concern for possible increase of choice among schools relates to other kinds of devicesdevisiveness, racial and socioeconomic. There will be other testimony today about racial devisiveness.

Suffice it to say here that one could still significantly expand choice among the schools while still limiting it carefully to avoid the destructive patterns of segregation.

The question of religious devisiveness is often spoken of in the same lump as racial, but it is really an extremely different matter. Andrew Greeley and Peter Rossi made an extensive sociological research based on a representative national sampling of Catholics, and this included an investigation of the charge of religious schools always are socially devisive.

They concluded that there is no significant difference in community involvement in interaction with non-Catholics concerned about worldly problems and attitudes toward other groups, between adult Catholics who received an education in Catholic schools and those who received their education in public schools.

Furthermore, Donald Erickson, researcher at the University of Chicago, suggests that possibly homogenous schools may often mitigate devisiveness rather than promote it, for they may provide a sense of security and identity which permits the individual to become more open, tolerant, and adventuresome in society.

Socioeconomic devisiveness is a problem, but it is an endemic problem in this country; witness the suburban public school. It, furthermore, is completely an error to conclude that most families in independent schools are wealthy; this is simply not the case. There are schools that cater to the wealthy, but in the first place they are a very small proportion of the nonpublic schooling and in the second place, the range of socioeconomic levels within those schools is not dissimilar to that in suburban public schools.

Furthermore, it is very clear and obvious that if one is to alleviate the problem of socioeconomic devisiveness, the most direct way to do that is to find ways to help the poor enroll in independent schools.

Indeed, if one could say that if the Oregon decision to which Mr. Potter referred earlier is some guarantee that there will always be some private schools in existence, then it becomes a matter, it seems to me, of wise public policy to try to make our-those private schools as little devisive as possible.

Another concern that is expressed about parental choice of schools, and this is a very popular concern, particularly among professional educators, is the question of the capacity of parents to choose. How indeed could parents possibly choose what would be a good school for their child if they haven't gone to a school of education.

Most people who support this belief generally except themselves, and it is rather surprising that in a country which has created this massive system, beyond anything else in history, to educate parents, where in 1900 we had something like less than 10 percent of people who were high school graduates, and now it must be well over 80 percent in spite of all of this educational effort, where we trust people to go into a voting booth to vote about matters of urgent national concern, we still do not trust them to choose a school for their own children.

Let me speak now a little more positively about choice. Most educators would agree that all education takes place within some value framework; it must. Those who are philosophically inclined will acknowledge that there is but a hazy boundary, really, between a value system and a system of religious beliefs.

There are a significant portion of Americans who believe that the public school does represent a distinct value system, and they would term it secularism. There would be those who would contend that this particular system is not dissimilar to a religious system.

Now, those who do believe that are ready to acknowledge that the bulk of Americans do believe in that system, and this justifies the support of schools therefore for that.

They would contend, however, that they are also to have the right to choose schools that are that espouse various systems in which they believe. Most Americans, of course, hoot at this particular analysis of schools, and it strikes me that it is not dissimilar to the difficulty one

has teaching students about distinctive elements of American culture. They are simply too close to it, too distinctively immersed in it to see distinctive elements, and even if you bring in very different cultures to try to graphically demonstrate elements of distinctive American culture, instead generally, what it tends to do is reinforce their feeling that their own lives and culture is the standard—is neutral, and other people deviate.

Moreover, we cannot ignore the burden placed on some families, even though public school educators try very hard to make schooling within their schools a neutral experience, religiously. Morally, the Amish find it difficult to put themselves in the worldly setting of the public school. Jews and Seventh-day Adventists, many of them find it difficult to adhere to the weekly schedule of school activities; for example, the Seventh-day Adventist boy who likes very much to play football, but is unable to participate, say on a Friday evening football game because of the observance of his Sabbath-the whole schedule of religious holidays within our schools places a burden on people of Jewish and Seventh-day Adventist faith.

The Fundamentalists-the daughter of a Fundamentalist family who is taunted by classmates because she will not wear makeup; the Christian Scientist required to take health classes in the public schoolthese are real day to day concrete issues wrestled with, contended with by real American citizens.

We believe that in an age that is searching for moral values, there is every reason to encourage and support families who wish to choose an education in the value system in which they believe and are ready to support. Presently, this freedom is denied to the poor and is extremely costly to the middleclass.

What is even more disturbing is that this choice of an independent school, and particularly one of a particular value or religious framework is being denied fiscally to an increasing portion of Americans. For the last 40 years, public spending for schooling has risen faster than per capita income. This means, then, that families are taxed for and have less remaining to meet the costs in private schools, but as public school expenditure rises, so also must private school expenditure, to match quality.

The Oregon decision in 1925, that States could not make a monopoly out of the State system of schools-but it is clear enough that a State could simply, by its fiscal policy, create a monopoly.

To illustrate-if we could pose it that tomorrow a State school system would triple its expenditure in schools, the families in the State would, of course, be the ones having to meet that tripled tax burden. They would have even less left of their income to meet private school costs, which also would have to rise in kind, and very few of course could afford schools under those hypothetical conditions.

Now, the same thing is happening in the country, albeit more gradually. There are psychological benefits that come from choice that are very simple, directly connected with human nature.

When we choose, we like to work to make and confirm that that choice was wise. We work to make it productive; we tend to minimize the negative features connected with the choice. A possible example,

of course, is that the man who is assigned the doughnut looks very hard at the hole; the man who chooses the doughnut responds to more optimistic signals.

There is a question of principle or product made; a great many people who believe that our public school principals are really quite knowledgeable, that they and their staffs could do a job but their hands are tied, they do not have autonomy.

One of the reasons they don't have autonomy and power to do the job as they believe in it is because all parents are assigned to them, and are taxpayers given only that one school. They have no choice; this means that the principal must offer an educational program that is nonobjectionable to every parent within the school. The result so often is a bland neutrality, which as we know, bores students.

I have spoken recently with Dr. Robert Schwartz, who is the principal of John Adams High School in Portland, one that has received a great deal of attention as an experimental high school, and he has told me that one of the principal causes of the problems that school is currently experiencing is the fact that there is a significant minority of students and parents within that school who simply do not believe in the philosophy that that experimental high school is trying to project, but because they are assigned to that school they fight it all the way, because they have no other recourse to receive the kind of education in which they believe.

In the future there will be even greater need to choose between different educational aims and methods. The fact is that educational research is not converging to a single method, to a single point of the most effective education; instead, it is describing more precisely and more accurately a whole variety of options, some desirable, some undesirable, from which you could choose, and a whole variety of methods that you could take in pursuit of those objectives.

For example, we see this today in the very basic question of those parents, those researchers, who would support the concept of solid grounding in the basic disciplines, manipulative competence and accuracy, capacity for vigorous and sustained work, and others who would forego those things, as desirable as they might be, for a maximum development of the imagination or a support of personal spontanaeity, curiosity, and enthusiasm.

Every school and every teacher must strike some balance between those ends of the spectrum. The question is: Who should choose the right mix for a particular child?

It is not that we maintain here that there is some kind of natural wisdom that inheres in parents or children; it is simply that we question and fear that the placement of this responsibility on anyone else but the parent, for a country that esteems the independent individual and is apprehensive about conformity-I would say again that that responsibility ought to be placed with the parents.

Finally, there is the question of accountability, and responsiveness. I think it is not either exaggerated or radical rhetoric to note that today there are a number of inner-city schools that are virtually dead. They are corpses in which it is difficult to discern the signs of death, because those corpses have guaranteed enrollment and guaranteed fiscal blood.