NEA's Diamond

"It is a fair guess that Franklin D. Roosevelt is in very fact the most important American educator of today. More people have recently been studying about the Supreme Court than ever before, not even excepting the time of the Dred Scott decision."

So spoke venerable William Heard Kilpatrick, just retired by Columbia's Teachers College and now at Northwestern University, at the 75th or "diamond" convention of the National Education Association in Detroit last week. As 1,300 delegates and 12,000 vacationing NEA members crowded warmly into the Masonic Temple to begin four days of talk about their profession, no one was more on teachers' minds than the President of the U. S. He had just signed a new NEA charter which democratized the board of directors by dropping from it the Association's 22 past presidents, mostly school superintendents and long a thorn to rebellious classroom teachers. And he had sent Chairman Floyd W. Reeves of his Advisory Committee on Education to tell the NEA just how good a friend of Education Franklin D. Roosevelt is.

According to Adviser Reeves, the Federal Government spent over $21,800,000 to keep rural schools open in 1934 and 1935, loaned $84,271,000 through the PWA and spent another $213,832,000 outright for school buildings and repairs up to the end of 1936. The National Youth Administration had 435,000 needy students on its lists, WPA had given work to 42,000 unemployed teachers, there have been 1,500,000 youngsters in the CCC. To NEA, however, this tale of generosity did not atone for the fact that the Association's pet Harrison-Black-Fletcher bill, providing Federal school subsidies up to $300,000,000 a year to the States, was sidetracked this year by the President when he sent his economy message to Congress. Ohio's fiery Representative Brooks Fletcher appeared at the convention to complain:

"When the richest nation on earth permits seven million--nearly a third--of its school children to be taught by a quarter million teachers who receive less than $750 a year, and 30,000 poverty-stricken teachers who receive less than $450 a year, there is need for an awakening of civic pride in the discharge of obligations to children."

The convention once more resolved to plump for the Harrison-Black-Fletcher bill, encouraged NEA's adult education section to strike Congress for another $25,000,000 to eradicate illiteracy.

The convention heard and applauded a speech by Oklahoma's Senator Josh Lee against War, a speech by Secretary Henry Agard Wallace about the ever-normal granary, one by Stuart Chase about erosion: "Three billion tons of solid continent are washed into the oceans every year. ... It would take a train of freight cars 475,000 miles long to cart this continental slide away. Such a train would girdle the equator 19 times. . . ." High point of every NEA gathering is the election of a president for the coming year. The Association alternates between a man and a woman and this year it was a woman's turn. All week in a thirteenth floor suite at the Statler Hotel stout Candidate Amy Hinrichs, principal of New Orleans' Audubon School, poured Louisiana chicory coffee for tired delegates, gave each a small box containing Spanish moss, cane sugar, pecan pralines. On the third floor stately, white-haired Candidate Caroline S. (for Salome) Woodruff, principal of Vermont's State Teachers' College, dispensed Vermont maple candies. At week's end maple candies and Miss Woodruff won.

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