Education School Needs

No dean pleaded louder or more urgently in the last ten years than Francis Keppel '38, who left the Graduate School of Education in December to become U.S. Commissioner of Education. Although the Ed School's endowment, now $5,780,000, has more than doubled since 1948, its financial position remains unhealthy. Expenses have risen from $226,000 to almost $3 million; today income from endowment provides a scant 11 per cent of the annual budget, and tuition adds only 21 per cent.

Despite a chronic shortage of funds, the Ed School during the last ten years has impressively expanded its programs in teacher training and research. The faculty has been greatly enlarged and overhauled, and the School has gone a long way toward closing its historic rift with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

President Conant began the rebuilding program in 1948 with his decision to "save" the Ed School; and in Keppel he found the ideal dean. As Theodore Sizer, director of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, describes him: "he was too young to have made enemies; the he possessed only one degree and that the most appropriate, the Harvard A.B.; he had been trained in Cambridge as an assistant to Dean Buck of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and he was the son of a distinguished scholar and philanthropist. Impeccable he was indeed, and his arrival was timely."

Expansion

In sheer numbers the Faculty of Education increased from 28 in 1948 to 148 in 1961. (At the same time the student body expanded from 252, most of whom were part-time, so 589, most of whom were full-time.) To improve relations with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences a number of joint appointments were made, notably in mathematics and psychology, and the process of departmental consultation for Ed School appointments was instituted.

President Pusey has already announced his intention to bring the two faculties even closer by getting more Arts and Sciences members to work on educational problems; in his year as acting dean of the Education School he will have an opportunity to put this policy into effect.

In its attempt to concern itself with education in the widest sense, the Ed School has sought to include three kinds of personnel in its ranks: 1) scholars from the specialized academic disciplines, who will work on educational problems and research, such as historians and philosophers of education; 2) experts in the variorums educational specialties, such as guidance and methods of instruction; and, 3) working educators with firsthand experience with the problems of organization and administration in the schools.

The last category--which involved the part-time appointment of school administrators to the faculty--comprises the School's outward "face" to the schools, just as its relations with the University and the FAS form its inward face.

Starting almost from scratch, the School has built up in the last ten years close contact with the local school systems. An internship program to give Ed School students a term of practice teaching was set up in 1954, and in order to give them additional experience the six-week Harvard-Newton Summer School was begun.

Master of Arts in Teaching

Both the internship plan and the summer school had their start as adjuncts of Harvard's Master of Arts in Teaching program. The purpose of the M.A.T. program is to attract good students from liberal arts colleges, and in a year of study, to give them further work in their own subject, under the FAS, and professional training in methods of instruction and the role of the schools, under the Faculty of Education.

Though begun in 1936, the M.A.T. program did not become truly successful until the last ten years. It was in the fall of 1952 that Harvard sponsored the formation of the 29 College Cooperative Plan, in which leading northeastern colleges joined in an association to "sell" teaching as a career to their undergraduates.

Whatever the success of its larger aim, the Plan did succeed in sending new talent into the Graduate School of Education. Faculty committees in the participating colleges provided a recruiting and screening agency for the M.A.T. program, and by 1956 the percentage of students from the 29 colleges enrolled at the Ed School had jumped to 43 per cent from 14 per cent in 1948.

The blossoming of the M.A.T. program is the most ready demonstration of the extraordinary improvement of the Ed School in the last ten years. But the very success of the School in expanding teacher training programs and research has added to its problems.