The Changing Politics of Educational Opportunity:

Federal Education Reform under Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush

Anya Rosenberg

Submitted to the Department of Government

of Smith College
in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts

Marc Lendler, Honors Project Advisor

May 12, 2014

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to my thesis advisor,

Marc Lendler, for his guidance throughout this project. I am extremely appreciative of the

countless hours he committed to this project through meetings, sleuthing through resources, and

his world-class copy editing skills. His input was invaluable and this project would not have been

possible without him. Thank you, Marc, for your encouragement, useful suggestions, and kind

nature.

Secondly, I would like to thank my family and friends for their continued love and

support throughout this project. I am grateful to my wonderful friends and Smith family in

Sessions House who always make me smile even through our most stressful weeks. To my

parents, Paul and Patty, thank you from the bottom of my heart for making my entire educational

experience possible.

I would like to acknowledge and appreciate the scholars whose work I drew extensively

from. Your commitment to the subject material is awe-inspiring, and your capacity for deep

policy-analysis is equally as impressive. I would also like to thank all of my professors at Smith

who have challenged me to refine my writing skills, think more deeply and critically, and to learn

with passion and love.

I feel very lucky to have had the experience to invest deeply in this academic project, and

I thank everyone in the Government Department and Smith College Administration who has

made this possible. And of course, thank you to the Presidents and Congresspeople of the United

States for always being interesting. Cheers!

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………2
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………......…4
Presidential-Congressional Policy Making…………………………………………………….…….7
The Federal Government’s Role in Education Prior to LBJ…………………………………….…..12
Johnson Develops the ESEA………………………………………………………………….…….19
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Five Titles……………………………….….…….30
The Act Goes to Congress: The House of Representatives……………………….…………….…..36
The Act Goes to Congress: The Senate……………………………………………….………….…41
The ESEA Becomes Law: Signing and Implementation…………………………………………...42
Implementing Title I…………………………………….………………………………………… 46
Implementing Titles II–V…………………………………….…………………………………… 48
ESEA Impact …………………………………….………………………………………………...50
Other Presidential Education Initiatives: From Nixon to Clinton………………………………….62
Education Policy and the 2000 Presidential Election………………………………………………72
NCLB Develops…………………………………….………………………………………….…...79
No Child Left Behind Through the House of Representatives………………………………….…..84
No Child Left Behind Through the Senate…………………………………….……………….…...87
No Child Left Behind: Conference Committee…………………………………………………….90
No Child Left Behind: Legislation Summary……………………………………………………....92
Comparing the Bills…………………………………….…………………………………………. 98
What did Bush Keep from the ESEA? …………………………………….……………………...103
The Growth of Federal Involvement…………………………………….………………………...108
Summary…………………………………….…………………………………………………….112
Postscript: Barack Obama, Race to the Top, and the Common Core……………………………..118
Bibliography…………………………………….………………………………………………...123

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Introduction

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson began an unprecedented effort to enact a major

federal bill dealing with the United States’ education system. President Johnson had already

established himself as a President who cared deeply about issues of poverty and inequality in

American society—expressed in his War on Poverty policies that aimed to use public policy to

combat poverty and inequality in American society. The most lasting and best known policies

spearheaded by Johnson include the creation of Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act of

1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the establishment of the Office of Economic

Opportunity.

President Johnson put education at the center of this expansive effort; he believed

wholeheartedly in the power of education to combat poverty and enable those living in poverty

to make great strides out of it. His grand vision created the Elementary and Secondary

Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the first major bill providing federal aid to states and school

districts with high concentrations of disadvantaged students. The ESEA created a funding

formula to determine which school districts were eligible for federal funding and provided these

school districts with money for supplemental education services aimed at helping poor students

succeed. The enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was the introduction of

K–12 education into national policy debates and also a politically intriguing process.

Following Johnson’s presidency, subsequent presidents orchestrated small changes to the

ESEA legislation, but the intent and the structure of the law remained largely unchanged.

However, in 2001 when President George W. Bush became president, he embarked on a

substantial reorientation of the legislation. While both Presidents Johnson and George W. Bush

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believed that educational inequality perpetuated greater inequality and poverty in the nation and

that education was an important civil-rights issue, they approached the issue from different

ideological visions.

As the former Governor of Texas, George W. Bush had experience with

accountability-based education reform; his policies reflected a belief that schools and school

districts must be held accountable for the state aid that they receive. As President, Bush

transferred this belief to the federal government, creating the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB),

which instituted standardized testing for all states in order to receive federal Title I money. Both

of these policies represent a massive restructuring of the federal government’s role in the

education system; while President Johnson began the initial effort to assist disadvantaged

students through federal aid to school districts, George W. Bush built on this effort by

commanding that states must improve academic performance yearly in order to receive Title I

funds. Through this effort, President Bush expanded the scope of federal involvement in the

education system, adding new mandates, increased funds, many new programs, and above all,

imposed prescriptions for state education reform. Some states and political leaders saw this

effort, instituted by a Republican president, as “the most sweeping intrusion into state and local

control of education in the history of the United States” (McGuinn 2006, 184).

In this thesis, I set out to compare how President Johnson and President Bush went about

major educational reform by examining the nature of their policy proposals, the policy creation

process, the creation of legislative coalitions in Congress, the introduction and discussion of

legislation in the legislative bodies, and the outcomes of the legislation. My guiding research

question throughout the project has been: Was President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind

education policy a sharp change of direction from President Johnson’s education policy, or a

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continuation of it? This question allowed for an in-depth policy study of both Presidents’ major

education policies and the political and educational landscape in which these education policies

were crafted. Why, as a conservative Republican, did George W. Bush decide to pass a federal

law that imposed a great amount of federal influence in a historically states rights issue? Why

was President Johnson able to pass the ESEA while President Kennedy failed to do so? What

was occurring in the country at the time of these major policies that allowed for their successful

enactment? What were the President’s motivations behind instituting these policies? And

moreover, how have the trends of federal government influence in the education system evolved

and/or stayed the same from the time of the Johnson presidency to the presidency of George W.

Bush?

One guiding objective of my research was to understand the legislative effort needed to

pass these major reform efforts by both Presidents and Congress. On a personal level, I plan to

apply my interest of the American political system by becoming a high school social studies

teacher. I believe that the federal government does have the capacity to institute broad education

reform aimed at reducing poverty and narrowing the achievement gap in schools, but I think it is

equally as important to understand and acknowledge the limitations and shortcomings of such an

effort. Therefore, this thesis sets out to understand the impacts of the Presidents’ legislation,

while also acknowledging the limitations inherent in federal education reform that derive out of

the American political system. I do this not to become overly cynical of the country’s ability to

progress, but to be able to address education and education reform efforts as a more informed

citizen and scholar, from a basis of historical knowledge and regard for the challenges a

President faces when developing education reform legislation. This research aims to convey a

deep respect for the democratic policy process, while also acknowledging the inherent

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limitations in the process. It is my personal belief that the federal government has the potential

to provide lasting and beneficial education reform, and it was both my hope and aim to use this

thesis to examine how this reform could be structured to be the most beneficial for creating a

more equitable society.

While other Presidents have proposed and enacted education reform legislation, I chose

to focus on the legislative efforts of President Johnson and President George W. Bush because

they represent the largest restructuring of the federal government’s role in the education system.

To complete this work, I did extensive research on the policy processes behind the ratification of

both legislation, utilizing memoirs, presidential biographies, Congressional records and

transcripts, original legislation, public polls, policy studies, and president’s speeches to get a

well-balanced view of how the legislations developed. In addition, I looked at the impact of the

legislations through both Congressionally funded policy studies and those done by interest

groups to develop an understanding of the effect that the legislation has had on the education

community and the relationship between federal and state governments.

Presidential-Congressional Policy Making

The Constitution of the United States invests all legislative powers in the two bodies of

Congress—the House of Representatives and the Senate—but undoubtedly, the President plays a

large role in creating legislation. The President of the United States is entrusted with the

executive power of government; he is not given the power to create or ratify legislation alone,

but he is given the power to veto any legislation that passes through Congress. While the

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President may propose legislative plans that can be picked up and supported by Congressional

representatives, he may not act purely on his own political will in creating legislation for the

country. Much of the power that the President does hold in policy creation is in framing the

national agenda. “Americans have come to expect the president to act as policy leader: to set the

agenda and to engineer passage of legislation to deal with the country’s major problems”

(Sinclair 2006, 234). From the time of the campaign, the President lays out a legislative plan that

will need support from Congress to come to fruition. The President identifies the problems he

sees as necessary for the federal government to address through legislation, and continues to

express, change, and secure his agenda throughout his years in office. So while the President

does not hold constitutional power to legislate, it has become clear over the life of the American

Republic that the President is the central actor in deciding the political agenda of the country.

In the American political structure, the overlap in power between the Executive and

Legislative branches creates conflict and a deep interdependence between the branches. “The

Constitution gives the president and the Congress different powers, and each is jealous of the

other’s constitutional prerogatives regardless of context” (Thurber 2009, 10). The Framers of the

American political system intended for this sort of messy balance of power to protect the country

from overreaching leaders and to provide for a political arena where conflicts could be dealt with

through political dialogue, compromise, and action. When a national problem comes together

with the political stream—made up of politicians, elections, political parties and public

opinion—and the policy stream—composed of congressional committees, interest groups, and

bureaucratic agencies—a policy window is created (Baumer and Van Horn 2014). This policy

window provides Congress and the President the opportunity to create new legislation that

addresses the many different actors’ interests.

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 The structure of the American government and the way in which politicians are elected to

the government through free and fair democratic elections also establishes a complex dynamic

between the political parties in Congress and the Executive branch, which shapes how policies

are crafted. The election cycle, which provides different election years and lengths of terms for

Presidents, Senators, and Representatives ensures that leaders remain accountable to their

constituents, and that the parties in power can change frequently. Party polarization is now an

extremely important characteristic of the legislative bodies in the United States, but it was not

always this way. During Lyndon Johnson’s term as president, policy making centered on the

committee system in Congress, allowing for policy specialization and compromise between the

parties in the Congressional bodies. Notably, the Democratic Party held super-majorities in both

the House and Senate, which undoubtedly shaped the legislative behavior in Congress.

Committee-based policy making was beneficial for creating policies that represented many

different interests, and while opening up the policy process to constituencies, “the policy issues

handled by each subcommittee give rise to ‘issue networks’ that include members of Congress

and their staffs, executive agencies, interest groups, journalists, and academics” (Baumer and

Van Horn 2014, 132).

However, starting in the late 1980s, committee-based policy making has given way to

party-led policymaking, investing more importance in party unity and the majority party

leadership in Congress. As party unity increases, the parties move further and further away from

one another to the extremes of their views. At the time of President George W. Bush’s election

in 2001, the Senate party split was 50–50. In May of 2001, Senator Jim Jeffords defected from

the Republican Party to become an independent and caucus with the Democratic Party. This

threw the party balance in the Senate to 50–49 in favor of the Democrats. Following Jeffords’

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switch and the Democrats acquiring a slim majority in the Senate, “the legislation Senate

committees reported tended to be in a form Bush opposed” (Sinclair 2006, 237). Despite the fact

that the membership in the Senate did not change, a new governing party proved to be an

important factor in Bush’s relations with Congress.

The platform that Presidential candidates campaign on often result in policy

considerations by the Congress, an example of how the Presidents so readily shape public policy.

But how do they manage to advance their policy plans when they are not given constitutional

power to do so? Presidents hold much political sway and influence on the members of Congress,

especially when they are of the same party. Logistically, party members tend to agree on basic

policy questions and support each other for this reason. Moreover, a President’s success weighs

heavily on a party’s image, which also encourages politicians of the same party to support the

legislative efforts of their president. In the same way party loyalty binds members of Congress

to one another, it also connects presidents to Congresspeople in his same party.

The relative levels of centralization of the leadership structure on Capitol Hill and

intraparty cohesion on floor votes operate together with chief executives’ electoral

resources to condition the degree to which any president can steer the congressional

agenda and construct partisan or cross-partisan coalitions for his positions, whether under

single- or split-party government (Conley 2009, 161).

Considering the legislative relationship between the President and Congress,

presidential-congressional concurrence, or the percentage of times floor votes in Congress

correspond to the President’s views, provides a window into how successful Presidents are in

implementing their policy views. President Lyndon Johnson tops the charts with a 94%

concurrence rate of legislation in 1965—undoubtedly shaped by the Democrats large majority in

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both Congressional branches. President George W. Bush had over an 80% concurrence from

2001–2006 under a much more divided Congress (Conley 2009, 168). Presidents’ connection

with his party leadership enables them to have a direct link to the legislative actions of the

Congressional bodies; parties leaders and other high-ranking representatives in the House and

Senate remain in contact with the President to ensure that his policy plans are being carried out

as intended.

Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush were confronted by very different Congressional

prospects, but both Presidents faced problems inherent in the Congressional compositions of

their time. Before President Johnson took office, the Democrats held a majority in both the

House of Representatives and the Senate, and after the 1964 congressional election, the

Democrats secured 2/3 of both branches of Congress. But Southern Democrats, who had

historically opposed civil rights legislation and often voted with conservatives on social

programs, shaped this Democratic majority. While the numbers suggest that the Democrats held

a supermajority in both chambers, the Southern Democrats represented a bloc of politicians

vehemently opposed to civil rights and a possible strong threat to Johnson’s education policies.

President Bush faced a very different Congressional composition with a Senate split 50–50 and a

slim Republican majority in the House. President Bush knew that he would have a very difficult

time getting conservative legislation passed in the Chambers, which informed his political

policies considerably, especially in his early years.

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The Federal Government’s Role in Education Prior to LBJ

“Prior to the 1960s, one of the most distinctive attributes of America’s political culture

had been the tenacity with which the United States, unlike most nations, had resisted a national

education policy” (Graham 1984, xvii). The commitment to preserve education as a local issue

dates back to the founding of the United States; inherent in the development of the American

governmental system are the principles of diffused Federal and state power. Article Ten of the

Bill of Rights states that, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor

prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people (Bill of

Rights). Education is included within this vast category of powers, and thus has historically been

considered an issue reserved for states, localities, and families. There has however been some

federal involvement in the education system.

In the 1780s, the Northwest Ordinance was passed by Congress, adding new Great Lake

states to the nation. Thomas Jefferson saw the importance in each new state having its own

public education system as well as a political governance system. In his own state, “Thomas

Jefferson lobbied the Virginia General Assembly to implement a system of publicly-funded

schools,” but failed in his effort (Shuford 2007). Jefferson believed deeply in the development of

culture among the young people of the nation in order to build a state capable of self-governance.

Jefferson’s efforts to implement publicly-funded schools in the country just years after the

Declaration of Independence represents the beginning of a movement to use state funds to

educate young citizens—a powerful notion for the formation of a new country.

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 Throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries, land was given to states to develop public

education institutions, including both land-grant colleges and vocational and training high

schools. By the 1940s, the Lanham Act was passed to provide aid for school districts impacted

by “non taxed-military installations,” and in 1944, Congress passed the GI Bill, which among

other things, provided returning World War II veterans with the chance to obtain vocational high

school and/or college training upon their return home (Graham 1984, xvii). But overwhelmingly,

education policy has remained a state issue, and despite the American belief in decentralization,

“Americans have long expected the public schools to cure a variety of social ills without

revolutionizing existing political and economic arrangements” (Jeffrey 1978, 5). This creates an

expectation that the states will provide the resources needed for their local schools without

support or incentives from the federal government.

After the end of World War II, politicians and citizens alike began to see education as an

increasingly important political and social issue. Following the defeat of totalitarian rule,

Americans began to invest more fully in education as a protection against such oppression; “the

defeat of Germany and Japan renewed the enormous faith of many American citizens in popular

education as the most effective bulwark of democracy against totalitarianism” (Kizer 1970, 84).

This served as a pivotal time in the history of educational conceptualization in the United States,

as it solidified the need for a strong education system as a means to ensure a belief in democratic

government. As Senator Hill, a Southern Democrat from Alabama stated in subcommittee

hearings on Labor and Public Welfare in the Senate in 1947,

While I am convinced that education is a chief function of the States and localities, I am

equally convinced that the Federal Government also has a responsibility to see that

American school children have the opportunity to get a defensible minimum education.

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 Our children are not only citizens of the communities and the States in which they live.

They are citizens of the Nation. They have national obligations that disregard State lines.

They cannot meet these national obligations of citizenship if they are not adequately

educated (Hill 1947, 3).

Senator Hill expresses the shifting sentiment of many Democrats and a few Republicans of the

time; however, despite the pressing support of strengthening the education system through

federal legislation, such bills were unable to make it out of committee.

Throughout the late 1940’s, members of Congress responded to concerns of “classroom

shortages and inadequate local funding,” but were unable to advance their bills (Howell,

Jackman and Rogowski 2013, 217). In 1950, however, Congress was able to pass two federal

aid to education bills that provided limited federal funds for school construction and “for

educational expenses incurred in federally ‘impacted areas’” (Kizer 1970, 89). The Lanham Act,

passed on October 14, 1940 and amended on June 28, 1941, created the groundwork for the

Impact Aid Act of 1950. The impact aid program recognized, “the impact which certain Federal

activities have had on the school construction needs in the areas in which such Federal activities

have been or are being carried on,” and promised federal funds to provide for school construction

and to assist in providing money for districts that have lost tax revenue through the presence of

tax-exempt Federal property (The Lanham Act 1940). Aid to impacted areas began as a limited

program that focused on providing aid for school construction, but it would prove to be an

integral part of the crafting of Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

For more than a decade, federal legislation focused on improving school performance had

been introduced by multiple Congressmen, but “by intermittently linking federal involvement in

education to predominant concerns about religion, communism, and segregation, opponents

14
managed to keep the federal government out of public education,” other than some categorical

aid for the building and maintaining of schools (Howell, Jackman and Rogowski 2013, 218).

These concerns blocked any major legislation from advancing in Congress, until 1958, when the

Cold War, anti-Soviet sentiment sparked a great deal of fear for politicians and the public.

The launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik on October 4, 1957, led to hysteria that the

Russians were quickly advancing in science and technology far beyond the United States, so

President Eisenhower began to refocus the debate over federal aid to education around U.S.

national security (Howell, Jackman and Rogowski 2013, 218). President Eisenhower framed the

issue of education as a security priority—one that would provide both protection from the spread

of communist thought and competition in space and technological advancement. A bill to

address such a problem was quickly brought to a committee hearing, with witnesses uttering

statements such as, “We now face the stark reality that our national survival depends on the

success or failure of our educational institutions to provide the intellectual, the scientific, the

diplomatic leaders sorely needed to solve complex problems at home and with our neighbors

abroad” (Jeffrey 1978, 6).

Through this shift of focus and a strong commitment on the part of fearful Congressmen,

Eisenhower was able to overcome party opposition and pass the first major federal aid to

education bill, the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Jeffrey 1978, 5). This bill was a

four-year, $1 billion program that aimed to improve science, mathematics, and language

education in the United States, a major turning point in the trajectory for federal involvement in

education. The Senate majority leader at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson, referred to the act as “an

historic landmark… one of the most important measures of this or any other session” (Graham

1984, 5). As education became a shield against communist thought, liberals, educators, and

15
politicians began to see the natural link between education and other social problems (Jeffrey

1978, 4).

The 1950s also brought with it mass changes in the makeup of America’s cities, bringing

race relations and the quality of urban education for all races into the mainstream psyche. “By

the sixties the population of some cities like Washington, D.C., and Newark, New Jersey, were

over 50 percent black” (Jeffrey 1978, 8). In addition, the 1954 Supreme Court Case Brown v.

Board of Education created a new political environment for debates on education. This

vehemently contested decision created a precedent for equal educational opportunities. The

Brown decision clarified issues of segregation and school quality for many Americans, and civil

rights groups and individuals pressed for the education inequality to be addressed by legislation

and action. As many cities began to become racially diverse and neighborhoods and schools

remained segregated, the schools with predominant numbers of students of color suffered

tremendously. Through a lack of school space, resources, teachers, and societal support, “sixty

percent of non-whites who entered school dropped out before finishing. Unlike their immigrant

predecessors, poorly educated blacks and dropouts discovered that there were few unskilled jobs

for them” (Jeffrey 1978, 8). The complex patterns of segregation, lack of funding, school

dropouts and unemployment created and perpetuated cycles of poverty that John F. Kennedy and

Lyndon Johnson would soon take up as major policy programs.

President John F. Kennedy came to office in January 1961, bringing with him a political

commitment to civil rights and federal aid to education. After campaigning on a platform of

“grants to the states for educational needs of the greatest urgency, including classroom

construction and teachers’ salaries,” Kennedy convened a task force to create an education plan

that brought together his campaign promises with political feasibility (Kizer 1970, 93). The plan

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that the task force created called for grants of approximately $2.3 billion over a three-year

period, to be used for public elementary and secondary school construction, teachers’ salaries, or

“other appropriate educational purposes” (Graham 1984, 12). This bill had a much larger price

tag than the education bills previously rejected by Congress in the years proceeding it, and it

immediately garnered a negative reaction from important Catholic leaders with its focus on aid to

public, and not private, schools.

Catholic groups, such as the Catholic Welfare Conference, were pressing for a bill that

included across-the-board loans for public and non-public schools, but Kennedy, a Catholic who

insisted on a clear line between church and state, refused to consider such an idea. Eventually,

the Catholic Welfare Conference declared, “on behalf of the Catholic hierarchy that the federal

aid bill was unacceptable without a loan program for parochial schools” (Graham 1984, 20).

Strong opposition to Kennedy’s education proposals persisted, and, despite the impending

legislative defeat, the President did not transform his package to appease Catholics and

Congress. Different members of Congress proposed a series of education bills in 1960, but all of

them failed to garner the political support that they needed to become law (Kizer 1970, 97). The

final attempt by Congress came in September, when the House proposed an extension of

Eisenhower’s National Defense Education Act and an extension of aid to impacted areas for two

years, which Kennedy signed the law with “extreme reluctance” due to what he say as economic

infeasibility (Graham 1984, 24). After the 1962 election, Kennedy managed to pass the Higher

Education Facilities Act of 1963, but he failed to provide aid to elementary and secondary

schools, an unfinished mandate that Johnson took up immediately after Kennedy’s assassination.

Expressing his desire to pick up the pieces of Kennedy’s failed education plan, Johnson told

Congress, “I…strongly urge the Congress to take early, positive action on the unfinished portion

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of the National Education Improvement Act, particularly those programs which will assist

elementary and secondary schools” (Graham 1984, 52).

The 1964 election brought on many arenas for debate about the Federal government’s

role in education, spearheaded by Barry Goldwater, the Republican Presidential candidate and a

stanch dissenter of federal aid to education. Goldwater believed that Federal aid to education

was not only unnecessary, but it was also unconstitutional. Senator Harry Byrd agreed with

much of Goldwater’s assessment, but “not many of his cohorts [were] as able to rise above

history and find federal aid unconstitutional per se” (Buchanan 1962, 56). However, many

Republicans in the 1960s agreed with Goldwater’s assessment that Federal aid to education is

unnecessary, as they held that the schools are doing an adequate job. Republicans in the 1960s

saw much risk in allowing the federal government to have a hand in education, fearful that aid

would quickly become control, “which will be an unmitigated curse” (Buchanan 1962, 56).

Writing in 1962, Buchanan analyzes the difference of opinion of liberals and conservatives,

concluding that:

What is it that makes federal aid peculiarly accident prone? The answer is as old as the

Republic—the principle of the concurrent majority… The concurrent majority is a

conservative principle embedded in the constitutional structure… it protects

things-as-they-are, for it is more effective in preventing than producing change. It keeps

money from being spent… It squares with strict constructionism (58).

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Johnson Develops the ESEA

In President Lyndon B. Johnson’s first State of the Union address after he assumed the

Presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he stressed the centrality of his proposed

domestic policies to his new administration. President Kennedy’s assassination gave Lyndon

Johnson the moral and political capital to pick up stalled pieces of Kennedy’s “New Frontier”

programs and pass them through Congress with relative effectiveness and speed. In the State of

the Union address, Johnson expressed his commitment to addressing severe inequalities in

society by declaring, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on

poverty in America. …Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and

better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more

Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery…” (Johnson 1964).

Johnson’s War on Poverty was the central component of his Great Society program,

which aimed to engage the federal government to create policies to end poverty through

economic programs. One of the largest programs was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964,

which created the Job Corps to provide adults with education and basic training and established

other programs to promote the health, education, and economic standing of those in poverty. The

Economic Opportunity Act was the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity within the

executive office of the President, allowing for the Great Society programs to have a central base

and a place of oversight (Graham 1984, 53). The Head Start program, created to develop

federally funded preschools in low-income neighborhoods, was also one of the important

programs of Johnson’s War on Poverty, which aimed to address poverty within early-childhood

educational institutions.

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 Among the broader economic and social policies aimed at reducing poverty, Johnson’s

“highest Great Society priority was to broaden educational opportunities and enrich the quality

of school offerings” (Dallek 1998, 195). President Johnson had a strong personal connection to

the power of education to uplift students and young adults out of poverty to a more a successful

future. Lyndon Johnson grew up in a rural, working-class town in Texas where, had he not had

the experience of high quality education, he would not have had a chance to reach the level of

status that he did as a politician. While Johnson often overplayed this story, it did contribute to

his dedication to and belief in education as a means to get out of poverty and ensure a better life

for oneself. Johnson often expressed sentiments like, “Our society will not be great until every

young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination,” and his belief in

that was genuine (Unger 1996, 17). As a schoolteacher for a short time and later as a school

administrator and speech instructor in Cotulla, Texas, Lyndon Johnson developed a respect for

the role education played in his own career. George Reedy, President Johnson’s press secretary,

affirmed that Johnson had “an abnormal, superstitious respect for education” (Unger 1996, 117).

Therefore, at the center of the War on Poverty, Johnson proposed policies to address the

educational gap in the United States. These policies expressed the central principle that education

can and ought to lead economically disadvantaged peoples out of poverty and into mainstream

American life. As a practical politician, President Johnson knew that posing educational

opportunity as a section of a larger economic program would help to gain support of the measure

within Congress and among the many powerful interest groups who would undoubtedly have

strong views about any federal influence in the education system.

The relative popularity of the Great Society, heightened by Kennedy’s assassination and

the “honeymoon” period experienced by Johnson, provided for a greater possibility for Johnson’s

20
federal policies in education to receive general support. Johnson and his political advisors knew

that proposing a federal role in a state-controlled institution such as education would not be an

easy feat—but Johnson presumed that by posing education as simply a section of the poverty

reduction program, there would be less conservative backlash. Johnson’s keen political

assessment turned out to be correct. The development of poverty reduction as an issue that must

be addressed by the federal government provided Johnson with a window to make education

both a federal and state matter.

Johnson’s main goals in developing federal policy around education centered on the main

theme of increasing educational opportunity and quality for all American citizens. Johnson

believed that a good education provided a route out of poverty. He thought the most effective

means was federal aid to America’s schools, especially those in poor neighborhoods, in hopes

that the U.S. could “broaden and improve the quality of our school base, concentrate our

teaching resources in the urban slums and poor rural areas, and expand and enrich our colleges”

(Dallek 1998, 196). Guided by his personal commitment and belief in education, Johnson truly

wanted to be known as the “education president,” and wanted his administration to be

remembered as one that cared deeply about increasing education opportunity for poor children

(Unger 1996, 118).

To achieve this goal, President Johnson convened a task force to create education policy

that could make a lasting impact on the education system while also gaining bipartisan support to

pass through both chambers of Congress. Known for his use of task forces in policy formation,

Johnson invested a great amount of trust and power in the education task force; he gave them the

primary task of crafting an education policy that would satisfy the many political actors and

interest groups, including the important Catholic groups and individuals. In outlining his

21
approach to policy creation, Johnson wrote, “I am going to instruct each of the task forces to

come up with practical program ideas. At the same time, I expect them to be imaginative, and

not to be bound by tired, preconceived notions” (Graham 1984, 56). Johnson appointed John

Gardner, the President of the Carnegie Corporation, to head the education task force with a total

of 14 members (Graham 1984, 65). Meeting only four times, many members of the task force

exercised their policy crafting power more independently—most well known for this was Francis

Keppel, Commissioner of Education appointed by President Kennedy in 1962 (Davies 2007, 18).

The education task force was given the directive to develop education policy with relatively little

visibility and much speed; Johnson thought that if the task force was able to create this sort of

legislation it could pass through Congress quickly and effectively.

With a task force prepared, the political stage was set for Johnson to craft a federal

education policy, but the undertaking at hand was not a simple one. The 1964 Presidential and

Congressional elections resulted in a landside victory for Johnson over extreme conservative

candidate from Arizona, Barry Goldwater. In 1960, Senator Goldwater asserted his strong

political views that “federal intervention in education is unconstitutional,” and “any federal aid

program, however desirable it might appear, must be regarded as illegal until such time that the

Constitution is amended” (Goldwater 1960, 79). In addition, he campaigned on the assertion that

federal involvement in states’ rights issues, such as education “represents a great and perhaps

irreparable loss-not only in [peoples] wealth, but in their priceless liberty” (Goldwater 1964).

Johnson’s landslide win over Goldwater demonstrated the voters’ rejection of strong

conservative thought toward a more liberal social policy, creating a policy window for the

creation of a federal education policy.

22
 In addition, the 1964 Congressional election proved to be pivotal for Johnson and his

policy agenda, as the Democrats gained a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate

(Davies 2007, 31). While Southern Democrats made up a portion of this super-majority, the

overwhelming Democrat support in both Chambers gave Johnson the security that he needed to

present a broad education policy to Congress.

With the encouragement of the presidential and congressional elections, Johnson also had

the general approval of his War on Poverty programs to help him garner support for an education

plan that aimed to alleviate poverty in society; by forming the discussion of federal involvement

in education around the issue of poverty reduction, Johnson was able to use the power of an

established policy issue to apply it to one that would otherwise receive much conservative,

states-rights pushback (Unger 1996, 118). Through Johnson’s political savvy and Kennedy’s

legacy, anti-poverty programs had become a federal issue that were generally supported by the

American public. Johnson knew that if he were to win a fight over federal involvement in

education, he would have to tie it to a larger principle that would gain him increased support. In

Johnson’s eyes, “federal leadership in education was a logical extension of the New Deal,” but

he would have to work to convince Congress members and interest groups of this (McGuinn and

Hess 2005, 293).

On a larger scale, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s opened up a window

for the mainstream American middle class to recognize the experiences of marginalized peoples

in the United States and their experiences living in poverty. The literature, speeches, marches,

and protests brought on by the Civil Rights Movement shone a light on the many injustices

experienced by poor Americans, and subsequently brought on discussion of the achievement gap

in school of poor students as opposed to students in middle-class neighborhoods and schools

23
(McGuinn and Hess 2005, 292). In addition, on a larger political cultural level, the United States

was experiencing a transformation in educational-thought. Brought on by the 1950s and the

launching of Sputnik and Truman’s admonition that education was the country’s protection from

communism, by the 1960s, “liberals, politicians, and educators all agreed that education could

deal with newly recognized social problems, so competently had it dealt with other problems

growing out of the early cold war” (Jeffrey 1978, 4). Despite this acknowledgement on the part

of many politicians and citizens alike, the movement for federal aid and engagement in education

had historically not been able to overcome the power of the states’ rights arguments. Johnson

entered into his policy formation with this knowledge in mind, but was committed to meet these

challenges to implement a meaningful federal education policy.

Beginning the policy discussion in the education task force, Johnson gave the members

the instruction to devise a policy plan that anticipated difficulty surrounding the infamous ‘three

R’s’ which had historically halted federal involvement in education: race, Reds, and religion.

Taking into account strong opposition to government-enforced integration, Johnson knew that

the passing of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, making segregation in federally funded

programs and institutions illegal, “eliminated race as a reason to oppose federal aid to education”

(Dallek 1998, 197). This historical bill played very much in Johnson’s favor, as it effectively

took away the legal question of race, and such limited the scope of policy consideration to two

major issues. In order to garner support from Southern Democrats and a few Republicans,

Johnson and the task force knew that they would have to present the education bill as a natural

and non-threatening extension of the role of the federal government in education; in other words,

they had to craft a policy that could not be perceived as an entire rejection of state control of

education (Davies 2007, 35). The task force, and particularly Francis Keppel, believed that the

24
best way to do this was by providing “general aid to the states in the form of what the Bureau of

the Budget abhorred as the leave-it-on-the-stump-and-run variety” (Graham 1984, 71).

The issue of religion was more elaborate and complex, however. In the 1960s, Catholic

schools were both widespread and powerful, holding political and monetary influence over

politicians and Congress. The Catholic Welfare Conference held particular political power over

questions of federal funding to education, especially when funding to private schools was not a

part of the educational-reform equation. It was well understood by Johnson and his policy

wonks that general aid to education and the church/state divide would be tricky territory to

traverse, so Johnson handed the duty off to the task force to work with religious groups,

administrative officials and educational leaders to develop a solution that would be both

politically and religiously feasible. In typically candid language, Johnson told his Assistant

Secretary to Health, Education and Welfare, Wilbur Cohen, “By the way, Wilbur, be sure… you

don’t come out with something that’s going to get me right in the middle of the religious

controversy. I don’t want to have the Baptists attacking me from one hand and the Catholics from

another” (Dallek 1998, 197). As Johnson knew, the religious issue was heated and convoluted,

so he passed the problem to his task force, in whom he invested great trust.

Francis Keppel eagerly took the creative license given to him by Johnson to

work with many political and private actors to develop an education plan that

balanced the issues posed by Republicans and religious groups. Keppel developed a

plan for categorical aid to education, which would focus on sending federal dollars to

students via poor districts, rather than to certain poor states. This sort of categorical

aid was a departure from the educational community’s long fight for general aid to

education, but in Keppel’s eyes, it was the way to satisfy Republicans and Southern

25
 Democrats who would undoubtedly see general aid as an intrusion into the state’s

rights. With the religious question in mind, “Choosing to give money to needy

children rather than the school offered a good chance of avoiding the religious

question, which focused on whether federal aid should go to parochial schools”

(Jeffrey 1978, 71).

Five months after the first meeting of the task force, Keppel sent Johnson a detailed brief

on the three major policy options for Johnson to view in moving forward with a policy plan: of

these, Keppel stressed that only the categorical aid option was politically feasible. The other two

options, broad federal aid in the form of salary increases and building subsidies for public

schools only, or providing general aid to both public and private schools, were politically

impractical. The first option would evoke an extreme Catholic backlash, as well as strong

Republican opposition, while the second option opened the federal government up to a

constitutional issue and a fight from the National Education Association (NEA) (Graham 1984,

73). Keppel communicated strongly that a categorical aid program,

…would satisfy no group entirely, but it would make opposition more difficult and would

start down the road toward the ultimate goals for education a generation from now. To

adopt this course may open the Administration to accusations of lack of nerve,

unwillingness to bite the bullet, etc., etc., on the ground that the basic school problem is

not being faced directly. But it seems possible to create a package in some ways more

effective educationally—and largely fiscally—than previous ‘general aid’ bills (Graham

1984, 74).

Keppel’s expertise and background conversations with interest groups quickly convinced

Johnson to agree with his political assessment. Along with a broad political strategy, Keppel

26
developed a formula to determine the districts that would receive federal funds. This formula

defined poor as any family earning less than $2,000 per year (compared to $15,000 in 2014), and

any district with 200 or more poor children would receive federal funding. To discern how much

federal aid a certain district would receive, the number of poor students within the district was

multiplied by 50% of the state’s per capita spending on education (Davies 2007, 35). Because

every state had poor districts, they would all receive federal aid to education; Keppel noted in his

proposed formula that, “the great majority of all school districts in the Nation would receive

payments” (Graham 1984, 74). Keppel and Johnson knew that the more districts that could

receive funding under the auspicious of a categorical aid program, the more votes the bill would

receive. In practice, Keppel’s categorical aid formula provided federal aid to 94% of school

districts in America (McGuinn and Hess 2005, 295).

The caveat was that when calculating the number of students who were considered

“poor,” both public and private school students could be counted in the calculation. This proved

to be central in gaining the support of the Catholic Welfare Conference (CWC) and important

Catholic school actors. In developing this proposal, Keppel was inspired by the Supreme Court

decision of 1947, Everson v. Ewing Township, which deemed a New Jersey law that enabled state

spending to go toward busing private school students to and from parochial school constitutional,

reasoning that the spending was benefiting the particular children, not the parochial school

(Unger 1996, 118). This decision set the precedent that as long as the private institution was not

directly benefiting from the state or federal contributions, aid could go toward private school

students. While President Kennedy’s advisors urged him to use the Everson case in favor of his

education plan, he believed that the decision did not mean that federal aid could go to the school

district (Graham 1984, 19). However, as a Protestant, President Johnson did not shy away from

27
the murky territory that President Kennedy, a Catholic, refused to touch—so Johnson quickly

and naturally took to Keppel’s interpretation of Everson (Unger 1996, 118).

Another tactic used to win over Catholic support was Keppel’s proposal—inspired by

education task force member Hugh Carey’s proposal of supplementary educational programs—to

create a section of the bill that targeted funding for library books and textbooks to benefit all

school children. These educational materials would be given to poor communities, and made

available to students in both public and parochial schools. This section of the bill was not

introduced to the rest of the Gardner task force, as Keppel planned to use this section of the bill

in a private meeting with “Catholic monsignors” to win over their support. In one of the many

private meetings planned and run by Keppel, he introduced this supplementary program as a

“sweetener” for the Catholics, such as Congressmen Hugh Carey of New York who, in Keppel’s

assessment, expressed “lively interest” in the bill (Graham 1984, 74).

Keppel did not only communicate with the Catholics. He also “performed a key role as an

intermediary broker of ideas, moving among various arenas: the task force, [the Department of

Health, Education and Welfare]…the White House, the Congress; the Press; professional

associations and interest groups” (Bailey and Mosher 1968, 41). As the policy discussion grew

more serious and elaborate, the other members of the task force faded into the background as

Keppel took the lead role as the main strategist and author of the bill. In opposition to many of

the views of the CWC stood the NEA, which supported general aid to public education and

strongly resisted any aid to private schools. As Keppel communicated to the NEA, “no federal

aid bill could pass without some religious compromise,” and through Keppel’s astute political

and personal skills, he “got the emotion out of the issue” to obtain the support of both opposing

groups (Jeffrey 1978, 73–74).

28
 After acquiring Johnson’s support for the major provisions in the bill, Keppel, with help

from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, crafted the text of the bill. Much of the

text for the largest portion of the bill, Title I, was taken from Keppel’s original December 1

memo submitted to the President; the remaining four titles of the bill were crafted from the

Gardner task force report (Davies 2007, 32). The bill, soon to be deemed the Elementary and

Secondary Education Act by President Johnson, passed from Keppel’s hands to the Johnson

administration during the month of December, with Douglass Cater and Wilbur Cohen becoming

point men (Dallek 1998, 199). Johnson spent a working Christmas at his ranch house in Texas

working out the final political logistics of the bill and weighing “task force recommendations,

agency requests, and White House reviews” (Graham 1984, 76).

One of the most important questions that President Johnson had to address was the issue

of impact aid within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Started in the 1950s, “Impact

Aid was designed to assist local school districts that have lost property tax revenue due to the

presence of tax-exempt Federal property” (U.S. Department of Education). Since the 1950s

however, school superintendents were able to broaden the definition of the bill tremendously to

acquire federal aid for their districts. The Bureau of Budget and the Department of Health,

Education and Welfare were strong proponents of reforming the aid-to-impacted-areas program

so that it would benefit poorer districts, rather than those currently receiving aid, such as

Montgomery County, Maryland, one of the wealthiest districts in the nation (Davies 2007, 36).

However, there was not enough support in the House of Representatives to follow through with

such reform because of the loss of revenue the districts would experience, which would

inevitably anger constituents of these wealthy districts. When it came down to it, President

Johnson was the only one who could decide whether to reform the impact-aid program so that

29
poverty became the central tenet of aid, or to let the bill function as it was. Deeply afraid of

jeopardizing the bill that he and his staff had been working tirelessly to create, Johnson made the

decision not to touch the aid-to-impacted-areas program, “and with painful irony the nation’s

largest proposal for aid to educate the children of the poor was launched as an expansion of the

unreformed impacted-areas-law, which disproportionately aided the children of the middle class

and even those who were well-to-do” (Graham 1984, 76). This political decision would prove to

be extremely important in the impact and scope of influence of Johnson’s most treasured piece of

legislation.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Five Titles

After submitting the text of the Elementary and Secondary Education Bill from the task

force to the White House, Francis Keppel and the education task force passed much of the

negotiation responsibilities of the bill to President Johnson. Before submitting the bill to

Congress, Johnson began to garner Congressional supporters and leaders for the bill in the House

and the Senate. Johnson also made a trip to the National Education Association to receive a

public endorsement for the bill from the powerful education association (Dallek 1998, 200).

Just before submitting the bill to Congress, President Johnson held a meeting to brief his

Cabinet on the contents. Immediately after, the White House held a press conference in which

the Cabinet called this approach to education reform “revolutionary, exciting, and exhilarating;”

reporters were told that through the enactment of this bill, Johnson hoped to be known as “the

education President” (Bailey and Mosher 1968, 45). In order to expedite the process through

30
Congress, Keppel, Cater, Johnson, and other political advisors had completed their meetings with

all interested parties before the legislation reached the floor of either chamber, thus

“circumventing conflict and obviating the need for changes during the enactment stage” (Bailey

and Mosher 1968, 46). Johnson undoubtedly wanted to be the education president for both

political and personal reasons, and in order to maintain a reform bill that was congruent with his

objectives, he hoped that the education bill would pass through the House and the Senate fairly

untouched by other political actors.

The complete Elementary and Secondary Education Act approved by Johnson and passed

on to Congress contained five major titles, each title being designed and crafted in a specific

manner to satisfy a particular interest group. Title I contained the heart of the bill. Of the $1.3

billion originally allotted to the education program, $1.06 billion was arranged to go toward Title

I (McGuinn and Hess 2005, 295). At the heart of the ESEA bill, Title I reflected Francis

Keppel’s political genius in the carefully calibrated equation for categorical aid to education.

Title I funding was determined by the number of poor students in a district. The exact equation

for determining the amount of federal aid that a district would receive relied on a definition that

defined a poor child as one whose family earned less than $2,000 per year. The number of poor

children in a given district would then be multiplied by 50 percent of the state’s per capita

spending on education. Any district with more than 200 poor children as defined by the bill

would receive Title I assistance (Davies 2007, 35). Keppel developed this equation with the

knowledge that every state had poor districts, so all states would benefit from such an analysis;

in addition it preserved the power of the states through the use of the state’s per capita spending

on education, attempting to preserve states’ control of their education system. In this way,

Johnson and his education task force worked to avoid a major battle with Republicans and

31
Southern Democrats who viewed education as solely an issue reserved for the localities that the

federal government had no right interfering in by maintaining the monetary figures established

by the states.

Johnson decided he would not propose general aid to education and rather direct Title I

aid at poor children in “city slums and rural areas, both heavily represented in Congress” (Dallek

1998, 197). The states and districts would have a large amount of discretion to decide how to

spend the federal assistance. The U.S. Commissioner of Education along with the Department of

Education provided oversight for what programs the federal aid could be spent on, but the

districts retained much of the power to decide how exactly they put the money to use within their

districts and schools. Immediately, the lack of oversight guaranteed in the bill was apparent, but

in order to defuse the issue of taking extensive power away from the states, Johnson kept the role

of the Department of Education small. Title I was created with the National Education

Association in mind, as well as the representatives in Congress. With 94% of districts receiving

aid under the auspices of a categorical aid program, Keppel and Johnson hoped to garner

bipartisan support for the bill.

Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act aimed to appease Catholic

leaders; while Catholic schools would not benefit from the funding allocated to ‘poor’ districts,

they would benefit from the supplementary aspects of the bill. Title II created a five-year

program designed to fund the purchase of library books, instructional materials, and textbooks by

state educational agencies, which would share the materials with public and private schools

(McGuinn and Hess 2005, 295). Title II was created to address the “impact that concentrations

of low-income families have on the ability of local educational agencies to support adequate

educational programs” by providing federal funds to these local educational agencies in areas

32
with high concentrations of low-income families (Congressional Hearings on ESEA 1965, 6).

The funding would come in the form of basic grants and could be used in a variety of

ways—including the construction of school facilities—if the program was found to “expand and

improve” the educational programs of “educationally deprived children” (Congressional

Hearings on ESEA 1965, 6).

The distribution of aid to support the acquisition of library resources and printed

educational materials would be orchestrated by a chosen state agency, which would, with the

Commissioner of Education’s approval, act as the “sole agency” for the administration of said

resources. In other words, once approved by the federal government, the basic grants given to

states would be managed solely by the state itself, giving the localities ample authority over the

use of federal funds. Used as a “sweetener” to win over Catholic leader’s support, “the intent of

Title II was clear: children of private, church-related schools were to benefit substantially from

Federal funds for education” (Bailey and Mosher 1968, 52). Although the NEA had been

advocating general aid to education for years, it understood the political pressure from Catholic

schools, and therefore chose to endorse the bill despite the fact that Catholic as well as public

schools would benefit from federal assistance.

Title III is directly related to Title II, as it also allocates funds for the use of

supplementary education centers in low-income areas to compensate for the lack of such

offerings for low-income students. Title III is a matching grants program given to educational

agencies “to stimulate and assist in the provisions of vitally needed educational services not

available in sufficient quantity or quality in elementary and secondary schools and [in the]

establishment of exemplary elementary and secondary school educational programs to serve as

models for regular school programs” (Congressional Hearings on ESEA 1965, 29).

33
 Title III proposed an allocation of $100 million for the first year, and intended to continue

for five years (McGuinn and Hess 2005, 296). Educational services as defined in the text of the

bill include: guidance and counseling services, specialized instruction material, and the

development of radio and television programs for classrooms. Moreover further instruction for

programs remains ambiguous as the title also states that “other specially designed educational

programs which meet the purpose of this title” can also receive federal funding (Congressional

Hearings on ESEA 1965, 33). Interestingly, Title III acknowledges the lack of resources in many

elementary and secondary schools in the United States, but rather than proposing to develop

these programs within the schools themselves, the money was proposed to go toward educational

agencies so that public and private school students could both benefit.

Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education departed from the focus on program

funding and rather gave permission to the U.S. Commissioner of Education to “enter into

contracts with universities and state educational agencies to conduct educational research,

surveys, and demonstrations” (McGuinn and Hess 2005, 296). Title IV aimed to find ways to

improve the American education system by allowing the Office of Education to “perform the

duties for which it was originally established” and conduct research on education that had been

historically minimal (Congressional Hearings on ESEA 1965, 40). Title V of the bill designated

grants to fund state Departments of Education for the purpose of “the establishment and

improvement of programs to identify and meet the educational needs of states” (Congressional

Hearings on ESEA 1965, 47). Title V was also a three year program that was designed to give

$10 million grants per year, which represented a sharp break from Francis Keppel’s request for

$75 to $150 million for state Departments of Education, but nonetheless provided some funding

34
to allow the Department of Education to further the cause of education reform efforts (Graham

1984, 76).

While most of the funding of the ESEA was intended for Title I, the other titles expressed

the reality that within the task force and the President’s office, an all-inclusive formula or plan to

address the growing inequalities and lack of resources in the education system could not be

agreed upon. In essence, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act represented a

conglomerate of many different ideas of how to address poverty in education and how to educate

children from low-income families, but it also represented a highly political, well-crafted policy

meant to satisfy many different political and private actors. While the bill included categorical

aid by name, the aid given to schools in the ESEA had extremely broad categories for what

constituted acceptable programs. In many ways it would be more accurate to view the aid as

block grants. However the power of the bill was not so much the type of aid that was being

provided to schools, but rather the debate that was solved through the enactment of the bill; “the

participants in the federal aid fight in 1965 all acted as though and spoke as if the issue to be

decided was general aid to education. Further, there was implicit in the attitude of the two sides

the feeling that the outcome of the battle in 1965 would permanently settle the question”

(Eidenberg and Morey 1969, 91).

35
The Act Goes to Congress: The House of Representatives

President Johnson sent the proposed text of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

to Congress on January 12, 1965. That same day, Carl Perkins of Kentucky, chairman of the

general education subcommittee, and Wayne Morse of Oregon, chairman of the education

subcommittee of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, presented the bill to their

respective committees (Graham 1984, 78). Despite the 2/3 majority held by the Democrats in

both the House and Senate, Johnson and his advisors were not certain that the bill would pass;

one of Johnson’s presidential assistants expressed his doubt this way: “Even with all the

conditions being favorable and the omens saying the right things, the fight to get Congress to

make a new departure is a difficult one. Legislative departures are much more difficult than

expanding programs that have already met their initial legislative test successfully” (Eidenberg

and Morey 1969, 51). In this case, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was proposing

a major aid program to the country’s schools, an issue that had been historically contentious,

divisive, and often, a political failure.

Once in the House of Representatives, Perkins was committed to advancing the

Elementary and Secondary Education Act through the Chamber as quickly and efficiently as

possible. “By holding Saturday sessions and packing large numbers of witnesses into each

session, he was able to complete hearings within two weeks and mark up a bill within three”

(Davies 2007, 38). The White House, along with its many Congressional supporters, knew that

the longer the bill stayed in Committee, the more time and opportunity arose for a church-state

backlash and for larger protests of the bill’s design to surface and envelop the bill. Johnson

adopted a strategy to move legislation through Congress quickly to send the message that the

36
bill’s passing was inevitable. “The most important role the full Education and Labor Committee

played in the education battle of 1965 was to keep the subcommittee bill essentially intact and to

prevent any major defections among the majority members of the committee” (Eidenberg and

Morey 1969, 93). Perkins and other major supporters of the bill within committee worried that an

important member might take a public stance against the bill in its early stages in the House,

which would make it increasingly difficult for the bill to pass through the floor of the House

without major changes and amendments.

Therefore, a political agreement was made on the part of Perkins, John Brademas of

Indiana, and Hugh Carey of New York to unite with the Johnson administration and work to get

the rest of the larger Committee’s Democrats in support of the bill and get it swiftly on the floor.

They decided, with the administration’s approval, to achieve this by adapting a “no amendment”

tactic for the bill once it proceeded out of the subcommittee (Eidenberg and Morey 1969, 95).

Hearings for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, H.R. 2362, began on January 22,

1965 in the House General Subcommittee on Education. The hearings occurred in twelve days,

in which Republican members protested that the lack of time given to witnesses favorable to

minority views by Chairman Perkins was unfair and biased (Eidenberg and Morey 1969, 106).

Nevertheless, the subcommittee voted on the final markup on February 5, and swiftly passed the

barely-revised bill to the full Education and Labor Committee.

Once in the full committee, Edith Green, a Democrat from Oregon experienced in

education policy, quickly emerged as an opponent of the bill’s formula for distributing funds to

school districts, as well as to the aid designed to benefit parochial schools. Green was concerned

that “the formula had the perverse effect of rewarding those states that did more for their school

programs, thus increasing inequities between rich and poor;” expressing that under the existent

37
formula, counties such as Westchester, NY would receive more federal aid than districts in the

deep South (Eidenberg and Morey 1969, 98).

With Green’s political influence in mind, Perkins, Brademas and Carey made a few minor

changes to the bill that dealt with funding to parochial aid, which angered some Catholics, but

were seen as “largely cosmetic” by the National Catholic Welfare Association, who remained

supportive of the bill (Davies 2007, 38). The modest change that occurred through the political

compromise with Green was the alteration of the child-benefit theory, which was amended by the

subcommittee to read “the Public-trustee theory,” which provided that “all funds go directly to a

public agency for distribution at the local level” rather than from the federal government to the

local school (Eidenberg and Morey 1969, 98). In addition, Titles II and III originally made the

public and private schools partners in the administering of funds to purchase supplementary

educational materials, such as library books and classroom textbooks. The Committee changed

this so that only public schools could be responsible for administering the funds (Eidenberg and

Morey 1969, 101).

In response to Edith Green’s complaint regarding the funding formula, northern

Democrats protested that in fact the rural South would receive too much funding through the

Title I formula, “suggesting that Texas would receive more funds than California, North Carolina

more than Pennsylvania… and Mississippi as much as New Jersey and Massachusetts combined”

(Davies 2007, 39). The northern Democrats wanted to add another level indicator to the $2,000

poverty figure that would capture the needs of members of their districts. Francis Keppel and the

Johnson administration understood the importance of the support of northern Democrats, so they

added a section to Title I that factored in families receiving aid through the Families with

38
Dependent Children program into the Title I funding formula no matter their income (Davies

2007, 39).

Republican subcommittee member Charles Goodell expressed the conservative concern

of an increased role in the education system by the federal government and whether federal aid

would threaten the localities with federal control of the education system. Supported by many

other Republicans and Southern Democrats, the Republicans had historically opposed federal aid

to education because of their desire to maintain state control over issues of education. Goodell

and his Republican counterparts still deeply opposed the bill until the final Committee mark-up,

especially bitter from the “hasty and superficial consideration given the bill in subcommittee”

(Eidenberg and Morey 1969, 106). The Republican minority in the education committee

presented an alternative to HR 2362 that did not completely reject the need for federal aid to

education, as might be expected; rather, “Republicans attempted to make it clear that they did not

disagree with the majority on the need for school assistance but rather were taking issue with the

means proposed in HR 2362.

The main components of the Republican alternative to Johnson’s education plan were:

$300 million in direct grants to the states for preschool training for families making $3,000 or

less a year, “a tax credit of up to $100 based upon the amount paid in local school taxes and a tax

credit up to $325 per student to families with children enrolled in college” (Eidenberg and Morey

1969, 113). Despite Republican efforts to stall the progression of HR 2362 until the Ways and

Means Committees could review the proposal, the Democrats successfully portrayed the

Republican proposal as a “warmed-over Goldwater proposal left over from the campaign”

(Eidenberg and Morey 1969, 114). Despite the Republican opposition to the HR 2362 bill and

39
the vocal disdain of Edith Green, the bill passed out of Committee by a 23 to 8 vote on March 8,

1965.

Once on the floor of the House, Edith Green and Charles Goodell’s protests about the bill

intensified. Charles Radcliffe, a Republican member of the Education and Labor Committee

compiled statistics that suggested that Title I funds would in fact benefit wealthier districts more

than the poor districts it was created to serve, adding to the building counterargument surfacing

among both Republicans and Democrats in the House. Philip Landrum, a Democrat from

Georgia, worked to limit this discourse among the Southern representatives in hopes of

maintaining necessary Southern support for the education bill (Davies 2007, 42). After days of

candid debate and hearings on the floor of the House in which Republicans were given the space

to express their disapproval of the handling of the bill, the original committee leaders of the bill,

Powell, Carey, and Brademas, successfully moved the bill to a vote. Remarkably, over fifty

amendments were proposed by Democrats and Republicans alike, but only one was adopted by

the full House—“a relatively insignificant passage that created an advisory counsel to advise the

commissioner in carrying out his functions under the bill” (Eidenberg and Morey 1969, 142).

The final vote on the bill was taken in the House on March 26, with a comfortable margin

of victory, 263-153 (Davies 2007, 43). Despite supporting the bill, Congressmen James O’Hara

recounted:

The 1965 bill, in all candor, does not make much sense educationally; but it makes hell of

a lot of sense legally, politically, and constitutionally. This was a battle of principle, not

substance, and that is the main reason I voted for it. If I could have written a bill that

would have included provisions to meet the national interest in the education field it

would not have been 89-10 (Eidenberg and Morey 1969, 93).

40
The Act Goes to Congress: The Senate

While the bill’s road through the House was complex and uncertain, in the Senate, “it was

barely conceivable that ESEA would not pass, given how comparatively receptive the body had

been to federal aid proposals for the past decade” (Davies 2007, 43). Moreover, confident that

the bill would pass in the Senate, Johnson’s main concern was that the Senate pass a bill that

concurred with the version voted on in the House to avoid having to bring the bill to a conference

committee. On January 12, Senator Wayne Morse, a Democrat from Oregon, introduced the

Administration’s bill, S 370, to the Senate, garnering sponsorship from thirty-six other Senators

in just three days. Senator Morse, head of the Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on

Labor and Public Welfare, scheduled hearings to begin in the Labor and Public Welfare

Committee on January 26. Within the hearings, Senator Robert Kennedy of New York emerged

as a strict examiner, yet an equally strong supporter, of the bill. Kennedy was certainly going to

vote for the bill, but felt the need to examine the funding formula very closely, quizzing Francis

Keppel about its effectiveness and fairness on the second day of hearings. The third day of

hearings was dedicated entirely to the issue of church-state relations. A particularly important

issue for the bill, “the testimony had historical significance because it subtly indicated a more

moderate position by groups on both sides of the issue” (Eidenberg and Morey 1969, 153).

Morse made the decision to wait until the bill was passed in the House to proceed with

legislative action after the initial hearings were complete, as the House had previously been a

graveyard for federal education bills. So, when the House passed HR 2362, action continued in

the Senate; the subcommittee on education decided to proceed with the HR 2362 just passed by

41
the House, rather than continuing with S 370, for the purpose of avoiding a conference

committee.

After hours of debate on the bill, the subcommittee voted HR 2362 out of subcommittee

by a unanimous vote. Although the Republicans did not particularly support the bill, “they were

willing to go along with the Democrats in reporting the bill because they knew it would clear

regardless of how they cast their votes… they thought they might as well give Morse the

personal satisfaction of having a unanimous report” (Eidenberg and Morey 1969, 159). The bill

quickly made it through the full Labor and Public Welfare Committee by a unanimous vote with

no mark-ups. Once on the floor of the Senate, Senator Morse reamined committed to Johnson’s

plan that the bill would pass through the Senate unamended. After three days of intense debate

and many failed amendment attempts, the ESEA passed in the Senate by a vote of 73 to 18,

(Democrats, 55 to 4; Republicans, 18 to 14) (Eisenberg and Morey 1969, 167).

The ESEA Becomes Law: Signing and Implementation

After the House and Senate passed HR 2362 with speed and relatively little altering,

President Johnson signed the bill into law on Sunday, April 11, 1965, outside of the former

one-room schoolhouse in Cotulla, Texas where he began his schooling as a child accompanied

by his first teacher, Katie Deadrich Looney. In the signing ceremony, Johnson evoked a former

education leader by quoting Thomas Jefferson.“[p]reach, my dear sir, a crusade against

ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people” and continued with

a few personal words, “We have established the law, let us not delay in putting it to work”

(Dallek 1998, 201).

42
 Once Johnson guaranteed that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed

through Congress, he did not retain much control over the implementation over the bill; this

came partially from the original intention of the bill to allow localities to oversee much of the

implementation and discretion of the funds, but was also influenced by Johnson’s preoccupation

with administering other bills and the growing prominence of the War in Vietnam (Dallek 1998,

201). With much of the political maneuvering complete, the Elementary and Secondary

Education Act was given to the United States Office of Education (USOE) for planning and

implementation. Not surprisingly, the final bill passed by Congress was comprised of

ambiguous, complex, and vague language, providing the Office of Education both confusion and

discretion in working to implement the law.

To understand the complexities of the implementation of the Elementary and Secondary

Education Act within the executive office, it is important to understand the task at hand for the

executive office when implementing a major law. The process of “finding a way of turning the

controversial into the routine” is elaborate and extremely tricky, involving

creative acts of discretionary judgment; an endless interplay with affected clients in the

development, interpretation, and modification of ground rules; an elaborate system of

data gathering, analysis, and reporting for execution; a constant sensitivity to demands by

executive and legislative superiors, as well as by group interests and the press, for

explanations of actions taken or contemplated; resiliency in dealing with the ambiguous

functions of statutory or ad hoc advisory committees and panels; and an almost infinite

capacity for adjusting to policy modifications imposed by political necessity or induced

by administrative experience. All this must occur within a general framework of

43
 predictability, consistency, and equity in the application of the law (Bailey and Mosher

1968, 98).

All of these contributing factors make it absolutely necessary to study the implementation of a

law beyond the debate that goes on within Congress. The work that is done between the passing

of the bill in Congress and the measured impact of the bill is often left out of much political

discourse, but can provide an early sign of a bill’s possible faults—in the case of the Elementary

and Secondary Education Act, this is undoubtedly the case.

To begin with, the extreme speed that the ESEA progressed through Congress lent itself

to misunderstanding and confusion on the part of state and local authorities; in fact, many

schools were unaware that the ESEA was not providing general aid to schools, and equally

unclear about the eligibility needed to receive federal aid and the paperwork required to begin

the process (Bailey and Mosher 1968, 99). It was the Office of Education’s job to administer this

process with local districts and make localities aware of the available funding options; but

immediately a question surfaced: “how could USOE be specific, even coercive, with regard to

fiscal accounting, and at the same time be flexible and permissive in establishing criteria for

local project design?” (Bailey and Mosher 1968, 99). While the legislation’s major objective was

to tackle poverty through categorical aid programs for disadvantaged students, it did not specify

which services districts should provide to educationally disadvantaged students, and provided no

real oversight abilities for the executive office to ensure that the aid did indeed benefit poor

students. The lack of administrative muscle given to the Office of Education was an obvious

political move to ensure that the federal government was not taking away the authority of local

school districts, but it meant that the USOE had little power to ensure compliance with federal

directives (McGuinn and Hess 2005, 299).

44
 The ambiguities that resulted from the tireless work of the task force to obtain political

support from many different interest groups and political actors immediately presented

themselves as challenges for implementation of the bill. Because the ESEA encompassed so

many different varied forms of poverty reduction through educational services, the bill included

methods that were incompatible with one another (McGuinn and Hess 2005, 299). The

bargaining and concessions that were necessary for the political success of the bill immediately

presented themselves as problems for implementation and success of the bill’s major reform

efforts. Harold Howe II, commissioner of education from 1966 to 1968 saw the connection

between the political process and the implementation of ESEA. “[T]he ESEA was the only type

of federal activity in education which was likely to be politically viable in 1965… I doubt that

anyone could have dreamed up a series of education programs more difficult to administer and

less likely to avoid problems in the course of their administration” (Jeffrey 1978, 100). While

problems of implementation certainly came from the political compromises made by the task

force and political actors, there were problems imbedded within the structure of the Office of

Education that also led to problems with implementation of the bill. Historically, the USOE was

a “small, passive organization that focused on collecting and disseminating statistical data on

education and did little else… the passage of ESEA did not change the prevailing organizational

culture at the USOE” (McGuinn and Hess 2005, 300). The passing of the ESEA required a

complete revamping of the Office of Education to carry out the implementation and oversight

duties of the bill—this reorganization did not happen. Whether this can be blamed on an

adherence to the status quo and obedience to familiar power structures or a lack of executive

forcefulness, a pivotal step in the implementation of Johnson’s education reform bill did not

happen.

45
 In addition, one cannot ignore the pressing external forces that effected the bill directly

after its passing. As the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, Johnson’s

administration became preoccupied with impending problems abroad and removed much of their

focus and funding from the Great Society. The growing rift between liberals and Johnson due to

Vietnam furthered the detachment from the ESEA, and Johnson lost many political allies who

had previously pushed for a successful implementation of the ESEA (McGuinn and Hess 2005,

301).

Implementing Title I

In order to follow through with the implementation of the ESEA, task forces were created

in the Office of Education for each of the ESEA titles. Priority was given to Titles I and V—Title

I for its importance and size, and Title V because it was necessity to carry out the other titles.

Title I required an unprecedented use of funds to school districts for the purpose of expanding

educational opportunity for disadvantaged students. “Subject to qualifying conditions for

approvable projects, nearly 25,000 school districts in 54 States and territories were entitled to

spend more than a billion dollars within 15 months” (Bailey and Mosher 1968, 100). The

funding for the program, however, was not appropriated for the bill until September 23, 1965,

after the 1965 school year began. This created a serious time lag for the program, as it would

take the states and localities at least a few months to launch such an extensive undertaking. This

46
time frame created an unstable beginning for the bill, exacerbated by the USOE’s, states’,

districts’ and educators’ unfamiliarity with how to enact such a complex bill.

To begin with, Title I programs needed to benefit disadvantaged students who had

historically been marginalized and less successful in traditional educational settings; this required

both a restructuring of basic programs and a shift in mindset for educators and

reformers—something difficult to legislate and equally impossible to access. “Furthermore,

there was a widespread shortage of personnel qualified to plan and operate such programs. In

fact, many districts entitled to Title I funds had no previous experience in carrying out

federally-connected projects of any kinds” (Bailey and Mosher 1968, 101). In addition, a major

point of difficulty derived from the fact that Title I programs were required to be additional to,

but not separated from, traditional school offerings, requiring that educators and administrators

develop innovative programs that departed from the status quo.

The Office of Education was given the primary task of creating standards for

administering funds to states and localities, and to craft procedures to direct aid through states to

local educational agencies (LEAs). These duties included calculating how much money could be

directed toward districts and defining criteria for acceptable programs to benefit disadvantaged

students. When creating rules for educational programming, “the Commissioner of Education

was authorized to establish criteria for State approval of LEA grant applications and to decide on

the details necessary for approval of State applications to participate in the Title I programs.

USOE officials were…charged with clarifying ambiguous legislative language relating to some

of the most sensitive areas of school management” (Bailey and Mosher 1968, 109).

Although criticized by state officials during the implementation process for encouraging too

much federal oversight, it soon became clear that the Office of Education would struggle to

47
maintain the established criteria. Despite the legislative power given to the Commissioner of

Education and the USOE, “the state agencies and the local districts, by and large, were used to

going their own ways, which often meant disregarding federal requirements” (McGuinn and

Hess 2005, 300).

Implementing Titles II–V

The responsibility for administering Title II of the ESEA was given to the Division of

Plans and Supplementary Centers (DPSC) in the Bureau of Elementary and Secondary

Education. DPSC had the authority to approve state plans for supplementary education services

and was granted the power to create “regulations and guidelines which would allow maximum

flexibility to the States in developing plans, criteria, and standards, but which would give the

States sufficient ground rules, procedures and substantives so that they could have some notion

as to how to qualify under national legislative intent” (Bailey and Mosher 1968, 134). As part of

these guidelines and regulations, the SPDC required States to submit individual state plans in

order for their local educational agencies to receive Title II funding.

The Division of Plans and Supplementary Centers was also assigned the role of

administering Title III of the ESEA. The matching grant program for education services and

centers was especially tricky to administer, as the legislative meaning of ‘supplementary

educational centers’ was particularly ill-defined. The implementation of Title III was bound by

two major conditions: “first, grants were to be assigned on a competitive basis, depending upon

the quality of local submissions; second, the U.S. Commissioner of Education, rather than the

State departments of education, was to make the final allocative judgments” (Bailey and Mosher

48
1968, 136). The DPSC focused on approving planning grants rather than operational ones,

which meant that the state would have to develop a plan for a program that did not yet exist.

This took significant planning and forethought within the local communities—making it harder

for smaller, poorly-funded school districts that did not have the staffing, money, nor additional

time to plan educational service centers (Bailey and Mosher 1968, 137).

The implementation power of Title IV of the ESEA was given to the United States Office

of Education Bureau of Research, which chose nine university-connected Research and

Development Centers to conduct educational research. The creation of a network of ‘labs,’ which

would be created to study “basic or pure research, curriculum development and evaluation;

development of promising innovations; demonstrations of noteworthy programs,” proved to be

“excruciatingly difficult for all concerned” (Bailey and Mosher 1968, 140). The lack of

available staff to put in semi-independent, highly innovative and experimental education

laboratories made the implementation of this section of Title IV nearly impossible.

Because a strong state education department was pivotal for the implementation of the

other bill’s titles, Title V was given special priority in the implementation stages of the ESEA.

The two major tasks at hand for the execution of Title V were to design a system of expectations

for State Education Agencies and to present to State departments of Education their options for

Federal support available to them.

Of the many problems that surfaced in the implementation stage of the ESEA, the issue

of lack of oversight power of the Office of Education would undoubtedly bring to light the

largest problem inherent in federal, state relationships. As Joel Berke notes,

federal aid is channeled into an existing state political system and pattern of policy, and a

blend distilled of federal priorities and the frequently different state priorities

49
 emerges…Federal money is a stream that must pass through a state capitol; at the state

level, the federal government is rarely able—through its guidelines and

regulations—radically to divert the stream or reverse the current (Berke 1974, 143).

ESEA Impact

Studying the ESEA through the legislative language, intent, and process through

Congress can provide an important window into the American public policy process; often, this

process goes unnoticed by the average American. The American public does, however, consider

the impact of the legislation, especially when the impact is felt on a personal level. With the

knowledge of how the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was originally crafted and sent

through the political streams necessary for a piece of legislation to become law, it is pivotal to

turn to the impact and evaluation of the ESEA to examine how the law reflected the original

intent of Johnson’s reform effort.

The intent of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is relatively simple, to

provide disadvantaged students increased educational opportunity. This begins in the form of

federal aid, which goes to states and localities to use in programs deemed to help disadvantaged

students; the states and localities have a great deal of discretion when forming programs that

align themselves with the intent of the legislation. Therefore, the foremost question that arises is,

what educational services were enacted by states and school districts and what students did they

reach? This question gets at both the heart of the intent of the law and the clearest ambiguity

present in the ESEA legislation.

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 The basic funding formula of the ESEA is that while federal funds are distributed to

school districts based on the number of poor children in the district, the district is given the

power to decide what services to use the money on, as long as they are directed at reaching

“disadvantaged” students. “The consequence of ESEA’s initial flexibility was that federal funds

were used in a wide variety of ways and for a wide variety of purposes, and local districts often

diverted funds away from redistributive programs (McGuinn 2006, 35). The lack of power given

to the Department of Education to ensure that school districts complied with ESEA provisions

(as previously touched on in the implementation section) made it all too easy for school districts

to use federal funds in a way that did not necessarily align with the intent of the bill. If they did

use the funds in such a way, the USOE did not have much power to punish them for doing so.

The discretion given to school districts in spending the federal aid made the assurance that

localities were following the federal legislation “spotty at best” (McGuinn 2006, 35). While the

intent of the legislation was noble, clear, and narrowly defined, the lack of provisions within the

bill essentially nullified the strength of President Johnson’s original educational intention.

The lack of such provisions reflects the two strands of thought present in the ESEA. The

legislation was based on the idea that disadvantaged students need additional federal aid because

states and localities are not educating them to their best ability. In some ways, the ESEA

reprimanded school districts in order to force them to work harder to teach their poor students.

On the other hand, the states and localities were given almost all of the authority to decide how

the federal funds should be used within the schools to benefit “needy” students. Inherent in this

contradiction is either a lack of forethought and planning, or a belief that school districts could

do better for these students if given the resources. In the case of the ESEA, it seems that both

strands of thought were represented. In the first few years of the legislation, it became clear that

51
the Office of Education was going to need to have more federal power to coerce, encourage, and

punish schools in order to create programs that did in fact intent to benefit disadvantaged

students. With the reauthorizations of the ESEA in 1968, this began to happen (McGuinn 2006,

36). One of the first amendments Congress made to increase accountability when receiving

federal aid was the requirement that reports be produced outlining successful programs and

effective uses of Title I money (Vanecko et al 1980, 19). From 1960 to 1970, there were several

other notable changes to the oversight of the administration of Title I funds, including:

[T]he level of basic resources in Title I schools—before Title I funds are added—must be

equivalent to that of other schools in the district. In order to guarantee that the services

paid for by federal money supplement those that would otherwise be provided to

disadvantaged students, ‘supplement-not-supplant’ provisions were also formulated

during this period. Districts were required to convince Title I officials that the services

provided to disadvantaged students would not have been provided without Title I

funding. Finally, the notion of ‘maintenance of effort’ emerged as significant feature of

Title I. By preventing districts from reducing their overall expenditures upon receipt of

Title I funding, the maintenance-of-effort requirement provided yet another test of

whether or not Title I services were truly additive (Vanecko et al 1980, 20).

These efforts reflected an acknowledgement on the part of the Johnson administration and

Congress that increased oversight was needed in order to ensure that the impact of the legislation

reflected the intent of the program. But there remained a large disconnect between the efforts

made to ensure this and the reality of the way in which Title I funding was spent.

The reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act resulted in a

continuous expansion of the federal role in the education system; from the first reauthorization of

52
the ESEA in 1968, the scope of ESEA was expanded to include support for rural areas, dropout

prevention programs, and support for bilingual programs (McGuinn 2006, 37). In addition, a

major amendment was added to the bill the year prior that added “handicapped” children to those

listed as “disadvantaged,” initiating a new major segment of the legislative focus that would later

become its own piece of legislation. The many revisions and additions to the ESEA demonstrate

the title-wave effect the legislation had on the federal government’s role in the education

system—rather than acting as a stand-alone legislation that had minor effects in the education

system, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act became one piece of a seismic reform

movement. Once the rationale that the federal government should assist disadvantaged students

in the education system became “enshrined in federal law and court precedent, a number of

education-related interest groups worked hard to protect it and to expand the number and type of

students considered ‘disadvantaged’ and thus eligible to receive federal Title I aid” (McGuinn

2006, 37).

To address the question of what programs federal funding was used for and what students

these programs reached, we turn back to the original funding formula of the ESEA. Francis

Keppel and President Johnson’s education task force worked tirelessly to create the formula that

eventually passed through Congress: any school district with 200 or more poor children would

receive federal aid. While this formula did provide 94% of school districts federal funding, it

still left disadvantaged, poor students throughout the country in schools with lower levels of poor

children without any federal aid (McGuinn and Hess 2005, 295). While this reflects the reality

that no federal legislation can reach everyone in need of assistance, it also begins to parse out the

inequality embedded within the legislation.

53
 This inequality is further exemplified when looking at which school districts receive the

most aid through the federal funding formula. “To secure passage of the legislation, Congress

mandated that almost all school districts be eligible for at least some of the limited Title I funds.

Yet this often meant that some of the poorest and most disadvantaged students in high-poverty

areas did not get any federal assistance while already successful students who did not really need

that help received it in more affluent school districts” (Vinovskis 1999, 189). Despite Congress’

efforts to add accountability measures to certify that Title I funding would benefit disadvantaged

students, in practice the law was often unable to function in this way.

A Sustaining Effects Study conducted by the System Development Corporation in the

1970s completed an analysis of ESEA’s Title I program and the effect that the federal funding

had on students. The study collected data on 120,000 students from 300 different elementary

schools. From 1976–1979, a cohort of students were followed, some of whom benefited from

Title I programs and others who did not, to examine their academic performance and

achievement. The study’s director, Launor Carter, found "no demonstrated relationship between

the costs of the instruction students received and changes in academic achievement." Overall,

Title I recipients did better than comparable non-Title I students; but unfortunately the children

who were the most disadvantaged (and a particular focus of Title I funds) were not helped much

at all” (Vinovskis 1999, 190). The minimal gains made by the most disadvantaged students were

not sufficient to close the achievement gap between them and students not benefiting from Title I

funding, and “Title I students remained below regular students in academic achievement year

after year” (Vinovskis 1999, 190).

One of the most influential critiques of the program came from an article written by Ruby

Martin and Phyllis McClure in the 1970s in which the authors claimed that the Title I program

54
guidelines were being violated by many school districts. This led to the creation of a Title I task

force to deal with the authors’ serious allegations. The task force generated six “urgent”

recommendations in its report, New Directions for Compensatory Education, including a

suggestion for a minimum expenditure of $150 per Title I-eligible student (Vanecko et al 1980,

21). “As a result of one of the task force recommendations, [the Division of Compensatory

Education] set up its own management review program that unlike the HEW audits and the State

Management Review Program focuses only on Title I administration and not the management of

other federally funded education programs” (Wargo et al 1972, 31).

The reforms that came out of the studies conducted early on in the ESEA’s history

increased program management and prompted revisions of the legal framework to protect against

the misuse of Title I funds. “The federal management system gradually shifted from a service to

an enforcement model, based on the premise that when states and local districts accept federal

funds they enter into a contractual agreement with the federal government” (Vanecko et al 1980,

54). With this contractual agreement in mind, the federal government had the right to monitor

the programs being instituting within states to ensure that federal requirements are being

fulfilled.

These two studies and the subsequent actions taken on the part of the United States Office

of Education and the Division of Compensatory Education (created in 1996 to oversee the

administration of Title I funds) represent a perpetual effort on the part of the federal and state

governments to reform the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, specifically the Title I

program, to better serve the needs of the students that the legislation aimed to help. In other

words, there was a constant effort on the part of the Executive Office of the President to align the

practice of the ESEA with the original intent of the bill. This work demonstrates that once

55
administered into law, the ESEA had a transformative impact on the American political system

as well as the American education system.

With a basic understanding of the constant studies, alterations, and amendments to the

bill, the more obvious question becomes, how well did these efforts pay off? In other words did

the ESEA help the students Johnson intended to help? When examining this question, it is

pivotal to acknowledge the scope of program and the limits inherent in public policy analysis. As

demonstrated by the Sustaining Effects Study by the System Development Corporation, a sample

size of 300 elementary schools over a three-year period can be both informative and extremely

flawed; three years may not be enough time to observe an academic gain by a student in a Title I

program, and it is not easy to measure such a gain in qualitative terms. Moreover, it is extremely

difficult to control for other factors that influence student achievement. In addition, while the

study concluded that “some of the more moderately disadvantaged students benefited from the

Title I program, their gains were not sufficient to close the gap with the regular students,” it was

never conceived that the ESEA could solve all of the academic problems facing all

“disadvantaged” students (Vinovskis 1999, 190). It is important to keep in mind both the

limitations of a piece of legislation as well as the shortcomings of a public policy study when

measuring a program’s impact.

The first area of interest within the question of which students benefit from the ESEA

federal funding is how schools and students are chosen as benefactors of ESEA Title I funding.

Once a school district receives federal funding, it employs various poverty measures to decide

which schools receive the most federal aid. These poverty measures used beginning in the 1960s

include: census data, the Orshansky poverty thresholds, counts of free lunch recipients, and Aid

to Dependent Children recipient counts (Vanecko et al 1980, 72). This eligibility varied

56
tremendously from district to district. For example, “[o]ne district in NIE’s survey had so few

poor children that an attendance area was counted eligible when only 2 percent of its children

were from low-income families. In a much poorer district, 77 percent of the children had to be

disadvantaged for the school to be eligible” (Vanecko et al 1980, 73). This statistic makes clear

the unfair nature of deciding eligibility and the perhaps flawed principles behind school

targeting.

Once the money has reached the schools, it is less clear as to how certain schools chose

eligible students for Title I funding. Within school systems, Title I funding was used to benefit

students from poor families and those identified as behind in certain learning targets such as

reading. In many school districts, a variety of tests were used to determine student eligibility for

Title I-funded programs, in addition to the input of teachers and parents in schools. “In some

instances, the tests were administered following a set of screening activities: only students who

had been served previously, had poor grades, or were referred by teachers were tested to

ascertain their eligibility for Title I” (Vanecko et al 1980, 73). However it becomes clear that

although the law states that Title I funds are reserved for poor students, once the funds were in

the hands of the schools, it is increasingly difficult to discern through tests whether the students

who will be served by Title I programs are indeed from poor households. In other words,

educational need does not always align with economic standing. In any case, if districts are

following federal regulations and using Title I aid to create programs to benefit disadvantaged

children, those with high educational need (i.e., those that are following below grade level and/or

not succeeding on tests) should be served by the Title I programs.

This educational need is further exemplified by the correlation between reading level and

the probability of being chosen for Title I-funded programs. “As reading level increases, the

57
probability of selection decreases substantially” (Vanecko et al 1980, 73). Because federal

funding is limited, the ESEA legislation aims to serve the most disadvantaged students first.

Hypothetically (if reading achievement is used as the primary form of discretion) students with

the lowest reading achievement should be the first beneficiaries of an additional reading program

developed within a school. As an example, Alum Rock, a school district in San Jose, California,

reported in 1976 that 50% of its students were more than one-year below grade level in reading.

However, “in Alum Rock, where 85 percent of the students are classified by the district as

educationally disadvantaged for purposes of federal and state reporting, Title I services are

distributed rather evenly among students” (Vanecko et al 1980, 82). This can be a result of the

use of other inputs, such as teacher and parent opinions, to decide which students get Title I

assistance, rather than simply relying on tests and assessments. Moreover, this is a contradiction

of the intent of Title I because schools are not necessarily pointing their resources toward

students most in need. Consequently, as the System Development Corporation’s study

demonstrated, “the children who were the most disadvantaged (and a particular focus of Title I

funds) were not helped much at all” (Vinovskis 1999, 190).

While the selection of districts and students to receive support from Title I programs can

be inequitable, the primary means for selection does not seem inherently flawed. Understanding

the basis of how students are chosen to receive support, we turn to the question of what sorts of

programs schools create with federal Title I money. First of all, districts concentrate their federal

aid toward services for elementary schools. “Of the 30 million public elementary school students

in 1975–76, 5.9 million (or 19.5 percent) received some form of compensatory services”

(Vanecko et al 1980, 95). One of the reasons for this may be that early intervention strategies for

58
increasing academic performance are often more beneficial for students, and programs targeted

at elementary schools are able to reach disadvantaged students at a younger age.

Prior to 1975, little comprehensive information was available as to what services Title I

funding was used to fund, but it was clear that Title I students received support mainly in reading

and/or language arts through the use of specialized classrooms designed for compensatory

education, also known as pull-out programs (Vanecko et al 1980, 95). From the time of

implementation of the bill, studying the varying programs created by the ESEA was not a simple

task, primarily because “when Title I was implemented, it produced not a Title I program, but

something more like 30 thousand separate and different Title I programs” (Graham 1984, 193).

For this very reason, studies can be completed and generalizations made about the programs

created and adopted by school districts and individual schools, but the successes, the details, and

the failures of individual programs may not be easily discerned.

The National Institute of Education conducted a study in 1975–1976 of the Title I

programs used by thirteen demonstrative school districts. The data focused primarily on

language arts instruction, as the majority of Title I funding in 1967 went toward language arts

learning in elementary schools (Vanecko et al 1980, 97). Within these school districts, in order

to provide students with compensatory education programs, “compensatory instruction in

language arts was provided in place of regular language arts instruction an average of 58 percent

of the time. Instruction in mathematics was lost fourteen percent of the time, and instruction in

science or social studies was lost 6 percent of the time” (Vanecko et al 1980, 98).

In other words, the majority of the time, Title I students were pulled out of full-class

learning to meet with instructional specialists (who generally have higher levels of education

than the classroom teachers) in a place external to the child’s regular classroom “in specially

59
equipped labs or resource rooms” in which more individualized learning takes place (Vanecko et

al 1980, 103). The time lost within classrooms is theoretically compensated for by the

specialized, individualized learning that is able to take place in many Title I funded programs—

assuming that the programs are of high quality. However the problems inherent in pulling

children out of their normal class are multifaceted; as an example, students may fall more behind

in the day-to-day classroom learning, and Title I students may become ostracized by the rest of

the class and labeled as “different.”

In the early 1990s, Congress initiated a major study of the ESEA program entitled

“Prospects: The Congressionally Mandated Study of Educational Growth and Opportunity.” The

study selected a diverse cohort of districts to participate in the study, where they found that the

majority of the Title I funds were used in elementary schools, which was consistent with the

findings in the 1970s (Puma et al. 1997, iv). However, the study drew conclusions that

supported many cynical politicians’ ideas of federal aid for disadvantaged students: it didn’t

work.

In the period covered by this study, children in high-poverty schools began school

academically behind their peers in low-poverty schools, and were unable to close this gap

in achievement as they progressed through school. When assessed against high academic

standards, most students failed to exhibit the skill and mastery in reading and

mathematics expected for their respective grade levels. Students in high-poverty schools

were, by far, the least able to demonstrate the expected levels of academic proficiency

(Puma et al. 1997, iv).

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This conclusion that was made throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s reflects the growing

disapproval for the use of Title I due to a perceived lack of effect of the programs (McGuinn

2006, 49; Vinovskis 1999, 191; Davies 2007, 73).

Throughout the life of the legislation, there was great debate about the impact increased

federal aid could have for students’ achievement. Influenced by sociologists, educators, and

politicians who bolstered their position with evidence that educational achievement has more to

do with family makeup and values than a student’s experience at school, many politicians

consistently campaigned for the end of the Title I program because of its misguided, costly

efforts.

In the period covered by the 1993 study, children in high-poverty schools began school

academically behind their peers in low-poverty schools, and were unable to close this gap in

achievement as they progressed through school.

[Title I] did, on average, serve those students who were clearly most in need of

supplementary assistance. However, [Title I] assistance was, on average, insufficient to

close the gap in academic achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

The observed 'lockstep pattern' of student growth clearly demonstrated that where

students started out relative to their classmates is where they ended up in later grades

(Puma et al 1997, v).

This finding continued to creep its way into studies and observations throughout the 1990s and

2000s of Title I programs, beginning the massive reform movement of the Elementary and

Secondary Education Act toward the creation of educational standards and assessments to justify

federal spending.

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Other Presidential Education Initiatives: From Nixon to Clinton

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act established an important role for the

federal government in education, “but it was a very targeted and limited role” (McGuinn 2006,

49). Nixon’s presidential term maintained the federal role in education established by the ESEA,

but much of the attention and focus on social policies developed by Johnson’s War on Poverty

faded away as foreign policy issues took center stage. Despite a continued effort on the part of

Republicans to reduce the federal role in education, the Congressional majority held by

Democrats throughout much of the 1960s and 70s allowed for the federal role in education to

expand gradually. “A powerful network of interest groups rose up during the 1960s and 1970s to

defend federal education programs and to advocate for their incremental expansion. These

groups allied with powerful congressional committees and subcommittees to lock in the original

limited view of the federal role in education and to defeat periodical reform efforts” (McGuinn

2006, 48). School desegregation became the major education focus for the public, politicians,

and the President, making federal aid to education take more of a backseat to the divisive issues

of the 1970s and 80s.

While Nixon left office without reauthorizing the ESEA, President Ford reauthorized the

ESEA in 1974 shortly after taking office. The 1974 reauthorization of the ESEA represents a

continued expansion of the categorical programs established by the original legislation. Added

to the legislation were programs such as funding for community schools, gifted children,

women’s equity, career training, and arts education; however, “even if fully funded, [the

programs] would amount to less than 50 cents per child if allocated across the entire national

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school population” (Cross 2010, 52). This symbolic funding of dozens of categorical programs

was not unique, and it would continue with every reauthorization of the bill. Due to their lack of

funding, “most of these programs withered away, having achieved very little” (Cross 2010, 52).

Under President Carter, the ESEA was reauthorized with a further expansion of the bill’s Title I

program. Carter increased Title I funding and added an important stipulation to the funds: if at

least 75% of students within the school are eligible for Title I funding, then the Title I aid can be

spent in school-wide programs, rather than just in supplementary programs as previously

established (Robelen 2005).

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1981 and the subsequent release of A Nation at Risk:

The Imperative for Educational Reform in 1983 encouraged an awakened concern about the

declining quality of public education and the negative effects it has on the American economy. A

Nation at Risk was a result of a study conducted by the National Commission on Excellence in

Education about the state of public school education in the United State and it detailed many

pieces of evidence that the American public school system was at a serious risk and in need of

reform. Evidence such as declining academic test scores in comparison with other nations, high

numbers of illiteracy among the US’ adult and teen population, and declining Scholastic

Aptitude Test (SAT) was provided to demonstrate the dire need for reform of the education

system. As well as outlining the many problems facing the American education system, A

Nation at Risk offered some solutions to the issues they identified. Proposed reforms included

strengthening state and local high school graduation requirements, creating higher academic

standards within districts and schools, requiring students to spend more time in school,

improving teacher training preparation, and holding elected officials accountable for enforcing

these reforms (Vinovskis 2009, 16).

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 The study received a tremendous amount of attention from the media, politicians,

educators, and the public and prompted two very different strands of action on the part of

Democrats and Republicans in Congress. During his presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan had

pledged to abolish the Department of Education and to lessen the influence of the federal

government in education. However, he lacked the votes needed in the House of Representatives

and the Senate to follow through with such an effort, so rather than abolishing the office, “a large

number of categorical programs in the Department of Education were either eliminated or

combined into several larger block grants; the federal education budget was cut; and the

Department of Education’s Washington staff was considerably reduced” (Vinovskis 2009, 16).

Despite President Reagan’s efforts to speak out against the Department of Education, “public

support for the agency remained high” (McGuinn 2006, 49). Democrats, teachers’ unions, and

other powerful education interest groups remained committed to education reform through

increased federal involvement in the form of funding and regulations, but A Nation at Risk did

not focus on the federal government’s role in education. Rather, the real impact of A Nation at

Risk came in the form of suggestions to school districts and states.

A Nation at Risk, in conjunction with other education reports of the early 1980s, helped

launch the first wave of education reforms that focused on expanding requirements for

high school graduation, establishing minimum competency tests, and providing merit pay

for teachers. Although many states and local school districts responded positively to the

various recommendations, policymakers were disappointed by the lack of improvement

in student achievement scores and the continued gap between advantaged and

disadvantaged students (Vinovskis 2009, 17).

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 Instead of purposing new federal spending and increased federal regulation, the study put

the power of reform in the hands of states and school districts. A Nation at Risk was in no way a

liberal victory over conservative thought—while the study did establish a greater momentum for

increased federal leadership in education reform, “by the middle of the 1980s it was clear that the

ideational foundation of the equity policy regime created in 1965 in education had been

destroyed” (McGuinn 2006, 49). The liberal foundation created by President Johnson in 1965

with the ESEA that stressed increased access and funding for disadvantaged students as a

successful education reform began to be seen as insufficient (McGuinn 2006, 50). Instead, many

politicians and reformers began to turn their attention to academic standards as a better means for

effective education reform. Moreover, there were strong opponents to establishing powerful

academic standards reforms on both sides of the political line. On the Democratic side, teachers

unions had always been strongly opposed to across-the-board standards and testing, while on the

Republican side, states’ rights groups and strongly religious conservatives continued to attempt

to keep the federal government’s role in the education system as limited as possible (McGuinn

2006, 50).

During the 1988 Presidential campaign, George H.W. Bush pledged to be the ‘education

president,’ promising that, if elected, he would introduce education legislation at the beginning

of his presidency. As president, George H.W. Bush abandoned Reagan’s call to abolish the

Department of Education and turned his focus “using federal influence to promote school

improvement based on academic standards and tests” (McGuinn 2006, 51). Once in office,

President Bush sent his education reform plan, The Educational Excellence Act of 1989, to

Congress. This legislation proposed relocation of $441 million from the Department of

Education’s budget to provide money for several initiatives: rewards for excellent educators,

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alternative teacher certification programs, expanded public school choice in the form of magnet

schools, and increased drug prevention education (Vinovskis 2009, 36). In its entirety, the bill

contained a limited, modest policy that was “more notable for what it did not contain than for

what it did. The legislation did not call for significantly increased federal funding in education,

private school vouchers, or national education standards and tests” (McGuinn 2006, 59).

Despite the modest policies included in the legislation, the Democrats in the Congress

attacked the bill, saying that it “did not allocate sufficient spending or provide enhanced federal

leadership in education” (McGuinn 2006, 59). In addition, Republicans criticized the bill for not

including private school vouchers or tuition tax credits. So, while the Educational Excellence

Act did not contain policies that either party strenuously opposed, both parties saw it as too

limited and exclusionary. Within the House and the Senate, Congresspeople did not see the

purpose of revising the major federal education program if it did not significantly improve the

performance of disadvantaged students, especially when the program currently in effect

“functioned effectively” (Vinoviskis 2009, 37).

While the Educational Excellence Act stalled in Congress in 1989, President Bush

convened an education summit composed of the nation’s governors in Charlottesville, Virginia in

the fall of 1989 to create national goals for education and discuss the creation of national

academic standards. “The central compromise of the summit was a pledge on the part of the

Bush administration to give states and school districts more flexibility in the use of federal

education funds in exchange for commitments to meet school performance standards” (McGuinn

2006, 60). At the Charlottesville Education Summit, the nation’s governors and the Bush

administration created six education goals for the country:

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 (1) By the year 2000, all children in American will start school ready to learn; (2) By the

year 2000, we will increase the percentage of students graduating from high school to at

least ninety percent; (3) By the year 2000, American students will leave grades four,

eight, and twelve having demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter,

including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography; (4) By the year 2000,

U.S. students will be first in the world in science and mathematics achievements;

(5) By the year 2000, every adult American will be literate and possess the knowledge

and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and

responsibilities of citizenship; (6) By the year 2000, every school in America will be free

of drugs and violence and offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning

(Vinovskis 2009, 27).

These goals were intentionally vague, using broad language such as “ready to learn” and

“disciplined environment” to allow districts and schools to create their own meaning from the

goals; however the lack of explanation, incentives, and risks for not meeting the outlined goals

left the result of the summit to have little more than symbolic meaning. The legislation, created

to codify the six goals created by the National Governor’s Association and the Bush

administration, the Equity and Excellence in Education Act, proposed the creation of a

monitoring panel for the new national education goals. However, the differences in the versions

of the bill passed by the House and Senate could not be rectified, so the legislation was never

enacted (Vinovskis 2009, 30). The National Governor’s Association and the president did

eventually reach a compromise on the composition of an oversight panel, creating the National

Education Goals Panel, “[b]ut the underlying tensions between setting the goals and providing

67
the necessary resources to fulfill them remained unresolved and reappeared in subsequent

negotiations throughout the 1990s” (Vinovskis 2009, 31).

In April 1991, President Bush introduced a new education reform plan, entitled America

2000. Using the goals established through the Charlottesville Education Summit, America 2000

aimed to develop new academic standards in the core academic subjects in order to progress

toward the national educational goals. “It also called for the National Education Goals Panel to

‘create a system of voluntary examinations’ called ‘American Achievement Tests’ for all fourth,

eighth, and twelfth graders, which would be made available to governors for adoption”

(McGuinn 2006, 65). America 2000 also proposed the creation of an American corporation to

design successful school models and the creation of a private school voucher program.

Moreover, again President Bush’s education plan was met with extreme resistance from both

parties. Democrats felt that America 2000 did not send enough federal money to the right places,

and saw the creation of a private school voucher program as a rehashing of the private-school

funding debate (McGuinn 2006, 66). Conservative Republicans were committed to opposing

more federal involvement in education, especially in the form of imposed federal testing.

America 2000, after much heated debate and talks of compromise, died in Congress, and George

H.W. Bush ended his four years as president without passing a single major education reform

legislation. The response received from America 2000 was intriguing in light of previously held

liberal beliefs on education.

The liberal policy regime of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had utilized federal mandates to

force states to promote access and equity for disadvantaged and minority students…

Bush’s America 2000 plan represented the first attempt to use federal influence to

promote school reform—to address the outputs of education rather than just process and

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 inputs. This was a historical shift in the view of the federal role, and it challenged the

longstanding Democratic and Republican positions on federal education policy

(McGuinn 2006, 67).

This reaction would change in the coming years as George H.W. Bush’s education reform ideas

become more common and supported by democrats in Congress.

When President Clinton was elected in 1993 over incumbent George H.W. Bush, he had

prior experience with issues of education reform as former Governor of Arkansas. A particularly

active member in President George H.W. Bush’s Charlottesville Education Summit, Clinton used

the knowledge and experience gained through that experience in his early years as President to

begin an effort to enact a legislation dealing with education reform. However, at the beginning

of his presidency, Clinton did not stress education as one of his main focuses; rather, he chose to

focus on job training and apprenticeship programs more generally as a form of economic and

educational reform (Vinovskis 2009, 64). Clinton had, however, already shifted the democratic

policy balance by focusing on standardized testing as a means of education reform as Governor

of Arkansas. Governor Clinton appointed his wife, Hilary Clinton, to head a committee to create

higher standards for Arkansas’ schools. Through these efforts, “Clinton passed the state’s first

mandatory teacher-competency test, student achievement testing, a school choice program, and

annual report cards for school performance (McGuinn 2006, 79).

During the 1992 Presidential election, Bill Clinton used his successful education reform

efforts as Governor of Arkansas, as well as his national education reform proposals, to prove to

the voters that he was prepared to address important social policies. Within the education reform

proposal developed during Clinton’s campaign, he urged that “’governments must end the

inequalities that create educational ghettos among school districts and provide equal educational

69
opportunity for all’… schools must be held accountable to ‘high standards of educational

achievement’ through not simply spending more, but having to provide results” (McGuinn 2006,

79).

With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act pending in

1994 and a new education legislation in the works, Clinton received a great deal of input from

interested education groups on how to improve the act. “A coalition of 18 education

organizations… called for reorganizing federal programs into ‘clusters’ that would allow state

and local authorities to consolidate federal categorical education initiatives. They advocated

shifting accountability measurement from detailing the expenditure of funds to assessing student

outcomes” (Vinovskis 2009, 65). Other strands of education reform stressed providing general

aid to schools (the National Education Association) and the creation of more public charter

schools and youth apprenticeship programs. The Progressive Policy Institute of the Democratic

Leadership Council harbored the ‘New Democratic’ mode of education reform, emphasizing that

“federal funding alone would not solve schools’ problems and called for the president to

‘marshal public support for a radical redesign of U.S. education’” (McGuinn 2006, 85).

President Clinton supported the use of national assessments as a form of redesigning the

education system, but many politicians and interest groups in the Democratic party did not

support such a measure.

The reauthorization of the ESEA in 1994 began the movement toward standardized

testing and accountability, encouraging states to develop rigorous standardized tests for their

public school systems. The 1994 ESEA reauthorization, entitled the Improving America’s

School Act (IASA), represented a substantial shift in Title I accountability requirements. “For the

first time, policymakers shifted the program’s emphasis from inputs to outputs” (DeBray 2006,

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29). The 1994 reauthorization represented an acknowledgement of the fact that Title I funding

from the ESEA had failed to achieve its main goal: to increase the academic achievement of poor

students in school districts. The 1994 reauthorization was an effort to increase accountability for

receiving Title I funding, but the accountability was not well enforced. The IASA encouraged,

but did not demand, that states develop rigorous state tests to ensure that students were meeting

learning targets and using Title I funds in a beneficial manner. The law began to tie Title I

funding with increasing teacher quality and curriculum development as well as the large goals of

accountability and testing. Clinton also increased federal spending for the bill in order to send

more targeted aid at distracts with low-income students.

Clinton’s development of Goals 2000 proposed voluntary national standards and

assessments based off of the same six major national education goals created in America 2000.

Originally, the bill encompassed a plan that encouraged states to develop targets for learning

material and intellectual abilities by grade level. The central distinction between Goals 2000 and

George H.W. Bush’s America 2000 rested in the federal government’s role in developing these

state standards. Unlike America 2000, which simply encouraged states to develop educational

assessments, Goals 2000 initially required states to submit their standards to the U.S. Department

of Education before receiving Goals 2000 funding (McGuinn 2006, 87). However, like America

2000, Goals 2000 faced strong opposition to the bill on both sides of the political line, forcing

Clinton to allow significant compromise in Congress. Of the many compromises, Clinton had to

give up his hope that state standards would be checked by the federal government.

[T]he law greatly circumscribed the federal role in creating standards or assessments or in

holding states accountable for their education progress. The final legislation states that

national standard must be ‘sufficiently general’ that they ‘will not restrict state and local

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 control over curriculum and instruction methods… [and the states] can modify them to

suit their own circumstances.’ The law also emphasized that the national standards were

voluntary and that ‘states and communities can develop their own standards or modify

and adopt those developed under national consensus’ (McGuinn 2006, 90).

The final Goals 2000 legislation was a result of sharp partisan conflict and compromise that

resulted in an extremely watered-down bill that made suggestions to states, rather than demands.

The flexibility inherent in the bill and the lack of “any kind of meaningful accountability

measure” meant that Goals 2000 was essentially a bribe to the states (McGuinn 2006, 91).

Despite the lack of innovative reform, Goals 2000 was seen as a watershed legislation for putting

the federal government in a place of oversight over the education system. “Goals 2000

represented a very different federal strategy than ever seen before… It was audacious not only in

proposing to use federal funds to leverage whole system reforms at the state level, but also in

creating new national structures to guide the states toward a national strategy” (Schwartz and

Robinson 2000, 91). While Goals 2000 was unable to redefine national educational strategy, it

laid the groundwork for a paradigm shift in thinking about the federal role in the education

system as one of a leader and supervisor.

Education Policy and the 2000 Presidential Election

The election of the President of the United States in 2000 brought with it a renewed

political interest in federal education policies. The release of A Nation at Risk in 1983 and the

following efforts of Presidents to institute major education reform legislation demonstrated the

continuing movement to reform the role of the federal role in the education system. The 2000

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election was particularly unique in the field of education policy because both candidates, George

W. Bush, the Republican Governor from Texas, and Al Gore, the Democratic Vice-President to

former President Bill Clinton, were in favor of federal involvement in the education system. The

contested question was not if the federal government should have a role in the education system,

but how extensive the role should be and what form it ought to take. Both candidates agreed that

the focus of any federal involvement should be on “improving school performance for all

students” (McGuinn 2006, 146).

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 Leading up to the 2000 election, when polled, voters expressed that

education was one of their top priorities when electing a new president. A

poll conducted in January 2000 reported that 86% of respondents felt that

K–12 education was either extremely important or very important in

determining how they would vote in the upcoming Presidential election

(McGuinn 2006, 148). In addition, an ABC News/Washington Post poll

conducted March 30–April 2, 2000 asked the question: "[d]o you think federal

spending on education should be increased, decreased or kept about the

same? to which 65% of those polled responded “increased,” and only 8%

responded “decreased,” (PollingReport.com 2000). This poll reflected the

very real change in political culture in which the vast majority of Americans

were in favor of either increasing federal funding to schools, or at the least,

keeping it the same. Armed with these facts, both presidential candidates

knew that they had to present extensive education plans early on in the

campaign.

As a Republican, George W. Bush was at an automatic disadvantage

for gaining voters’ trust in education policy; since the beginning of the

development of major education policy in America with Democratic President

Lyndon Johnson, Democrats have historically been aligned with powerful

education interest groups such as the American Federation of Teachers. In

addition, Democrats have been strong supporters of federal funding to

education and advocates for an increased federal role in the education system

to reduce societal inequality. Aware of this partisan disadvantage, George W.

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 Bush knew that in order to gain the upper hand with education policy, he

needed to reform the image of the typical conservative typified by President

Reagan and his predecessors.

George W. Bush and his election team knew that they needed to

distance themselves from the conservative desire to abolish the Department of

Education and the Republican campaign strategies adopted in the 1992 and

1996 elections and instead form a new image of a conservative who believes

in the power of the American people to reform society (McKinnon 2001, 151).

Mark McKinnon, the director of media for the 2000 Bush campaign, writes

that:

People sensed that there was an education recession and that it was something we could fix,

something we could address. So we did another series of education spots. And again, a

lot of what you’ll see in the design and the presentation of this message is that George W.

Bush is a different kind of Republican, that this is not the kind of Republican that you’re

used to, he’s reaching across old boundaries and borders, talking about issues you’re not

used to hearing Republicans talk about (2001, 151).

Therefore, George W. Bush adopted a new Republican position as a

compassionate conservative—one who was actively committed to advancing

social policy. Bush’s image as a compassionate conservative distanced him

from the unpopular, extreme right-wing of the Republican party. By adopting

an education policy early on in the campaign, George W. Bush laid the

groundwork for his new, moderate image. All of the voters’ top priorities of

the election were domestic policy issues including education, social security,

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 the environment and health care—all issues on which Democrats historically

hold an advantage over Republicans on (Dowd and Steeper 2001, 39).

As a means to curb this advantage held by Democratic candidate, Al

Gore, President Bush was the first to create and voice a comprehensive plan to

reform the education system in America. This was an important strategic

move for him early on in the presidential election. “Bush’s activism on

education during the election would enable him to neutralize the longstanding

Democratic advantage on the issue—but committed him to an active

education agenda as president” (McGuinn 2006, 146). Both candidates

identified education as an important issue, and the budget surplus left

comfortable room for Bush and Gore to support new domestic spending

programs, including those geared toward education.

George W. Bush had previous experience with education reform from

his time as Governor of Texas from 1995–2000. As Governor, Bush

implemented a state-wide education reform plan that utilized local-control of

schools, higher standards, and revised curricula, giving him knowledge and

skill to pull from when developing a national education reform plan. When

developing a nation-wide reform plan, Bush utilized many of the same

features from his Texas education legislation combined with historically

Democratic ideas of federal funding and oversight. As Jay Dickey, the former

Republican spokesman on the House Education Committee remarked,

It was important that many of Bush’s ideas on education were things that Democrats often

talked about—like programs to help kids in the early grades learn to read He did not go

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on the campaign trail and talk about block grants or doing away with the Department of

Education. Instead he talked about inputs, tangible benefits, and programs, and those

were the type of things that made people think he cared about education. He had a clear,

concrete, and detailed plan for how to improve schools and avoided the unpopular things

that congressional Republicans had talked about in the mid-19990s” (McGuinn 2006,

156).

With these elements at the heart of Bush’s idea of national education reform, he

proposed an extensive education legislation in 2000 calling for a $13.4 billion

of federal education spending increase over five years (McGuinn 2006, 154).

Within Bush’s plan, he advocated more stringent standards, testing, school

choice for parents and children, and increased federal funding. One of Bush’s

largest focuses was on choice, an issue that encompassed multifaceted

meanings in the education realm, but something that was used to garner

Republican support for his education plan. From the beginning of the

campaign, Bush used the language of choice to supplant the use of vouchers to

maintain his alignment with the popular Republican policy, but also to

maintain as much moderate support as possible. “Interestingly, in only 3 of the

49 national press releases analyzed…did Bush actually use the term voucher.

Instead, he spoke in general terms about expanding parental choice and

increasing government support of charter and private schools” (Marschall and

McKee 2002, 105). Bush avoided using the word voucher to gain the support

of Democrats adamantly opposed to the concept; however, many leaders in

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the Republican party wanted to see Bush put vouchers at the center of his

proposal for education reform.

Bush’s official campaign summary of his education plan stated that “Governor

Bush will reform the nation’s public schools… He will close the achievement

gap, set high standards, promote character education, and ensure school safety.

States will be offered freedom from federal regulation, but will be held

accountable for results. Performance will be measured annually, and parents

will be empowered with information and choices” (McGuinn 2006, 154).

Bush used the Progressive Policy Institute’s (PPI) education reform plan to

craft his own policy, which had released a comprehensive federal education

reform plan in 1999 that called for federal policies to be consolidated into five

major policy aims and for states to have autonomy in deciding their own

education polices as long as they meet certain academic and assessment

standards. The education plan released by the Bush administration during the

2000 campaign was so similar to the PPI reform plan and contained many of

the same calls for reform that the PPI president Will Marshall to state during

the campaign, “I can’t criticize [the Bush] plan because it’s ours” (Pooley

2000).

Bush’s strategic move to adopt the moderate-Democratic views of the PPI was

further reflected in the position that Al Gore was put in immediately following

Bush’s announcement of his education reform. Because Bush began to

campaign on a moderate reform plan that included a significant federal

spending increase coupled with assessments and standards, the Gore campaign

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was put in a position where they had to either stake out a claim a much more

liberal position on education that did not include standards, or essentially

agree with the plan put forward by the Bush administration. Other than

proposing more increased federal spending than Bush, Gore did the latter.

The presidential debates gave Bush an opportunity to reflect his knowledge,

experience, and passion about education. George W. Bush was comfortable

talking about education issues and was able to speak from his experience with

instituting education reform legislation Texas as evidence that he had

experience in the area. This ended up being very important for Bush’s

election strategy, as education was the major policy issue Bush’s campaign

used to win over moderate voters. In other words, it provided the perfect

platform for Bush to paint himself as a compassionate conservative aware of

the important issues facing the country to appeal to both undecided voters and

moderate democrats. Bush also campaigned on the notion that education was

a civil rights issue. Bush stated that “on education…too many American

children are segregated into schools without standards [and] shuffled from

grade to grade because of their age, regardless of their age, regardless of their

knowledge. This is discrimination, pure and simple—the bigotry of low

expectations. And our nation should treat it like any other form of

discrimination… we should end it” (McGuinn 2006, 159). Under the guise of

the protection of civil rights, Bush proposed a limited voucher program that

would provide students in particularly bad schools with financial subsidies to

attend a private school in their area. Bush originally presented this idea in a

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 speech to Latinos in Las Angeles, a tactical campaign move (McGuinn 2006,

159).

To counter Bush’s education plan, Gore proposed $115 billion for

schools over 10 years; the rest of his proposal, with the exclusion of vouchers,

was similar to Bush’s. Gore held a single-digit lead over Bush throughout the

election in the area of education, which the Bush campaign team actually took

as win, as education was usually “an issue that the Democratic party has

owned” (Dowd and Steeper 2001, 40). The issue of education was extremely

important in the 2000 election, both in terms of the substance of the

candidates’ proposals and the symbolism of the social issues at hand. For the

first time, both presidential candidates envisioned that the federal government

would play a vast role in the education system for all students, not only those

identified as poor or disadvantage. “For the first time in memory… [There is]

widening agreement that Washington’s present approach to K–12 education

policy—an approach that has scarcely changed since LBJ’s time—is broken

and needs fixing” (McGuinn 2006, 165). George W. Bush embraced the task

of mending this “broken” system after winning the 2000 presidential election

and taking office on January 20, 2001.

NCLB Develops

As the winner of the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush took office alongside an

intriguing congressional body; in the House of Representatives, the Republicans held a razor-thin

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majority, with a ratio of 222 Republicans to 213 Democrats. In the Senate, the parties were

perfectly split 50–50, with Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s Vice President, as the tie-breaking

vote. The Congressional makeup was not the only thing that was particularly interesting, as the

2000 election brought with it an extremely contested and divisive election that reached a

pinnacle with a Supreme Court decision that halted a recount in Florida making George W. Bush

President by virtue of gaining Florida’s electoral votes. After a disputed election, “Bush was

determined to launch his administration as though it had received a mandate” (Mycoff and Pika

2008, 33).

President Bush and the newly elected 107th Congress came to office with the knowledge

that the proceeding Congress had struggled to agree on any education policy reforms—not

because they were not proposed, but because of the extreme variance of opinions about the

matter. Just three days after taking office, Bush sent a 28-page blueprint of an education reform

plan to Congress, based entirely on the education plan that he had proposed during his

presidential campaign. While Bush proposed his reform plan in the form of a blueprint, rather

than a piece of written legislation, it quickly became clear that White House aides would be

active throughout the process to ensure that the legislation developed in a way congruent with

President Bush’s vision. The blueprint contained the following components:

1) 54 previously-existing ESEA programs would be boiled down to 5 block grants that

would include: aid to disadvantaged children, improving teacher quality, the learning and

development of proficiency of the English language, expanding school choice, and

advancing school safety. Early Reading First programs would provide states with grants

to develop reading programs for pre-kindergarten programs such as Head Start; in

addition, Reading First programs could apply for grants for reading programs in grades

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K–2. The secretary of education would award grants to states to expand parental choice.

States would have the flexibility to use some of their federal aid to increase teacher

preparedness and quality.

2) Annual testing for grades 3–8 in reading and math would be established to increase

accountability for receiving federal aid. Tests would be added in history and science as

well. These tests would be a condition for states to receive Federal Title I money.

3) School report cards must be issued to demonstrate whether or students within schools

were successful or underperforming on the annual tests. Schools would receive rewards

or sanctions depending on students’ performance. Constantly underperforming, or

“failing” schools may receive more serious sanctions, such as the closing of the school.

4) States must partake in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test

for fourth and eight graders as a way to gauge how students are doing nationally.

5) “Adequate Yearly Progress” would measure disaggregated groups (such as

African-Americans, English language learners, and special education) test scores to study

whether or not the schools’ targets for growth were being met yearly. Schools that made

the most advancement in the performance of disadvantaged students would receive “No

Child Left Behind” bonuses. In addition, the Secretary of Education would be given the

power to reduce a school’s administrative budget if the growth targets for

“disadvantaged” students were not being met.

6) Vouchers would be provided to students in public schools that had been performing

poorly for three consecutive years (not meeting their Adequate Yearly Progress goals) to

use Title I funds to attend a better performing public or private school, or to pay for

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 supplementary educational services. (Mycoff and Pika 2008, 41; McGuinn 2008, 168;

Bush; Debray 2006).

The final goal of the program, as suggested by the title of the legislation, was 100% reading and

math proficiency by all children, including those deemed as disadvantaged, within 12 years.

Alexander (Sandy) Kress, a moderate Democrat from Bush’s education reform efforts in Texas,

as well as Margaret La Montage (later known as Margaret Spellings), who served as White

House Director of the Domestic Policy Council, were Bush’s main education go-to advisors.

They would remain pivotal parts of the NCLB act as it moved through Congress, as well.

In order to build a coalition of support for the blueprint, President Bush invited about

twenty members of Congress to Austin, Texas prior to the release of the blueprint to discuss the

upcoming education policy. “At the outset, the White House strategy was to build consensus

among key Republicans while reaching out to a limited number of moderate Democrats who saw

the need to reform public education” (Graham 2010, 68). The invited Senators included

Republicans Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and James “Jim” Jeffords of Vermont. The

Democrats included Evan Bayh of Indiana, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and Zell Miller of

Georgia. Notably, one of the most important Senators actively involved in education policy,

Edward “Ted” Kennedy, did not attend the Austin meeting (Graham 2010, 68). Whether a very

intentional political move on the part of the Bush administration, or an attempt to send Kennedy

a signal that his liberal education opinions were not to be included in the education bill, the

tactical move was very successful. “The Bush administrations early talks with Lieberman and

Bayh… made Kennedy realize that he would be denied a seat at the table for the drafting of the

most important education bill in forty years unless he was willing to compromise on his

longstanding opposition to testing and accountability” (McGuinn 2006, 167). By excluding

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Kennedy from the first major education meeting, Bush and his political advisors were able to

send Kennedy the message that he would have to shift away from being the voice of the teacher’s

unions (one of his major supporters) to move to support the program.

In addition, both President Bush and Senator Kennedy knew that in order for an

education bill to garner widespread Democratic support in the Senate, Bush needed Kennedy as

an ally and a supporter of the bill. Kennedy made this particularly clear to Bush through a private

meeting at the White House in January 2001, after which Kennedy agreed to work with Bush on

the education bill. Kennedy told reporters that “there are some areas of difference, but the

overwhelming areas of agreement and support are very, very powerful (McGuinn 2006, 167). As

Kennedy became a major player in the development of No Child Left Behind, it became clear

that President Bush was seeking a truly bipartisan bill that incorporated major political voices on

all sides of the political spectrum. Kennedy’s presence in the policy development changed the

nature of Bush’s coalition to include not just Republican and moderate Democratic views, but

also important opinions from liberal Democrats.

As demonstrated in the blueprint sent to Congress on January 23, Bush’s main education

goals were to increase accountability in the education system, to consolidate federally-funded

programs, to give states and families flexibility, to institute major testing to ensure that schools

institute high standards, and to provide school choice to families. These main components were

bound to lead to disagreements and heated debates as Congress considered the legislation. Many

liberal democrats represented the views of teachers unions in being entirely opposed to

standardized testing while also advocating increased federal funding for the education system.

On the other extreme, some conservative Republicans continued to insist that the federal

government has no role in the education system, and the only money that should be provided to

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schools and families should be in the form of vouchers. The conservative wing of the

Republican Party encouraged Bush to utilize vouchers and the idea of school choice heavily in

his proposal for school reform. Vouchers were one of the most important and divisive issues

within Bush’s education reform plan.

The Christian right generally supported vouchers as a means of aiding religious schools,

and some groups, such as the Family Research Council, claimed they would oppose any

bill without vouchers. More liberal organizations, such as teaching unions and civil

rights groups, strongly opposed the use of any public money to fund private school

tuition. Vouchers also attracted opposition from more moderate centrist Democrats and

Republicans in Congress (Parker 2009, 186).

From the beginning, it was clear that vouchers could make or break the passing of the

legislation. Bush was clear with his Congressional coalition that he was willing to give up

vouchers in exchange for important Democratic support. While this would be a very unpopular

decision on the part of conservative Republicans, Bush “was trusted by conservatives,

particularly by the religious rights, and could endorse such policies without losing his base of

support” (Parker 2009, 185). The Bush administration wanted a quick victory for the President’s

first major piece of legislation. “[B]y focusing on broad goals such as accountability and

flexibility and indicating his willingness to compromise from the outset, Bush could claim credit

for negotiating in a bipartisan manner and for whatever legislation Congress ultimately

approved” (McGuinn 2006, 168). As of January 23, President Bush passed his expectations to

his allies in Congress to ensure that the bill passed in a manner consistent with his aspirations

while allowing a bipartisan coalition to mold the legislative language.

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No Child Left Behind Through the House of Representatives

Immediately upon receiving the blueprint in the House Education Committee, Committee

Chair John Boehner organized a group of five Republicans and four Democrats to help him draft

the No Child Left Behind, or H.R. 1 legislative text. The group met two to three times a week

and were joined often by Sandy Kress and staff from the Department of Education. Within these

meetings, it became increasingly clear that Boehner and Miller were the main spokesmen for the

bill and represented the two strands of party debate within the issue of education reform (Mycoff

and Pika 2008, 47). Before the legislative process began, Boehner warned President Bush that at

least 60 House Republicans would likely vote against the bill, but as Republican Committee

Chair, Boehner felt it important for Bush to pass his first (and self-proclaimed most important)

legislative priority (Graham 2010, 68).

In May 2001, leading up to the committee vote on the NCLB blueprint, Boehner and

Miller met to work out a bipartisan compromise that would garner support from both parties

within the education committee. “Boehner agreed to double federal assistance to the poorest

schools by fiscal year 2006. Instead of insisting on 100 percent state flexibility in the use of

federal funds, Boehner agreed that only 50 percent of federal funds would be without strings. He

also dropped a provision that would allow have allowed federal funds to be used for after-school

religious programs” (Graham 2010, 70). Boehner maintained a provision within the bill for

public funds to be used toward private school tuition by poor families, but within the Education

Committee, the voucher provision was removed from the bill by a 27–20 vote in which five

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Republicans joined with the 22 Democrats who were opposed to vouchers (Mycoff and Pika

2008, 45).

The Bush administration knew that insisting on vouchers within the bill would lose them

pivotal support in the House, so Bush insisted that Boehner move the bill to the floor where Bush

would “support, but not insist upon, an amendment to allow parents a private school option”

(Graham 2010, 70). Taking President Bush’s instructions, Boehner moved the bill to the House

floor on a 41–7 committee vote. Within the committee, all but six Republicans voted for the bill,

although some insisted that they did so purely so that Bush could have an early legislative

victory. The committee process in the House was an extremely important stage for the

movement of the No Child Left Behind legislation; because Representatives Boehner and Miller

were so heavily involved in the shaping of the legislation with an emphasis on compromise,

many of the highly divisive education issues were able to be weeded out. “In the end, none of

the hot-button party priorities that had made progress impossible in 2000 made it out of

committee in 2001: Republicans got neither vouchers nor block grants; Democrats got additional

funding for neither class-size reduction nor school construction” (Mycoff and Pika 2008, 47).

Defeated within committee, vouchers quickly reemerged as a significant problem for

Republicans and the passage of the bill. Republicans in support of vouchers argued that

vouchers may be the only way for disadvantaged children to leave failing schools in hopes of a

better education. Democrats and moderate Republicans countered that the amount of federal aid

provided to families would not be enough to make a sizable difference but they would take

valuable resources away from the public schools that needed the funding the most. Richard

Armey, Majority Leader, proposed two voucher provisions to be included in the bill, but both

votes were defeated on the House floor. “[T]he key to passage in the House was defeating

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Armey’s amendments to the committee-approved bill, which didn’t contain vouchers” (DeBray

2006, 94).

Testing was the next most contentious issue within the No Child Left Behind legislation

on both the Democratic and Republican sides. Within the House and Senate, liberal Democrats,

supporting the view of the teachers’ unions, argues that tests were being overused and were

unfair to disadvantaged children” (McGuinn 2006, 175). Of course, teachers unions and the

National Education Association expressed disdain for measuring teachers and schools on

students’ standardized test scores. On the House floor, an amendment was proposed to strip

mandatory testing from the bill by an alliance of very conservative Republican Peter Hoekstra

and very liberal Representative Barney Frank. Despite garnering a great deal of support for the

provision, it was defeated by a vote of 173–255 in which 52 Republicans voted against testing,

joined by 119 Democrats and two independents. “The testing provision was saved by heavy

White House lobbying and by the effects of Boehner and Miller in the House…who kept the

centrist coalition from collapsing under pressure from the left and right. Majority whip Tom

Delay… a staunch conservative, also noted at the time ‘that the majority of our members want to

support the president, and the centerpiece of his proposal is testing” (McGuinn 2006, 174).

There was also a significant bipartisan compromise in the House on Bush’s block grant proposal

by agreeing to fund a “demonstration program.” The funding formula was established as a $10

billion increase, which satisfied many House Democrats. The discussion of the bill on the House

floor was shaped significantly by the Rules Committee’s hand; they allowed for only 28

amendments to be considered for the bill and structured their consideration in a way likely to

produce the amendments’ defeat” (Mycoff and Pika 2008, 51). In addition to the leadership of

Representatives Boehner and Miller, President Bush played a large role in ensuring the bill’s

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passage in the House by holding private meetings with Republicans when they proposed

amendments to change the bill and threatened to vote against the bill when their amendments

were defeated. In the end, the bill passed in the House with a comfortable margin on May 23,

2001 by a vote of 384–45, influenced considerably by party loyalty and the desire to provide

President Bush with an early legislative win.

No Child Left Behind Through the Senate

In the Senate, Senators Kennedy and Gregg became Bush’s allies for passing the

legislation swiftly with the President’s reform expectations intact. The coalition created within

the Senate comprised of moderate Republicans, moderate Democrats, and Democrat regulars

resembled that of the coalition in the House, with different important actors arising throughout

the legislation process. The problems faced in the Senate were similar to those addressed in the

house: vouchers, testing, cost of the bill. Moreover, the definition of adequate yearly progress

became the major political issue on the floor of the Senate.

The legislation began in the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee

(HELP), but the major contentious issues within the bill were not worked out until it reached the

Senate floor (Mycoff and Pika 2008, 51). Rather than confronting many of the major legislative

problems in committee, the HELP committee did not resolve the politically contentious issues

and instead left them to be resolved on the Senate floor. The lack of resolutions administered by

the HELP committee in the Senate was one of the major differences between the two Chambers.

After Senator Jim Jeffords defected from the Republican Party in late May and began to caucus

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with the Democrats, Senator Kennedy became the HELP committee chair and the bill’s manager.

Kennedy was able to persuade more Democrats to support of the bill by encouraging increased

consideration for Democratic amendments on the Senate floor. An important example of this

was the increase in spending that was authorized on the floor of the Senate, which in truth was

“unlikely to be realized because they were inconsistent with the previously passed budget

resolution” (Mycoff and Pika 2008, 52).

Despite the fact that vouchers were not approved in the committee process, Senator

Gregg, representing the opinion of many major players in his party, strongly encouraged

vouchers to be added to the NCLB legislation on the Senate floor. Gregg proposed an

amendment that would have authorized $50 million per year to fund private school choice

initiatives in only three states; “[a]ttempting to meet voucher critics’ objections, Gregg designed

the proposal so that only children in schools that had been designated as low-performing for

three years would be eligible,” but the amendment failed by a vote of 41–58 (DeBray 2006, 95).

With vouchers out of the picture, Republicans focused their energy on ensuring that

supplemental services remained in the education reform plan. Democrats, and especially Senator

Kennedy, were aware that the defeat of the voucher amendment meant that Democrats must

compromise on a smaller Title I private services program in order to maintain bipartisan support

of the bill.

As some Republican Congress members saw it, “the supplemental services are a foot

under the door for vouchers. They’re going to show that these schools aren’t working properly,

and we’ll finally be able to show that the schools aren’t doing well. The assessments are going to

prove the same thing” (DeBray 2006, 96). Senator Gregg used this reasoning, supported by the

fact that vouchers could develop out of the supplemental services program with time, to get wary

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Republicans to vote in favor of the bill. While some Democrats responded negatively to the

addition of supplemental services, the reasoning that programs such as Head Start and America

Reads made use of some private contracting out of services appeased them. In addition,

Democrats negotiated a cap of 15% on spending that could be used for supplemental services

(DeBray 2006, 97). Within committee, Republican members were able to maintain funding for

supplemental services within the legislation, which would provide federal aid for private

services.

The No Child Left Behind legislation nearly fell apart over the strict definition of

Adequate Yearly Progress, in a lengthy discussion deemed “hell week” by Senate staffers.

Governors had been pressuring the White House to weaken the requirements of Adequate Yearly

Progress, telling the Bush Administration that it would not be possible to meet the requirements

laid out by the legislation, which required that every disaggregated group identified by the school

score proficient in math and reading standardized tests in 10 years, or the school would be

labeled as failing. Senator Jeffords fueled this view, supporting it with evidence that a majority

of schools, including wealthy schools and those that invest a great deal in education, would be

deemed as failing under the bill’s formula. “The Congressional Research Service released a

study in August that examined the Senate bill and concluded that the vast majority of schools in

Texas, North Carolina, and Maryland would have been labeled ‘failing’ under its definition…

Since Texas and North Carolina were considered models of how annual testing and

accountability ought to work, Congressional aides argued that these findings were cautionary

(DeBray 2006, 98).

With many Congresspeople eager to reduce the testing requirements, Sandy Kress

worked with Senators Gregg and Kennedy to rework the formula to appease Jeffords and his

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supporters. “The new language, as worked and then reworked for a week by Kress and Senate

aides, required at least a 1 percent improvement in test scores each year per group. However,

progress would be judged over a three-year period and the scores of the lowest achieving

students would be weighted more heavily, giving schools credit for closing the achievement gap”

(Rudalevige 2003, 38). Despite the negative feedback received about the new formula being

called unworkable, convoluted, and impossible, the bill kept moving forward at Sandy Kress’s

urging. The adjusted adequate yearly progress definition worked out in the Senate did not align

with that of the House, so the bill moved forward with the knowledge that the accountability

discrepancies would have to be worked out in a conference committee. The bill was passed in

the Senate on June 14 with a vote of 91–8, a clear testament to the bipartisan compromise that

took place on the Senate floor and the unity Republicans wanted to express toward their new

president.

No Child Left Behind: Conference Committee

In early July, the congressional leadership named twenty-five senators and fourteen

representatives to serve on the No Child Left Behind legislative conference committee. The

conference was put together to settle “approximately 2,750 differences” between the versions of

the legislation passed by the House and the Senate (Mycoff and Pika 2008, 52). The conference

committee began to meet right before the annual summer recess, but the terrorist attacks on

September 11 put a temporary hold on their plans to complete the legislation. Secretary Paige

addressed this openly: “The events of September 11th didn’t make an education bill less

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important, it made it more important. Education is a national security issue. This is not

something we can put on the shelf and come back to later” (DeBray 2006, 117). This opinion,

shared among members of the Conference Committee, encouraged the members to work together

with the President to pass a legislation signifying the country’s unity. Some of the thousands of

discrepancies were as simple as wording, while three main matters instigated large debates: the

definition of adequate yearly progress, authorized spending levels for the bill, and funding for the

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

The original bill’s Congressional leaders, Boehner and Kennedy, were also the arbitrators

of final definition of adequate yearly progress. “The terms of agreement were that states would

have to design a plan to raise students in all racial and ethnic subgroups to get all students to a

‘proficient’ level in reading and math within twelve years… States would set cut scores

corresponding to three performance levels—basic, proficient, and advanced—as well as the

initial goals for target percentages of students to be proficient on state reading and math tests”

(DeBray 2006, 119). States were required to take corrective action in schools that did not make

adequate yearly progress for four or more years, these actions included: imposing a new

curriculum within the school, turning the school into a charter school, replacing school

administrators, or closing a school. Even after reaching a political resolution over adequate

yearly progress, the definition of failing under NCLB would prove to be extremely important in

the future of the bill’s implementation, impact, and measurable success.

The final funding for the bill was settled at $26.5 billion for the following fiscal year and

Title I specifically would receive a $5 billion increase in fiscal year 2003 (DeBray 2006, 118).

Funding for the IDEA, or the Harkin-Hagel act as it had become known in Congress, was

defeated by the Conference committee despite all Democrats and several Republican Senators

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voting for the provision. The House Republicans banded together in opposition to the act, which

led to its defeat in Conference and Senator Jim Jeffords final vote against the NCLB legislation.

Jeffords wrote in the New York Times: “I am outraged… that a majority of my colleagues on the

conference committee voted not to include this amendment… It is better to approve no bill than

to approve a bad one” (DeBray 2006, 118). Despite strong opposition from Jeffords and other

powerful representatives, the bill went back to the full Chambers were it was approved in the

House 381–41, and in the Senate 87–10 (The U.S. Congress Votes Database 2001).

No Child Left Behind: Legislation Summary

No Child Left Behind was signed into law by President Bush on January 8, 2002 at

Hamilton High School in Hamilton, Ohio, the hometown of Representative Boehner. The bills

brief description reflects the main ideology of the bill: “ [t]o close the achievement gap with

accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind” (No Child Left Behind

2001). The two main goals of No Child Left Behind are to close the achievement gap between

students labeled as disadvantaged and their peers, and to implement accountability within the

education system as to ensure that federal aid is being used in an effective manner and to ensure

that every child receives a good education. “[C]losing the achievement gap between high- and

low-performing children, especially the achievement gaps between minority and non- minority

students, and between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers” lies at the heart

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of the bill, which is a natural extension of President Johnson’s mission when creating the

Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Abernathy 2007, 3). The creation of accountability

and testing programs were a means for the closing of the achievement gap to occur. The

legislation was deemed a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Act, despite the fact

that it significantly reshaped the entire ESEA legislation and expanded the scope of the federal

government’s role in education tremendously.

The final legislation, The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, was an extremely bulky bill,

totaling in more than 750 pages of legislation, 1,500 pages of regulations, and ten separate

reform titles. The largest take-away for many educators, students, and engaged communities was

the imposed state standardized testing for students. NCLB requires that by May of 2003, every

public school must test their student in grades 3–8 every year and then again for grades 10–12 in

language arts and mathematics. The state assessments must be developed to meet “challenging”

requirements and must be adopted by all public school districts within the state. “Under NCLB,

all children in a state must take the same test, but each state is permitted to design its own tests

and define what constitutes ‘proficiency’ on those tests. Although some legislators had

advocated for uniform national tests, granting the states discretion to test children was seen as a

necessary nod to the principle of federalism” (Graham 2010, 74).

Title I of No Child Left Behind was the primary title taken from President Johnson’s

ESEA. Title I of NCLB;s main purpose is to “ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and

significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency

on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.” It

mandates that schools create “high-quality” state standards to measure individual student’s

achievement and growth, and also mandates that schools create report cards of their growth

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numbers so that they can be compared to students’ progress within the entire state. The purpose

of Title I of NCLB remains consistent with Title I of ESEA, i.e., to improve the academic

achievement of the disadvantaged, but the Title expands the use of federal money well beyond

programs targeted at disadvantages students, and redirects the focus to aiding the creation,

implementation and administration of state standardized tests. Title I makes clear that its

purpose is to improve the achievement in schools overall “but especially for the disadvantaged.”

In order to achieve the ambitious goal of closing the achievement gap and ensuring that

all children reach proficiency on state assessments, Title I outlines dozens of financial programs

authorized under the legislation. Some of the most notably are: Local Educational Agency

Grants, which disperse funds to local agencies within states that provide services such as tutoring

and reading help. This is aligned with the supplemental services programs approved by

Congress, which give private agencies federal aid to assist schools in increasing students’

academic achievement. The programs very important to President Bush are the Reading First,

Early Reading First, Even Start, and Improving Literacy Through School Libraries programs.

Reading First and Early Reading First programs intend to benefit low-achieving, disadvantaged

students who are in need of reading assistance in order to achieve on the state-wide reading

assessments. Even Start appropriations are targeted at long-income families for adult literacy

and adult basic education programs. Lastly, Improving Literacy Through School Libraries aims

to increase funding to school libraries to assist disadvantaged students to improve their literacy

skills. Appropriations are outlined for the education of migratory children, prevention and

intervention programs for neglected, delinquent and at-risk students, as well as for federal

activities such as school improvement programs and funding for technology grants. All of these

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funding channels were a means to reach the bill’s desired end of having all students reach

proficiency or better in the core academic areas by 2014.

Title I funding is determined by four different distribution formulas, the Basic Grant,

Concentration Grant, Targeted Assistance Grant, and the Education Finance Incentive Grant.

The Basic Grant allocates money to Local Education Agencies (LEAs) which disperse the funds

to schools based on the number of poor children they serve. “Any school district with at least 10

poor children and 2 percent of its students in poverty receives funding through the Basic Grant

formula, so almost all school districts, even very affluent school districts, get at least some Title I

funding through this formula” (Federal Education Budget Project 2013). The Basic Grant

resembles the Title I funding created by the 1965 ESEA because it resembles a block grant for

states in that it does not have narrow funding targets, and it goes to almost all of the school

districts in the country. The Concentration Grant is also determined by the number of poor

children within a district. To receive Concentration Grant funding, a school district must have

15% of its children living in poverty, or 6,500 poor students, whichever is less. Concentration

Grant money is in addition to Basic Grant funding, and the same amount of funding is received

per poor child within every school district.

The Targeted Assistance Grant provides more funding per child as a school district’s

number of poor children increases. “Each additional child in poverty above 38 percent brings a

district 4 times as much Title I funding as each poor child up to 16 percent of children in poverty.

Each additional child in poverty beyond 35,515 brings a district 3 times as much Title I funding

as its first 691 children in poverty” (Federal Education Budget Project 2013). This grant

addresses the concern that it costs more to educate students in schools with high concentrations

of students living in poverty. The last form of funding, the Education Finance Incentive Grant,

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takes into account state’s school funding formulas and the percentage of per capita income spent

on education. It rewards “good school finance states,” i.e., those that spend more money on

education and distribute the wealth equitably, and “doubly target funds on high poverty school

districts in "bad school finance states" that inequitably distribute state and local education

funding” (Federal Education Budget Project 2013). In the 2002 fiscal year, 69% of Title I

funding was distributed through Basic Grants, 13% through Concentrated, 10% through

Targeted, and 8% through Incentive (Federal Education Budget Project 2013).

In addition to requiring states to create their own assessments, “[a] sample of 4th and 8th

graders in each state must participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress

(NAEP) in reading and math every other year to provide a point of comparison for the state's

results on its own tests. Test results must include individual student scores and be reported by

race, income, and other categories to measure not just overall trends, but also gaps between, and

progress of, various subgroups” (McGuinn 2006, 180). The reporting of NAEP scores is coupled

with “report cards,” issued by all schools, which make their students’ test scores available to the

public.

State administrations are given funding to carry out the administrative duties outlined in

the legislation, especially in the creation and administration of state standards, which are

undoubtedly extensive and unprecedented. “State education officials were concerned about

being able to meet the expanded mandates on such short notice, but they generally were

supportive of the overall NCLB approach, especially the additional attention to improving the

achievement of disadvantaged children and the emphasis on teacher quality” (Vinovskis 2009,

173). The legislation required that by 2005–2006, states have “highly qualified teachers” in

every classroom where core academic subjects are taught; in addition, all teachers hired with

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Title I funding must be “highly qualified,” meaning that they must be certified within the state,

hold a bachelor’s degree, and display competence in the subject matter and teaching (McGuinn

2006, 178).

In addition to requiring that all students become academically proficient by 2014, The No

Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires that schools make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in

students’ test scores. Schools submit their test scores in the form of report cards in which they

report assessment scores of many aggregated groups, such as African-American students,

English Language Learners, and Latino students. States are instructed to create their own

academic standards and performance levels that they deem “proficient” and “advanced” student

achievement. Adequate Yearly Progress is measured by how well students progress toward the

set definition of ‘proficiency,’ rather than measuring the student’s change in performance over

time. “Educational experts believe that a key design flaw in NCLB is how the ‘adequate yearly

progress’ (AYP) goal is defined… Experts generally prefer ‘growth-based’ measurements of

student achievement because they reflect the impact of teachers and curricula better than the

absolute score” (Graham 2010, 77).

If schools do not meet their AYP goals in three consecutive school years, schools will be

required to use up to 5% of their Title I funding to offer supplemental educational services, such

as after school tutoring. After a fourth consecutive year of failing to make AYP, the school

district is given the authority to fire staff and to implement a new curriculum. If the school

continues to fail after five consecutive years, the state has the power to take over the school,

reconstitute it as a charter school, and/or the school mark the school as failing and shut it down.

As scholar Michael Cohen notes,

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 NCLB reflects significant impatience in Washington with the pace of state-led

improvement and, in particular, with the slow pace at which states have instituted tough

accountability systems. The legislation contains new and highly prescriptive testing and

accountability requirements for states…and spells out in more detail than previously the

consequences for schools that fail to make adequately yearly progress toward this goal.

These provisions substantially shift the historic balance of federal vs. state control over

education (McGuinn 2006, 182).

With the development of the major components of No Child Left Behind throughout the

campaign trial and his first few days of the presidency, as well as the creation of the education

blueprint and the coalition of supporters in Congress, President Bush demonstrated an advanced

expertise in policy making and the policy process. The amount of bipartisan agreement and

compromise that occurred through the development and passage of No Child Left Behind

reflects, if nothing else, an example of a highly cooperative and compelling moment in the

American public policy process.

Comparing the Bills

In order to pass both the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and the No

Child Left Behind Act of 2001, President Johnson and President Bush had to create bipartisan

coalitions that supported their bills and forge compromises with various political views in

Congress and with important education interest groups. At the heart of both bills is the effort to

increase the educational opportunity for disadvantaged students. Throughout Johnson’s

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presidency, he emphasized the integral connection between education and poverty reduction—in

both a political move and a sincere belief, President Johnson posed education reform as an

essential part of the War on Poverty. President Bush also felt a strong connection to education

and its ability to uplift the nation and ‘close the achievement gap.’ Both President’s had personal

connections to education growing up—while Johnson was inspired by his experience growing up

in poverty, President Bush’s mother and wife encouraged Bush to invest in early childhood

reading and literacy programs. In order to achieve their legislative goals, Presidents Johnson and

Bush interacted with Congress and various interest groups in significantly different ways.

To begin the process of adopting education reform legislation, President Johnson

convened a task force comprised of policy wonks and previous employees of the executive

office, President Bush on the other hand, called a meeting of experienced Congressmen from

both parties to forge a coalition of support for No Child Left Behind. The President’s approaches

to presenting Congress with legislation reflected this difference—while Johnson ordered his task

force to write a complete bill with all of the major titles written out in detail, President Bush

presented Congress with a short legislative blueprint of his main reform goals and let the

Chambers of Congress fill in much of the legislation’s content. This reflects a major difference

in the Presidents’ standing toward Congress; President Bush faced an extremely divided

Congress in which the Senate was evenly split and the House of Representatives was nearly the

same, forcing him to seek a bipartisan education bill. On the other hand, President Johnson’s

Democratic party held a 2/3 majority in both Houses, making it possible for him to be much

more enforcing with his reform efforts.

However, the work done by Johnson’s task force to garner support for the Elementary and

Secondary Education Act was extensive and focused primarily on interest groups. The task force

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meetings with the Catholic Welfare Conference, major Catholic school leaders, and the National

Education Association were the primary means for shaping the ESEA in a way that would satisfy

important political leaders. Without these meetings, Francis Keppel and the education task force

may have developed a bill that would have garnered more resistance in Congressional hearings

and in floor debate; but because Keppel orchestrated these compromises before the bill went to

Congress, many of the political contentious issues had already been solved. This was done

primarily by Francis Keppel’s Title I funding formula, which took into account poor students in

Catholic schools when counting the number of poor students within school districts (which

satisfied the Catholics), but did not provide direct federal funding to these private schools (which

satisfied the National Education Association). Sweeteners were added for both groups, but the

main focus of the bill from its development to the present is Title I funding and the formula to

disperse it.

Of course, President Johnson was not entirely without political issues within Congress,

particularly with maintaining states’ rights in the education system, which both Republicans and

Southern Democrats held at the center of their political ideology. In order to work toward

passage of the bill, Johnson gave up the idea of general aid to education very early on. Despite

the fact that the education community had been fighting for general aid from the federal

government, President Johnson and his task force identified it as politically unfeasible. This

created an important precedent for the federal government’s role in the education system. The aid

created through Title I of the ESEA was directed toward poor students and not school districts or

states, and the states were given a great deal of autonomy to decide how to spend the money in

order to garner support from Southern Democrats and Republicans for the bill. The formula for

Title I funding was categorical in theory, as it is aimed specifically at poor students, but it

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became general in practice, as 94% of school districts received funding under the 1965 Title I

program (McGuinn and Hess 2005, 295).

This created a precedent that allowed federal aid to be targeted at poor and disadvantaged

students within schools, but did not give the federal government much power to oversee the use

of the funds. A paradox is immediately apparent in this fact; the law itself recognized the need

for disadvantaged students to receive federal assistance to succeed in school, but it did not

propose how a school can or ought to go about instituting such programs. In addition, the Title

mandated that schools create programs to serve disadvantaged students, despite the fact that the

schools had historically struggled to create academic environments and programs that allowed

for disadvantaged students to succeed. By pursuing categorical aid over general aid, President

Johnson committed the President and Congress to better the academic achievement of poor and

disadvantaged children, i.e., those that had historically been falling behind in the education

system. But what the legislation did not do was purpose any sort of remedy or strong guidelines

for the use of the federal aid. By allowing states and school districts to create their own

programs that satisfied the little requirements created through the bill, the federal government

took on financial accountability for poor students’ success, but very little political muscle to

ensure that the programs created by states with Title I funds were successful or aligned with the

goal of the legislation.

This paradox remained important for presidents and politicians from the time of President

Johnson to the presidency of George W. Bush, and dozens of studies demonstrated that academic

achievement of poor and minority students was not increasing significantly (Vinovskis 1999,

190). President Bush began an extensive effort to reform the Elementary and Secondary

Education Act by changing the federal and state funding relationships created in the ESEA. The

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compromises President Bush forged were primarily with members of Congress. As a

conservative, Bush gave up the inclusion of vouchers in his education reform plan surprisingly

quickly, but he knew well that vouchers were politically tumultuous and far too divisive to fight

for. His speed in which he agreed to give up vouchers hints at President Bush’s true personal

commitment to getting No Child Left Behind passed and his ability to give up a central

conservative principle in favor of a larger reform effort.

His willingness to compromise on vouchers is not to say that he was willing to

compromise on all of his principles, however. Within the blueprint President Bush presented to

Congress, there were major principles he was unwilling to concede. Of these, testing and

accountability were central; so Bush’s largest area of compromise came in the definitions of

accountability and adequately yearly progress. No Child Left Behind demonstrates not only a

massive expansion of the federal government’s role in the education system, it represents a shift

in which the President and Congress turned the accountability for disadvantaged student’s

academic performance over to the states.

While the states remain answerable to the federal government for aid, NCLB ensures that

it is the responsibility of the state to raise their students test scores in order to receive federal aid.

“Although very similar to ESEA, NCLB takes the commitment to improving the educational

experiences of historically disadvantaged populations a step further. Provisions were added to

raise the bar of academic standards and hold state and local educational agencies accountable for

student achievement. More drastically, the new policy links federal funding to student

performance outcomes and imposes sanctions for low student performance” (Thomas and Brady

2005, 56). Linking federal funding to student performance outcome represents a seismic change

in the relationship between the federal and state governments. The states become massively

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accountable to the federal government, and the students’ outcome is the primary measure for this

accountability.

What did Bush Keep from the ESEA?

George W Bush used the ESEA as a protection for the radical expansion of the federal

government’s role in the education system; by posing NCLB as a reauthorization of the ESEA, it

was much more politically feasible that the legislation would pass without a large state’s rights

backlash. Because the ESEA set such a strong, unwavering precedent, President Bush was able

to defy his party’s core ideals to create a legislation that used made the federal government a

strong central player in the American education system.

The power of the ESEA came almost purely from Title I, even with a total of six titles in

the bill, the bill’s legacy lived on in the categorical funding that it guaranteed for public schools.

So naturally the main connection between the ESEA and NCLB rests in the Title I programs.

While ESEA proposed one major Title I program in the form of “leave it on the stump and run”

categorical aid to states, No Child Left Behind breaks the Title I funding into four categories.

The Basic Grant provided by ESEA is determined by the number of poor students in a district,

and it is almost identical to the Title I funding created by ESEA in 1965. However, the three

other forms of aid represent departures from Johnson and Keppel’s creation of a formula that

aimed to help disadvantaged students but in reality, gave aid to 94% of the school districts. As

stated previously, in order to obtain the votes needed to pass the ESEA, Francis Keppel worked

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to make the Title I funding formula reach as many districts as possible. In addition, President

Johnson did not change the requirements for receiving impact aid, which allowed wealthy

districts to continue to benefit the most from the program.

While the Basic Grant formula continues to provide aid to reach as many school districts

as possible, Concentration Grants and Target Grants are intended to reach schools with higher

numbers of disadvantaged students. Concentration Grants go to school districts with more than

15% of students from low-income families, while Target Grants provide more money as the

concentration of low-income students rise (Federal Education Budget Project 2013). These two

grants represent an acknowledgement on the part of the Bush administration and Congress that

the ESEA’s simple Title I funding formula was not as beneficial for low-income districts as it set

out to be. In addition, the expansion of the Title I program demonstrated a further commitment

to improving the educational experience of low-income students. While this may seem like an

obvious point, it is essentially the most important take away from both the ESEA and NCLB.

Johnson’s passionate commitment to fighting poverty through education created an almost

continuous expansion of Title I funding and program depth.

Under NCLB, if 40% of students within a school are eligible to receive Title I assistance,

the school is given the authority to use their Title I funds on schoolwide programs rather than

supplementary services aimed solely at the recipients of the federal aid (PL 107-110 2001). This

effort has both positive and negative connotations; if viewed differently, this means that a school

is allowed to direct their federal aid to all students, 60% of which may not qualify as

disadvantaged or low-income and in no need of extra assistance. However, it may lessen the use

of pullout programs—in which students identified as “high need” are taken out of their regular

classroom to receive focused assistance—which have negative effects on children’s learning in

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other classes as well as a number of complex social effects on class and student dynamics. In

fact, a study conducted in 2011 of 12 school districts to examine the way in which Title I funds

were being used in school found that:

Nearly all of the schools in the 12 districts… used Title I funds for schoolwide programs,

rather than for targeted assistance programs. Schoolwide programs offer flexibility by

allowing schools to fund a comprehensive schoolwide plan to upgrade all instruction in a

high poverty school without distinguishing between eligible and ineligible children and

also make it easier for schools to coordinate the use of Title I and other funds. While

schoolwide programs offer additional fiscal flexibility when schools combine separate

program resources into a single accounting fund, the school districts we selected for

review continued to track the Title I dollars to individual eligible activities, even as they

took advantage of the flexibility to serve all children (U.S. Governmental Accountability

Office 2011, 13).

While the use of this study in analysis may seem to be jumping ahead, it reflects a trend toward

using Title I aid for schoolwide programs. It may be important to speculate that if the study had

been conducted two or three years after the enactment of NCLB, the use of schoolwide programs

would probably not be almost universal as they had been in the 2011 study. The mere fact that

by 2011 “nearly all the schools” in the 12 districts adopted schoolwide programs rather than

pullout programs reflects a movement toward schoolwide programs that must have been

happening years before the 2011 study took place.

This finding reflects a number of very important and intriguing things about both the

ESEA and NCLB. President Bush and Congress made the decision to allow 40% of low-income

students to be the governing number for whether schoolwide programs could be adopted by a

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school, allowing many more school districts to implement this practice. While this may be a

reflection of a conservative principle of flexibility and allowing the states and schools to have

increased freedom with federal funds, it also reflects an acknowledgement on the part of the

government that pullout programs were not especially beneficial for students. The schools’

implementation of schoolwide programs using Title I funds also can reflect the rejection of

supplemental, pullout programs, especially as many teachers and administrators want to avoid

programs that make students miss class time.

At the time of the implementation of No Child Left Behind, “[t]he National Assessment

of Educational Progress (NAEP) continued to show a significant gap between the various

disadvantaged subgroups and all other students” (Shaul and Ganson 2005, 151). The prevailing

research that indeed the ESEA had not succeeded in closing the achievement gap or reducing it

significantly led Congress to seek an alternative way to direct the funds to schools, especially

within the most important title of the program. While the ESEA began as an effort to target

disadvantaged students and provide them with additional federally-funded programs, NCLB

shifts the focus from targeting the aid to individual low-income students and focuses it on

low-income schools to use the aid for schoolwide programs. While this may be a result more of

the law’s practice rather than its intent, it reflects an agreement on the part of schools that

schoolwide programs may be more beneficial for students.

Interesting, NCLB continues the practice of providing poor students in private schools

with federal aid through LEAs despite the absence of a strong Catholic interest group. The law

states that Title I “requires a participating LEA to provide eligible children attending private

elementary and secondary schools, their teachers, and their families with Title I services or other

benefits that are equitable to those provided to eligible public school children, their teachers, and

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their families” (PL 107-110 2001). Republican Congress men and women were most likely

supportive of this measure, and it is fair to speculate that there was not a strong political backlash

from Democrats because it had been in law since 1965.

Titles I and II of the ESEA directed funds at State Education Agencies to fund the

purchase and distribution of libraries, instructional materials, and supplemental services provided

by school districts. In the original ESEA, Titles II and III were meant both to benefit public and

private schools through the stipulation that a chosen state agency would determine what schools

would receive supplementary educational materials. President Bush compounded these titles to

be included within his Title I provision, which does not outright direct aid to private schools, but

does guarantee grant aid to low-income school districts for proposed programs, aimed at efforts

such as increased reading ability. The NCLB legislation turns away from a focus on resources

(libraries, books, instructional materials) and instead purposes specific programs. The Early

Reading First Grant program in the NCLB is an especially important example of this shift. In

order to receive a Reading First Grant, an “eligible applicant” must submit an application to the

Secretary of Education outlining the children who will be served by the program, how the

program will help these children, and how the use of instructional material will align with

“scientifically based reading research on early language acquisition” (PL 107-110 2001). In

addition to outlining the many things the program must be able to do, the legislation goes as far

as to define certain learning targets that the programs must meet. As an example, the bill reads

that the program must help to develop “understanding that written language is composed of

phonemes and letters each representing one or more speech sounds that in combination make up

syllables, words, and sentences” (PL 107-110 2001).

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 The amount of specificity that this measure calls for is remarkable. Johnson wouldn’t

have dreamed of putting such a highly-prescriptive measure in the ESEA! It is an interesting

thought experiment to imagine how starkly different this section reads from the content of the

original ESEA to begin to comprehend the growth and transformation of the legislation and the

federal government’s role in the education system. In reference back to the original research

question of whether George W. Bush’s NCLB was a change of direction or a continuation of

Johnson’s original policy, we can begin to see similarities in the basic goal and orientation of

Title I, but extreme differences in the government’s role in encouraging programs and enforcing

testing as accountability for receiving federal aid.

The Growth of Federal Involvement

Terry Moe, at the time of President Bush’s Presidency, wrote that accountability in the

education system was an easy sell to the public. Over the ten years leading up to President

Bush’s presidency, accountability was gaining momentum as a method for school reform, and as

a Republican president, President Bush was able to sell a legislation such as NCLB without

losing the support of his major Republican constituencies. Moe writes that “[t]he movement for

school accountability is essentially a movement for more effective top-down control of the

schools” (2003, 81). In the same way that businesses reward their employees when they make

sales or acquire new clients and oversee their work to ensure that they are not working against

the goals of the organization, NCLB creates similar incentives within the education system.

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Because the federal government is contributing money to the education system, they feel that

they should see results, and a concrete way of seeking these results is through testing students.

Educational success is not only of financial concern for the American government, it is also

extremely important for the security of a nation, the continuation of democratic principles, the

well-being and success of individuals, and the functioning of the American economy.

The addition of federal aid to the education system created a degree of financial interest

in the success of states’ education systems, but on a much larger and arguably more important

level, the federal government acknowledges the importance of a well-functioning education

system for the development of the nation and the strength of the American democracy. The

federal government and the policy makers central to the passing of NCLB proposed testing,

increased teacher standards, incentives and disincentives to ensure that school’s are using federal

funding to reform their education systems. Throughout the reauthorizations of the Elementary

and Secondary Education Act, it is clear that the federal government has not issued specific

prescriptions detailing the exact ways the education system must be reformed in order to achieve

results. “They do not know how to produce student achievement, nor do they necessarily know

student achievement when they see it. But they must try to design a control structure that gets a

resistant group of employees to apply their expertise in all the right ways to generate the desired

outcomes” (Moe 2003, 86). By requiring standardized testing to be adopted by schools in order

for states to receive Title I funds, the federal government exercises its power to oversee the use

of federal funds and the education of the country’s young people without telling the states how to

educate. In the simplest of terms, the federal government has a say in the education system too;

one cannot expect funding without some sort of stipulation.

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 The heart of the NCLB legislation still encompasses the effort to increase the academic

achievement of disadvantaged students, supplemented with required testing to measure whether

or not this academic improvement is happening. In its simplest form, the added accountability in

NCLB is a fairly natural progression of the 1965 ESEA. Phyllis McClure, a longtime member of

the Title I Independent Review Panel said, “NCLB has grabbed the education community’s

attention like no previous ESEA reauthorization. It has really upset the status quo in state and

local offices and has shaken the complacency of educators and parents about their schools’

performance. For the first time, districts and school officials are actually being required to take

serious and urgent action in return for federal dollars” (McGuinn 2006, 183). NCLB established

the federal muscle to ensure that the federal aid was being used in a way that was indeed

benefiting disadvantaged students. The federal government made it clear to the states that it was

their job to ensure that student’s were learning and achieving, a step away from the message

created by ESEA in 1965, which gave states with disadvantaged students funding without clearly

defined expectations

The extension of federal involvement in the education system with the enactment of

NCLB is vast. At the time of the implementation of ESEA, the Department of Education had

little power to enforce the stipulations that came with Title I funding; however, with the

evolution of NCLB, the Department of Education on both the federal and state levels became

extremely important actors for the oversight of the law. NCLB mandated that states create

curriculum standards and standardized tests for grades three through eight quickly, and the law

threatened to cut off funding for non-compliance with the creation and implementation dates

(Parker 2009, 189). It was the job of the state departments of education to oversee these cut off

dates, ensure that schools adopted tests, and assess the test’s quality to ensure that schools were

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abiding by the rules of the law. The implementation of NCLB was a monumental task, and like

with the ESEA, the Department of Education was largely unprepared for such a large overhaul of

the norm (Parker 2009, 189).

Under NCLB, the Department of Education was not given the power to issue regulations

on adequate yearly progress and failing schools until 2002, when it became clear that many states

would not make adequate yearly progress in the way it was defined by the legislation. “[A] large

number of schools across the country have been identified as ‘in need of improvement’ for

failing to meet AYP targets. A report on state implementation of NCLB released by the Center

on Education Policy in March 2005 concluded that though student test scores rose and

achievement gaps narrowed in a majority of states and districts, large numbers of schools

remained in “in need of improvement” status, and state and district officials have a number of

concerns about the law going forward” (McGuinn 2006, 184).

The use of federal testing in the education system is understandable. One of the major

appeals of testing is that it makes “achievement” measurable. While there is much debate

surrounding the government’s definition of achievement being based on students’ success on

standardized tests, the ambiguity in the definition is politically inevitable. Many educators and

politicians have acknowledged the importance of issuing standardized tests to gauge how well

students are learning across the board, but many educators also stress that standardized tests

cannot be held to such a high level of importance. Immediately upon enactment, NCLB received

a sizable backlash from states. In fact, three states’ teachers unions, backed by the National

Education Association, went as far to sue the Department of Education for what they saw as the

use of unfunded mandates. “Insufficient resources to support the reform, misunderstandings

about the state context of education, and lack of knowledge about the challenges of educating

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disadvantaged students represented obstacles to meeting the regulations of NCLB” (Thomas and

Brady 2005, 58). However, the unfunded mandate argument was rejected by the Supreme Court

because of the fact that states can opt out of creating standardized tests in return for a total loss of

Title I funding.

Moreover, the largest and most striking problems with NCLB that have received the most

criticism comes from the strict definition of adequate yearly progress, which many states have

failed to meet year after year. Because AYP does not measure individual students growth from

year to year and rather measures progress compared to a set number, educators and politicians

alike have spoken out against adequate yearly progress. The expectation that all students would

reach proficiency by the year 2014 represented an unattainable vision that reflects President

Bush and Congress’ hope that the education system could be completely restructured and

reformed in just 13 years—a demonstration of profound optimism and a great deal of ignorance

for how truly vast education reform needs to be.

Summary

With every reauthorization of the ESEA since 1965, there was a continued movement for

refining, refocusing, and clarifying Title I aid to states and school districts. By the time President

Bush was in office, the need to alter the ESEA bill significantly had become clear; Title I was not

achieving what it set out to achieve and the progress that was being made was not happening fast

or strongly enough for lawmakers to continue to justify the use of federal money in such a way.

In 1998, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported “43% of African Americans,

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36% of Hispanics, 35% of American Indians/Alaska Natives, and 25% of Asian

Americans/Pacific Islanders were below the basic level of competency in reading, in comparison

with 17% of Whites… [B]illions of dollars had already been allocated to ESEA programs

without the goals of the policy being met. Congress wanted more accountability and results for

the federal funds spent on ESEA programs” (Thomas and Brady 2005, 55).

Title I establishes that every state that receives funding must create “academic

assessments and other indicators described in the State plan to review annually the progress of

each school served under this part to determine whether the school is making adequate yearly

progress” (No Child Left Behind Title I Sec. 1116). Local Education Agencies must review the

school’s progress annually to ensure that schools receiving aid are making adequately early

progress; if they do not, varying levels of sanctions are imposed. The requirement to institute

these sanctions and the resulting penalties that may occur if states do not comply with the law or

if schools do not meet adequate yearly progress is an acknowledgement that states must do better

to educate poor students and to close the achievement gap. The enforcement of such a claim is

surprising coming from a Republican President, since the party’s image is a defense of states’

rights and limited federal government. NCLB expresses a traditionally anti-Republican view:

the federal government must intervene to force the states to change their education practices

because what they are currently doing does not match the intent of the original Elementary and

Secondary Education Act. It introduces new elements, but it certainly builds upon the vision

created by President Johnson in 1965.

The move away from simply providing federal funding to schools to mandating

standardized testing has had a transformative, unprecedented impact on the education system and

teachers’ practices. Throughout the policy process, teachers’ unions and leaders spoke out

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vehemently against standardized testing for a multitude of reasons. Major educators and

education scholars have spoken out against No Child Left Behind since its inception; of these,

Diane Ravitch is one of the most fervent and well-known spokespeople against testing and

choice. In her book The Death and Life of the Great American Public School System: How

Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, Ravitch writes about how the standards

movement severely weakens the quality of education in America and leads politicians and the

public to focus on the wrong aspects of learning. Ravitch writes that while states were able to

create their own standardized tests, the tests do not help to raise curricula standards within

schools and encourages teachers to “teach to the test.” Ravitch writes, “the new reforms had

everything to do with structural changes and accountability, and nothing at all to do with the

substance of learning. Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of

education” (2011, 22).

However, when looking at the transformation of Title I funding by the federal

government, accountability in fact makes a large deal of sense. Despite what many NCLB critics

care to believe, NCLB evolved out of a bipartisan coalition of politicians and actors that agreed

on the fact that states needed to be accountable for the funding they were receiving from the

federal government in order to make states accountable for education reform. You simply

cannot have one without the other. Fiscal accountability is needed in the form of testing in order

to determine a future track for serious structural education reform. The problems that have

developed out of No Child Left Behind, namely in state’s and school’s inability to meet adequate

yearly progress, represents the major flaw in the legislation. While it is useful data to know

which schools are unable to pass standardized tests, the information should be used for reform

purposes, not to punish or reprimand schools and states.

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 Despite their strong opposition to testing and their primary importance in the education

system, education experts, agencies, and teacher unions’ opinions were largely ignored by both

Presidents when crafting legislation. In the passing of No Child Left Behind, Senator Ted

Kennedy, historically aligned with teacher’s unions and interest groups, largely abandoned their

stance against testing to side with President Bush. “From the powerful senator that the groups

had always gone to, they got almost nothing” (DeBray 2006, 97). Teachers’ unions had

historically spoken out against standardized testing and holding teachers accountable for their

student’s test scores. The unions held the belief that tests are not a good measure of how well

students are learning, and that it is a mistake to measure student progress on yearly progress

made by disaggregated groups. In addition, in 1965, teachers unions and the National Education

Association campaigned for general aid to education rather than the categorical aid that was

developed by the ESEA; although it was not politically feasible, it is noteworthy that the major

voices of education experts were disregarded from the beginning of major education reform

efforts.

There are aspects of NCLB that do seem promising for education reform, and may have

received more support from teachers and teacher’s unions if they had been highlighted and

funded more adequately. Within the ten titles of NCLB, George W. Bush and the 107th Congress

created an extensive vision of holistic reform of the education system. Testing and

accountability bolster the funding for school reform programs geared toward language

instruction for immigrant students, safe and drug free schools, community learning centers, adult

education, teacher education, voluntary school choice programs for parents, funds for arts

education, and many more highly targeted programs. These reforms express a much more

holistic vision of education reform; one that is not only interested in raising student test scores

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but also improving the educational experience of students and their families. What is most

noteworthy perhaps is the lack of focus put on this dozens and dozens of program allotments and

rather the imposed standardized testing for all states. In many ways, this is a reflection of the

phenomenon noted in Carter’s ESEA reauthorization—that while many honorable programs are

proposed by the legislations, they are under funded and incapable of achieving the grand vision

that each title outlines.

Considering all of No Child Left Behind’s legislative failings, it is important to recognize

that while the legislation did not encourage deep curricular reform in schools to close the

achievement gaps, NCLB has provided educators and policymakers with extremely useful data.

Diane Ravitch asks the question, “How did our elected officials become convinced that

measurement and data will fix the schools?” and perhaps some politicians truly do believe that.

But the power of NCLB is in what the legislation has exposed. For policy makers, it has become

increasingly clear that achieving educational advancement for disadvantaged, poor, and minority

students is not easy to legislate or achieve simply through increased funding and strict

accountability. NCLB did not acknowledge nor take into account the multifaceted challenges that

‘closing the achievement gap’ entails, and a pure focus on numbers and testing progress will not

achieve the goal inherent in ESEA since its inception

However, Ravitch and many other education scholars fail to acknowledge that federal

education reform began purely as an effort to provide federal funding to schools. The Elementary

and Secondary Education Act provided the education system with what many education scholars

and teachers want from the federal government today—largely undefined aid. However, after

more than forty years of ESEA funds being targeted at schools, granted in smaller quantities than

needed, the funding was simply not working. This prompted President Bush and Congress to

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seek a new path for education reform—one grounded in empirical evidence of success in states

and within schools, and areas in need of serious improvement.

The heart of both the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and No Child Left

Behind raise challenging questions about the education system in America. Of these, Rod Paige,

Secretary of Education from 2001–2005 under President Bush asked, “After providing over $525

billion per year for education, what should American people expect from their investment?” and,

“Do we expect that, in this country, all children should be educated to high levels?” (Paige 2006,

462). Paige’s observations reflect the fact that No Child Left Behind has challenged the “basic

culture of our education system,” and in doing so, has instituted a wave of criticism aimed at the

law’s effects (Paige 2006, 462). However, the intent of the legislation is often lost in the many

valid criticisms of the state of the education system. Just as the ESEA was aimed to improve the

educational improvement for disadvantaged students and to make the education system more

equitable for all students, NCLB attempts to address the slow progress made in closing the

achievement gap and ensure accountability for the federal funding investment. After all, is it

farfetched to assume that students should be proficient in mathematics and reading

comprehension by the time they graduate high school? Do we as a country want all of our

students to have the skills to go onto college and successful careers?

While the concerns of the impact of No Child Left Behind in the education system are

often voiced by the very people who have to deal with the legislation and may be warranted, the

intent and primary goals of the legislation reflect a desire to improve the education system and to

ensure that students receive the skills they need in school to become active and involved citizens.

While the tests themselves and the high-stakes placed upon them may be flawed, the legislation

reflects a continued commitment to and reordering of the education system—a beneficial thing

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when, for decades, research has shown that the practices in many schools in the country do not

benefit students or improve the academic performance of students of color and those living in

poverty.

For policy makers, it has become increasingly clear that achieving educational

advancement for “disadvantaged,” poor, and minority students is not easy to legislate or achieve

simply through increased funding alone or strict accountability alone. NCLB did not

acknowledge nor take into account the multifaceted challenges that ‘closing the achievement

gap’ entails, and a pure focus on numbers and testing progress will not achieve the goal inherent

in ESEA since its inception. The fact that the ESEA began with an extremely large, yet

exceptionally important goal makes the legislation a particularly important one—and it will be

continue to be reauthorized, reworked, and refocused, but its central goal will remain steadfast. It

has taken the ESEA and the further reforms of NCLB to expose the realities of the American

education system, and it will take these two important legislations to move forward in finding a

more equitable solution to the system’s extreme inequalities and failings.

Postscript: Barack Obama, Race to the Top, and the Common Core

No Child Left Behind has been renewed by Congress since its enactment and continues to

function as the largest federal education policy, with Obama’s Race to the Top initiatives adding

another element to the mix. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), signed

into law by President Barack Obama February of 2009, aims to provide assistance to the

economy through job creation and investment in various social programs, such as education.

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One of the central features of the ARRA is a grant program called Race to the Top. The ARRA

outlines $4.35 billion for the Race to Top grants, to be rewarded on a competitive basis to

schools that have functioning education reform plans. Unlike the ESEA and NCLB, Race to the

Top grants are only given to states and school districts that can demonstrate plans for education

reform and track records of success (McGuinn 137, 2011). With the passage of the ARRA and

Race to the Top, the focus on education reform shifted away from imposing sanctions to offering

incentives, a demonstration that the expectations created in NCLB were both unfulfilled and

impractical

The Race to the Top initiative came out of Obama’s campaign against Republican

candidate John McCain in which he demonstrated his commitment to keeping the NCLB

legislation primarily in tact, while altering some of its provisions. Out of his criticism that No

Child Left Behind was under funded and built on ill-designed tests, Obama campaigned on the

promise that he would work with state Governors to redesign state standardized tests in order for

them to more accurately assess students weaknesses and provide sufficient funds for states and

schools to complete the reform needed to turn failing schools around (Sanchez 2008, NPR).

Obama has granted waivers to 41 states in the U.S. that have allowed them to forgo the

strict expectation that all of their students in the state become proficient in math and reading by

the year 2014. The granting of these waivers is a crucial acknowledgement on the part of the

President that the No Child Left Behind Act established unattainable goals that states should not

be penalized for not meeting. Because of Congress’ inability to reauthorize and reform the No

Child Left Behind Act, Obama began to offer waivers to states immediately after taking office.

The waivers allow states to forgo the goal for complete proficiency in exchange for a detailed

reform plan focused on college and career readiness and teacher and school evaluations, a

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departure from NCLB’s main focus on using student’s test scores to assess the quality of teachers

and schools.

The Common Core standards are another aspect that have come out of Obama’s NCLB

reform efforts and his campaign promise to revitalize state standards tests. The Governor’s

Association, along with the Council of Chief State School Officers and other state leaders have

worked together since 2009 to develop the Common Core standards, a new initiative to develop

nation-wide standards for definition of proficiency in various academic subjects (Core Standards

2014). The Common Core aims to provide two levels of academic standards: college and career

readiness, i.e, what students are expected to learn in order to graduate college and go on to a

career; and K-12 standards, which reflects an adaptation of current state standards practices to

create uniform, accepted standardized tests for every grade in kindergarten through 12th grade to

be completed by all students in the states. The Common Core standards reflect an extension and

reevaluation of No Child Left Behind Law; while the adoption of Common Core tests are

currently voluntary, they represent another major development in education reform and the

federal oversight of standardized testing. The implementation of the Common Core tests have

just begun. Students in 36 states began ‘field testing’ the new state standards the week of March

24, 2014, to gauge the quality of the tests and student’s performance on them. Student’s

performance will not be graded on the field tests, rather, they are being used for the benefit of

states and the developers of the Common Core to conduct a more research based, complete

implementation of the tests. This represents a growth in testing practices on the part of the state

and federal governments, which granted some states waivers from completing this year’s state

standards, which would have fallen at the same time and caused students to be tested twice.

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 No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the new addition of the Common Core

standards all aim to provide federal control of an extremely fragmented education system.

[W]e have 50 different state education systems that collectively contain approximately

14,000 school districts and almost 130,000 schools. States have developed vastly

different education systems, and tremendous variation in school quality exists within and

among states. Although the United States now has clear national goals in education, it

lacks a national system of education within which to pursue these goals, and the federal

government can only indirectly attempt to drive reform through the grant-in-aid system

(McGuinn 138, 2011).

This fragmentation explains much of the inherent limits in federal education reform; no matter

how well articulated the federal government’s reform goals may be, they are nearly impossible to

fully implement and oversee. The creation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and

the limits to the power of the Department of Education continue to have important significance

for education policy today. The implementation of NCLB further demonstrated this lack of

power within the state departments of education in monitoring compliance with the bill and

encouraging reform among school districts and schools that continually fall behind.

The development and implementation of the Common Core offers a sign of the future of

federal education reform. Although the Common Core standards are currently optional for states

to adopt, just as standardized tests were in the Clinton years, they may become the new federal

mandated standardized tests to be adopted by all states in the near future. This demonstrates both

a prolonged commitment to standardized tests as a means to measure school and state education

progress, and a further commitment on the part of the federal government to oversee education

reform with a heavy hand and strict standards.

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