The Era of Education: The Presidents and the Schools, 1965-2001

Introduction

Introduction When President Thomas Jefferson spoke in 1802 of a“wall of separation,”he was alluding to the invisible barrier that the First Amendment had created between government and organized religion. The founder of the University of Virginia could just as easily have been talking about education. The nation’s founders viewed it as private, elitist, and virtually absent from the four-month, fivethousand -word debates that produced the U.S. Constitution.1 Today in the United States, elementary and secondary education is public as well as private, required of all Americans, and cherished by most. Politicians at every level of government mention education at least as often as they invoke the nation’s founders. While paying homage to the tradition of local control of elementary and secondary schools that has rarely permitted more than a dime of every education dollar to come from the federal government, the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress, and the presidents have done more to raise the national profile of education issues in the past three decades than their predecessors did in the previous two centuries. Public opinion polls repeatedly put education at or near the top of national concerns. Presidents routinely cite education as their first domestic priority. Only historians seem to have overlooked the significance of schools to the children who attend them, the parents who send their children to them, the employees who staff them, and the taxpayers who finance them— in other words, just about everyone.2 Public School Aid If a national consciousness toward elementary and secondary education is relatively new, a federal role is not. In British North America, since education was primarily a family and religious function, colonial governments were largely absent from the schools. The American Revolution helped transform education into an instrument for developing and improving society. As private academics encouraged dissent and practical skills,and as“common schools”preached and practiced equality of opportunity, local and state governments began to regulate the schools. The national government’s Land Ordinance of 1785 divided public lands in the northwestern United States into townships comprising thirty-six sections 005 intro (1-6) 2/16/06 10:57 AM Page 1 of 640 acres each, with the revenue from the sale of section sixteen of each township allocated for public education. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which Jefferson authored, established a government for the territory north of the Ohio River, where “the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” When Ohio became a state in 1802, the federal government adapted the Northwest Ordinance policy to the region’s new states, providing land for common schools.3 The first national statistics on education and illiteracy were part of the census of 1840. The Morrill Act of 1862 set aside land in “each loyal state” for the construction of an agricultural college. The first federal Department of Education arrived in 1867 to gather “such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several states and territories.” Two years later, the department lost its cabinet-level status but survived as the Bureau of Education in the Department of the Interior. In 1929, it became the Office of Education (OE). Two years later, President Herbert Hoover’s National Advisory Committee on Education completed the first study of the federal role in education, finding virtually every federal agency “concerned directly or indirectly with education” and calling for the restoration of the Department of Education. President Franklin Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration, launched in 1933, issued loans and grants for school and college construction; his Civilian Conservation Corps (1933) and NationalYouth Administration (1935) provided jobs and job training for high school and college youth; and his Advisory Commission on Federal Aid to Education (1937) advocated temporary federal aid to public schools. During World War II,the LanhamAct (1941) funded school services and construction for soldiers and their children. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, or GI Bill of Rights (1944), offered a free college education to returning veterans. The Housing Act of 1950 included loans for construction of college residence halls, while Public Laws 815 and 870, enacted in the same year, created impact aid for school construction and operating expenses in the vicinity of naval and military bases. In 1953, the OE joined the new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Two years later, President Dwight Eisenhower convened the first White House Conference on Education, which called for federal aid for public school construction. In 1958, in the wake...