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

1. Public School Aid, 1965-81

chapter 1 Public School Aid 1965–81 Lyndon Johnson The taxes of the American people now help support most of those people who cannot support themselves, because they haven’t the basic education to do so. This is why education is our number one priority. —Lyndon Johnson (1965) Lyndon Johnson would be an unlikely revolutionary.1 An aging New Dealer with a Southern drawl, Johnson seemed more a career politician than a social crusader when tragedy thrust him into the Oval Office. But while he spoke slowly, he would act quickly. “Look, we’ve got to do this in a hurry,” the president said of his school bill in February 1965.“I want to see this coonskin on the wall.” Two months later, when Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, he virtually undid two hundred years of history. Four years later when he left office, he had ensured another three decades of conflict over the scope and direction of his considerable achievement.2 Johnson and Education Except for a summer at San Marcos Normal School and two months at Georgetown University Law School, Lyndon Johnson’s formal education occurred exclusively at public schools. After working his way through Southwest State Teachers’ College at San Marcos, Johnson taught at a Mexican school in Cotulla, Texas, and then at public high schools in Pearsall and Houston.3 The authenticity of Johnson’s experience as a public school student and teacher would overshadow his lack of expertise on education issues as a congressman (1937–49), senator (1949–61), and vice president (1961–63). In his twenty-four years in Congress, Johnson introduced only one education bill, to provide insurance for federal loans to college students, and gave only one speech on the subject, in support of a school construction measure that had just passed the Senate.4 010 ch1 (7-50) 2/16/06 10:58 AM Page 7 The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 Contemporary observers and most subsequent analyses have marveled at the political dexterity with which the Johnson administration navigated the treacherous currents of religion, race, and rules that had postponed for three decades the arrival of such broad federal aid. The National Education Association (NEA), which had grown since 1857 from a congressionally chartered study group of college officials, public school superintendents, and public school teachers to the nation’s largest teachers’ union, strongly opposed federal aid to nonpublic schools. Its leading rival, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), chartered in 1897 by the American Federation of Labor, was less politically effective than the NEA but equally opposed to nonpublic school aid. The National Catholic Welfare Conference, which continued to represent the country ’s Catholic bishops on Capitol Hill, had since 1944 just as firmly resisted federal aid without provisions for nonpublic schools.5 In November 1963, Democrat John Brademas of Indiana initiated a series of meetings among Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel, NEA president Robert Wyatt, and National Catholic Welfare Conference representatives William Consedine and Monsignor Francis Hurley. The talks led to the administration ’s abandonment of traditional “general aid” (public school construction and teachers’ salaries) in favor of “categorical” assistance to children.6 Similarly, the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July of 1964 appeared to preclude racial issues from blocking the ESEA the following year. The act stated that “No person in the United States shall, on the grounds of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal assistance.” Title VI of the act permitted the federal government to withhold funds in the event of such discrimination. No longer would the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation’s leading civil rights organization since 1909, deploy its congressional standard-bearer, New York Democrat Adam Clayton Powell, to burden education legislation with Title VI–type amendments. And no longer would the NEA countenance racial segregation policies by its affiliates. Finally, congressional reform removed procedural barriers that had impeded previous school aid bills. In January 1965, the Eighty-ninth Congress adopted the twenty-one-day rule, allowing the Speaker of the House to move a bill to the floor within twenty-one days of the House receiving a rule from the Rules Committee . The committee’s Republican–Southern Democrat alliance could no longer obstruct school aid, as it had done most recently in 1961, when an 8...