The Era of Education: Is it Beginning or Ending?

This book is part of a recent wave of interest in—and scholarship about—education reform in the United States. Few observers dispute that the country has witnessed an "era of education" unlike any other in American history. With the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 and the creation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, the federal government began to devote an unprecedented amount of attention and resources to expanding access to public schools and improving their performance. These efforts continue to this day in the form of the important and controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). McAndrews notes that "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" (p. 1). Most existing work on education by historians—such as Diane Ravitch's The Troubled Crusade: American Education 1945–1980 (1985)—does not focus on the federal role. The works that do focus on the federal role, meanwhile—such as Hugh Davis Graham's The Uncertain Triumph: Federal Education Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Years (1984) and McAndrews's earlier work, Broken Ground: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Education (1991)—tend to be quite dated. One of the great merits of his current volume is that it begins to fill this gap in the historical literature.

The organization of McAndrews's book is unusual, as the material is divided by topic and then again chronologically. McAndrews focuses on three different subjects—public school aid, school desegregation, and nonpublic school aid—during two different periods, 1965–1981 and 1981–2001. Dividing the material in this way helps to emphasize the fact that the three topics, despite generally being lumped together by scholars under the broader category of education policy, nonetheless often had distinct political dynamics and outcomes. This approach highlights, for example, how conservatives could oppose federal intervention in one area (public school aid) while embracing it in another (nonpublic school aid). The trade-off is that this segmented approach makes it more difficult to observe the ways in which the three areas were often interrelated. Nowhere is this more crucial, for example, than with the issue of desegregation. Race and busing—as McAndrews shows effectively—were politically important and contentious issues, but they also cast a pall over federal activism in education reform more generally. Dividing the material chronologically into two periods makes sense on its face, given the author's contention that the Reagan administration marked a significant break with the previous course of federal education policy. This cross-cutting approach to the material, however, can leave the reader a bit disoriented at times, struggling to traverse the shifts back and forth across time and space.

McAndrews begins his study with the passage of the ESEA in 1965—which constituted the big bang of federal education policy. ESEA cemented an important but limited federal role in the nation's schools, one focused on providing supplemental federal funding and programs for disadvantaged students. The author demonstrates how this role became firmly entrenched in subsequent years, despite ongoing concerns (especially from Republicans) about the proper scope and methods of federal intervention. Beginning with President Nixon, the GOP would try repeatedly and unsuccessfully to reduce federal spending and regulation in education or to convert it into unrestricted block grants for states. However, Democratic control of Congress for much of the 1960–1980 period and the popularity of federal education spending with the public and the powerful assortment of school-related groups collectively know as the "education establishment" ultimately undermined the ability (and in some cases the willingness) of Republicans to advance these efforts. While Nixon and Ford each vetoed two education appropriations bills, for example, these vetoes were overridden by Congress. McAndrews demonstrates that the...