The Lost Purpose of School Reform
Fifty years ago, Congress passed a federal education law to help poor children get a good public education: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Revised many times, it is still the basis for federal education policy today. When it was last reauthorized in 2001, it was named “No Child Left Behind,” which was President George W. Bush’s signature education initiative. Both the House and the Senate are now debating a reauthorization of the law, which has been pending since 2007. Since the law gives Congress the power to determine how federal dollars will be spent, it is crucial to understand its origins and how it has evolved over time. Much is at stake.
ESEA was originally conceived as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It had one overriding purpose: to send federal funding to schools that enrolled large numbers of children living in poverty. The schools that stood to benefit most were mainly in the South and in big cities.
Advocates of federal aid to public schools had been trying without success to persuade Congress to approve it since the 1870s. Their efforts consistently failed because neither party trusted the other to control the nation’s schools. Over the years, there were other complicating issues: Southern members of Congress (all of whom were white) feared that federal aid might be used to interfere with racially segregated schools; urban members of Congress opposed federal aid unless it also served children in Catholic schools; and in the mid-twentieth century, far-right conservatives suspected that the federal bureaucracy might push Communist ideas into school curriculums.
President Johnson was a master persuader, and he assuaged everyone’s concerns. The purpose of the law, he insisted, was to help poor children get a better education, and everyone could agree on that. The South could no longer preserve its segregated system, not only because of the Brown decision of 1954, but because Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, giving the federal government the power it needed to demand desegregation of southern schools. Catholics were mollified because they were included in ESEA’s funding (a Supreme Court decision later removed them). And by 1965, the Red Scare had subsided and was no longer an obstacle to federal aid to education. The bill was funded with $1 billion, and the federal government was at last committed to policies aimed at providing minorities and the poor with the same quality of education as everyone else. That funding, however, was far from sufficient, because public schools are typically underwritten by property taxes, which favor those who live in affluent areas.
Over the years, federal education funding for poor children has steadily grown but has never been enough to overcome the vast inequities between rich and poor. The United States is one of the few advanced nations in the world that spends more public moneyon rich children than on poor children.
With the passage of time, new federal programs were added to ESEA, such as funding for bilingual education, anti-drug programs, and charter schools. But the major shift in its purpose occurred in 1994, when the Clinton administration renamed it the Improving America’s Schools Act and required states to write academic standards and develop state tests for at least reading and mathematics. This was the first codification in federal law of the idea that uniform standards and testing were necessary to insure The Lost Purpose of School Reform by Diane Ravitch | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books: