For the first 176 years of its existence, the US federal government was mostly absent from the nation's K–12 education system, deferring much of the responsibility for schooling to the various state and local governments. Then, on April 11, 1965, this arrangement was altered significantly. The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) marked an important shift in American federalism—one that established a pattern of federal involvement that today continues to have an enormous impact on school funding and policy. In light of the progressive accomplishments of the early 1960s, it can be tempting to view the 1965 ESEA as something of a foregone conclusion. However, when closely examining the legislation's conscientious handling by its supporters as it moved through Congress, it becomes apparent that the passage of the ESEA was not in the least a certainty that year. Instead, its passage was the result of a well-crafted, well-executed legislative campaign on the part of the Johnson administration and its allies in Congress.
To date, legislative histories of the ESEA have lived mainly in two competing camps: the “auspicious circumstances” camp and the “presidential entrepreneurship” camp. Scholars in the first camp have generally regarded the ESEA as something of a political inevitability, believing that in light of the achievements of the Eighty-Eighth Congress (1963–1964), the Democratic landslide victory of 1964, and other favorable political circumstances, the passage of a substantial general aid bill for the nation's schools was already a fait accompli by 1965.Footnote 1 This line of thinking is demonstrated most clearly by James Guthrie, who writes that “a combination of favorable social and political circumstances enabled the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act to circumvent and overwhelm traditional school aid roadblocks.”Footnote 2 A similar statement can be found in Diane Ravitch's The Troubled Crusade, which attributes the ESEA's enactment to the 1964 landslide: “After Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in 1964…his party held a commanding majority of both houses of Congress.…With this kind of legislative support, no group was powerful enough to block a bill.”Footnote 3
Scholars in the presidential entrepreneurship camp, on the other hand, have challenged this deterministic view of policymaking and argued that the ESEA was primarily the result of skillful maneuvering on the part of Lyndon Johnson and his White House staffers. The first of these scholars is Hugh Davis Graham, whose book The Uncertain Triumph depicts the behind-the-scenes West Wing activities that helped bring general aid legislation into fruition.Footnote 4 At the core of Graham's work is his contention that presidential task forces, and the 1964 Gardner Task Force on Education in particular, catalyzed the ESEA by helping the executive branch bypass congressional gridlock and iron triangles. He writes, “Executive planning through presidential task forces…represented an attempt by the President to short-circuit the normal central-clearance process…interrupt the normal bureaucratic flow…and maximize [his] leverage.”Footnote 5 But while Graham's work is an impressive feat of analysis, it nonetheless has some significant limitations. The most serious one stems from the author's myopic focus on executive task forces, which naturally leads him to scrutinize the drafting of the ESEA and subsequently ignore the politics that surrounded the bill's movement through Congress. Consequently, Graham mistakenly suggests that the ESEA's course through Congress was uneventful, writing that the House and Senate ultimately “surrendered congressional autonomy on the issue.”Footnote 6
A second scholar in the presidential entrepreneurship camp is Gareth Davies, who joins Graham in refuting the auspicious circumstances camp, arguing in his book See Government Grow that “Johnson had an extraordinary mandate…[but] scholars who argue that the election made the passage of ESEA inevitable go too far.”Footnote 7 At the same time, though, he goes beyond Graham by including a description of the volatile policymaking process after the ESEA was introduced in Congress. Through an examination of the White House's handling of the bill after it had been sent down Pennsylvania Avenue, it appears to Davies that the Johnson White House deserves celebration for more than just an adroit use of task forces. It also deserves celebration for the political acumen it demonstrated in herding the bill through a daunting obstacle course on Capitol Hill.
But while Davies offers a compelling narrative of the legislative ferment of the Great Society White House, his book too restricts its focus to internal White House operations and consequently misses some important political dynamics at work in Congress during the 1960s. As scholars like Wayne Urban have emphasized, there had been congressional interest in general aid-to-education legislation since at least the 1940s, and there were senators, congressmen, and congresswomen who, by virtue of their own ideological leanings or personal experiences, were eager to pursue general aid legislation independently of White House pressure.Footnote 8 Therefore, by neglecting a close examination of congressional entrepreneurship, both Graham and Davies provide incomplete views of the ESEA's formulation and enactment.Footnote 9
Moving beyond these interpretations, I argue here that the ESEA was the product of a joint effort between policy entrepreneurs in the White House and in Congress. Like Graham and Davies, I argue that the success of the ESEA was anything but inevitable in 1965, although I do admit there were some favorable political conditions that facilitated passage. Differing with many scholars in the auspicious circumstances camp, though, I suggest that these favorable conditions had less to do with the 1964 election and more to do with subtler efforts undertaken by liberals to restructure committee rules and assignments throughout the early and mid-1960s. Furthermore, like Graham and Davies, I maintain the central importance of the Johnson administration, contending that without White House leadership and political skill, the ESEA would have faced much more difficult odds. However, I also reserve an important, perhaps equally indispensable, role for congressional leadership in this process and contend that without the commitment, coordination, and political acumen of key legislators, the aid-to-education effort may have faltered in the face of the same obstacles as before.Footnote 10
To make this argument, I consulted a wide variety of secondary and primary sources, some of which have been utilized in previous scholarship and many of which, particularly those related to Congress, have not. These sources include the papers of Lyndon Johnson; recorded White House phone conversations; the papers of Congresswoman Edith Green; the papers of Senator Wayne Morse; collections of minutes, notes, reports, and memoranda from the House and Senate Education Committees; transcripts of congressional debate in the Congressional Record; national and regional newspaper archives; and biographies, autobiographies, dissertations, and oral histories relevant to key policymakers. Together, these sources represent one of the most comprehensive collections of documents yet consulted in an ESEA legislative history.
The Star-Crossed Quest for General Aid, 1940–1963
Between 1940 and 1963, at least twelve major aid bills were considered in Congress, but all of them failed to be enacted, forcing progressives to settle for more limited, categorical programs. Of these, two in particular are worth mentioning as important ESEA predecessors. The first was the 1941 Lanham Act and its 1950 extension and amendments, which provided federal aid for school districts impacted by the installation of US military bases. The other was the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which is today mostly remembered for providing funds for math and science education after the national defense crisis spawned by Sputnik.Footnote 11 But these two pieces of legislation were exceptions to the general legislative trend, and most other federal education legislation was not so blessed. During the Kennedy years, for instance, legislation to address college access, school construction, and teacher salaries all were defeated, and the closest any general aid legislation came to passage was in 1961 when the House and Senate both passed bills but failed to reconcile them in conference committee.Footnote 12
Indeed, on the eve of Kennedy's assassination, the obstacles to general aid legislation were multitudinous, especially given the power of interest groups like the National Education Association (NEA) and the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) to torpedo legislation. Of all obstacles, though, the thorniest were issues known to contemporaries as the “Three Rs”—race, religion, and reds (shorthand for “federal control”).Footnote 13 The Three Rs ensnared education legislation for decades by creating entangling congressional alliances on three emotional issues. Those who opposed federal aid to education in the name of preserving federalism found themselves diametrically opposed to those who supported expanding federal education expenditures. At the same time, among those who supported federal aid, there were those who demanded that this aid be given solely to public schools and others who demanded that private and parochial schools receive an equal share. Among the latter were many urban northern representatives who either were Catholics themselves or who had a large number of Catholic constituents who sent their children to private schools. To make matters even more delicate, North-South divisions manifested themselves on the education-race issue as well, with civil rights proponents demanding federal aid be withheld from segregated school districts and white southerners insisting that the federal government not interfere with existing school arrangements.
While the Three Rs presented a labyrinth of obstacles in their own right, there were also other institutional obstacles to general aid legislation. One of these was the House of Representatives and its hierarchical, committee-centered structure that gave senior, antistatist conservatives disproportionate legislative power. Exemplifying this dynamic was the House Education and Labor Committee (HEL), which was chaired during the 1950s by conservative North Carolina Democrat Graham Barden, who loathed progressive legislation and regularly stonewalled pro-aid committee members. Because all major education legislation would be initiated in this committee, general aid bills that promised to expand federal influence in education were routinely dead on arrival.Footnote 14
An even greater obstacle was the powerful House Rules Committee, which was the gatekeeper for all legislation approved by committee and seeking a calendar date (or “rule”) for debate and voting on the House floor. Overseen by Howard W. “Judge” Smith, a conservative Democrat from Virginia who opposed big government, the Rules Committee frequently bottled up promising education legislation and prevented it from reaching the House floor for a vote. “No rules for schools” was an infamous Smith policy, and in 1955, 1959, and 1961, the Rules Committee proved a nightmarish stumbling block for general aid legislation.Footnote 15 Contemporary scholar Hugh Price even suggested that one of the Three Rs be replaced with “Rules Committee.”Footnote 16
In sum then, a few things were clear in 1963. While Congress had managed to pass some important pieces of categorical legislation, the prospects of more sweeping federal aid to education were bleak.Footnote 17 The Three Rs seemed to have Congress locked in a series of entangling alliances, and even if these could be overcome, any legislation would still have to navigate the rugged institutional topography of Congress and its committees. To overcome this environment would therefore require a tremendous deal of political skill on the part of not only the White House but congressional entrepreneurs as well.
The Genesis of the ESEA, 1964–1965
In some sense, the road to the 1965 ESEA was partially laid following the unprecedented educational accomplishments of the Eighty-Eighth Congress, which President Johnson proudly nicknamed “The Education Congress.” Following Kennedy's assassination, the Eighty-Eighth Congress passed a flurry of progressive education legislation that increased federal expenditures in education by $5 billion and softened existing aid-to-education barriers. Notable among these accomplishments were the Higher Education Facilities Act, the Vocational Education Act, and amendments to the Impact Aid Program. The NDEA was also renewed and expanded to cover aid to the humanities.
In 1965, the successors of the Education Congress were matched with a newly elected president who took an almost spiritual interest in the problems surrounding American schooling. Whereas Kennedy administration insiders would later admit that the private-school-educated Kennedy hadn't worked very hard on the issue, Johnson's commitment to education was by contrast visceral and unfaltering.Footnote 18 The son of two certified teachers, Johnson himself had worked as a teacher at all three levels of schooling prior to entering politics, including a stint in the impoverished Mexican-American community of Cotulla, Texas. By the time he completed his studies and entered Congress, he had come to fully appreciate the fact that education had been his own passport out of poverty and something critical for all hoping to achieve the American Dream.Footnote 19
As President, Johnson first seriously promoted the idea of general K–12 aid in his State of the Union address on January 4, 1965, in which he argued that in the fight against poverty it was imperative to “strike away the chains of ignorance” and ensure that all children “have the best education that this Nation can provide.”Footnote 20 Eight days later, on January 12, he elaborated on this commitment by submitting to Congress a special message and legislative package on education. Entitled “Toward Full Educational Opportunity,” the message began by painting a bleak picture of American education. Dropout rates were high, college matriculation rates were low, and employment opportunities for people without advanced education were diminishing.Footnote 21 To confront these challenges and keep America competitive, Johnson called on the federal government to make educational improvement the “number one business of the American people.”Footnote 22
Johnson then laid out a broad education agenda for the Eighty-Ninth Congress, the core of which was the expansive $1.3 billion ESEA, which consisted of five titles. In Title I, Johnson proposed slightly more than $1 billion in aid to help equalize spending between wealthy school districts and poor ones using the following formula:
(A/2)(B) = P, where A is the state's average annual expenditure per pupil; B is the total number of poor students (those from families with incomes of less than $2,000 per year) residing in the local school district; and P is the payment to that local school district.Footnote 23
Significantly, this formula guaranteed that over 90 percent of the nation's school districts (and virtually every congressional district) would qualify for some sort of Title I aid. In addition, Title II guaranteed over $100 million for the purchase of textbooks and library materials, as 70 percent of the nation's schools in 1965 had no libraries at all, and those that did could boast only an average of half a book per child. Central also to the ESEA was an attempt to improve the quality of the nation's schools and promote innovation. On this front, Title III proposed $100 million for the development of local supplementary educational centers, and Title IV proposed $45 million for the development of regional education research laboratories. The last section, Title V, proposed $10 million for strengthening state education departments to help them administer the program.
Following the transmission of Johnson's message, the ESEA (H.R. 2362) was introduced in Congress by Representative Carl Perkins and Senator Wayne Morse. Yet, while the timing of the bill appeared propitious given the two-thirds majority that Democrats held in both chambers of Congress, the passage of such an unprecedented piece of legislation would still only be made a reality through the legislative skill that the White House and its congressional allies would put on display over the next eighty-nine days.Footnote 24
In some ways, the seeds of the ESEA's success were planted months before its introduction—when Johnson established the 1964 Gardner Task Force on Education to design the administration's education program. While the exact value of the Gardner Task Force has been disputed, its most important accomplishment appears to be establishing the equalization logic for the ESEA.Footnote 25 According to Gardner Task Force Executive Secretary William Cannon, earlier education programs had failed because they had been written as a list of pet projects for various interest groups that often conflicted with one another. To avoid this, the task force suggested that the new program possess an overarching theme or rallying point, such as “access…to educational opportunity” for disadvantaged children.Footnote 26
While the task force was at work, a separate legislative brain trust was also busy meeting with critical interest groups like the NEA and the NCWC to feel out their positions and attempt to forge a compromise. As will be discussed later, this legislative brain trust included both administration and congressional officials, including Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel, Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Wilbur Cohen, White House education advisor Douglass Cater, Senator Morse, and Congressmen Carl Perkins, John Brademas, and Hugh Carey. The labor of these individuals helped ensure that when the ESEA was introduced on January 12, 1965, previously obstreperous interest groups would support it.
Once the legislation was outlined and all parties felt assured of interest group quiescence, the legislative brain trust also formulated a plan to get it through Congress. Senator Morse proved especially percipient here. Recognizing that the House of Representatives would be the most challenging institutional hurdle, Morse suggested that the bill first be passed in the House and then passed without amendment in the Senate to avoid a hazardous conference committee.Footnote 27 It would also be critical to move the bill quickly, avoiding major amendments and lengthy debate so as to capitalize on the president's coattails and maintain the fragile interest group coalition. At Cater's recommendation, Johnson judiciously placed the bill as his top legislative priority in 1965.Footnote 28
The House Education and Labor Committee
The first stop in the bill's legislative circuit was HEL, which historically had been something of a wild card. Andrée Reeves, in her study of HEL chairmen, described the committee like this:
It is fractious. It is raucous. It has had colorful leadership throughout its history. It authorizes big-money programs and subscribes least to Sam Rayburn's philosophy of “to get along, go along.” Education and Labor epitomizes not only the fundamental party and liberal-conservative dichotomies but those aspects of the legislative process that reflect the divisions in society. It is never dull. It might be described as the naughty child of Congress.…It acts unconventionally, and this unconventional behavior has come to be expected of it. Perhaps it is even institutionalized.Footnote 29
These tendencies would manifest themselves in the ESEA debates, but in 1965, HEL did not prove to be quite the indomitable obstacle it had been during previous years, due to some fortuitous political circumstances. As noted earlier, HEL chairman Graham Barden and conservative southerners on the committee had effectively blocked progressive legislation throughout the 1950s by using tactics of “delay, divide, and conquer.”Footnote 30 In the mid-to-late-1950s, however, several auspicious changes took place in terms of committee membership, rules, and leadership. The first of these changes occurred in the mid-1950s, when many pro-aid Democrats were elected to Congress and Speaker Sam Rayburn agreed to appoint them to HEL.Footnote 31 By 1959, pro-aid liberals had a majority. The second change occurred in 1957, when liberals frustrated with Barden prevailed upon the House leadership to adopt new rules that required the HEL chairman to refer all new legislation to a subcommittee for hearings and markup, thereby diminishing Barden's ability to unilaterally block incoming legislation.
An even more significant change occurred in 1961, when Barden unexpectedly retired from Congress and his gavel passed to Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was the polar opposite of his predecessor. A black civil rights crusader who represented Harlem and had an extremely liberal voting record, Powell prided himself for being a progressive activist. His importance as committee chairman during this time is difficult to overstate, for even with the rule changes, the chairman, by virtue of his visibility, seniority, and control of the agenda, could nevertheless set the tone for HEL. And Powell set an aggressive one. Immediately upon becoming chairman, he more than doubled the committee's professional staff and more than tripled its budget, expecting HEL to be a legislative dynamo. Unlike his predecessor, he also encouraged his fellow HEL liberals to think creatively about policy and to run with their own ideas, decentralizing HEL to accommodate their enthusiasm.Footnote 32 During the early years of his chairmanship, HEL also became markedly more liberal, northern, and pro-aid in orientation, in part because many southerners refused to work under a black chairman and were replaced by newer members of Congress supportive of federal aid.Footnote 33
Once in Congress, H.R. 2362 was first taken up by Perkins's HEL General Education Subcommittee. Perkins, a former schoolteacher who represented an extremely depressed region of Appalachian Kentucky, had been a member of HEL since 1948. Throughout his career, he had proven to be an avid federal aid supporter and there were “practically no areas of education Perkins did not support.”Footnote 34 He had introduced federal aid legislation during his first term in Congress and after that went on to promote aid for library construction, school facilities, school lunches, and job training, among other areas. He had been a sponsor of the 1963 Vocational Education Act, and in 1967 he would succeed Powell as chairman of HEL, becoming recognized as “one of the most powerful voices in Congress for aid to education” until his death in 1984.Footnote 35
Like many chairmen on Powell's freewheeling HEL, Perkins eagerly set to work on the ESEA, scheduling hearings and loading them with witnesses in favor of the bill. Understanding the importance of urgency, he wasted little time on Republican witnesses—something which angered ranking minority member Charles Goodell, who reportedly complained on the last day of hearings that he still had twenty-eight witnesses to call. After hearings were completed, the subcommittee began markup sessions, where dozens of amendments were proposed but, aside from a few cosmetic ones, all were defeated, usually at the urging of Perkins and his allies Carey and Brademas. On February 5, after a stunningly brisk three weeks of hearings and markup, the bill was discharged to the full committee for consideration.Footnote 36
Once in full committee, however, H.R. 2362 faced an unexpected obstacle from Chairman Powell that eventually demanded assistance from the president. To understand this episode, some background information is in order. While Chairman Powell was a staunch liberal ally of the president, throughout his career he was also one of the most polarizing members of Congress, a lightning rod for both his rhetoric and comportment. His supporters viewed him as a “defiant, self-confident, [and] relentless fighter against injustice” as he sought to draw attention to civil rights and poverty issues at every opportunity.Footnote 37 However, Powell was also characterized as having an extremely egocentric and flamboyant attitude, which irritated many who knew him, even his friends.Footnote 38 He openly ridiculed and taunted his colleagues when they disagreed with him, and he never shied away from playing political hardball or flouting conventions, from blackmailing Martin Luther King to eating in the whites-only Capitol cafeteria. In his autobiography, he proudly referred to himself as the “first bad nigger in Congress” and a “bomb-thrower.”Footnote 39 More controversial than his personality, however, was the fact that he had also become known for abusing the privileges of his office. Throughout his career, Powell had put relatives on his payroll, even though they did not work for him, and then collected their salaries. As chairman, he also approved his own travel and frequently took lavish vacations to the Caribbean or Europe with attractive female aides, compiling a high absenteeism rate in the process. At one point in his career, he was indicted for tax evasion, and in 1965 he was being sued for libel after calling one of his constituents a “bag woman.”Footnote 40
By early 1965, the House leadership was growing tired of his antics, and there was strong sentiment to curtail HEL's budget. Powell had requested $440,000 for his committee, and when the House leadership balked, he felt he needed to appeal to the White House for support. To pressure Johnson to intervene, Powell took the ESEA hostage, canceling the first meeting on the bill on February 8, rescheduling it for February 17, and then absconding to Puerto Rico with a female staffer for a secret, spur-of-the-moment vacation.Footnote 41 In the nine days that followed, it was as if Powell had vanished off the face of the earth. The White House, unable to locate Powell and desperate to see the bill passed before its delicate coalition of support started to crack, frantically rammed through Congress authorization of the $440,000 and began conspiring to seize control of the committee away from the rogue chairman. White House Assistant Jack Valenti began dropping hints that the FBI might get involved to locate the congressman, and White House Congressional Liaison Larry O'Brien began negotiating with the committee to ensure that a quorum could be mustered on February 17 to strip Powell of his chairmanship and commence work on the bill without him. Powell, sensing what was happening from afar, rushed home in time for the February 17 meeting and, gleeful that his appropriations request had been approved, promised to meet with the committee “every day, all day, including Saturday until work on the education bill [was] complete.”Footnote 42
Powell did complete markup rapidly, effectively shutting down amendment challenges from Republican members and more conservative Democrats.Footnote 43 But despite his promises, Powell was still slow to discharge the bill, this time becoming embroiled in a civil rights debate about the president's larger legislative agenda. As noted above, Powell was a lifelong civil rights advocate, and during the 1950s he had been one of the most prominent voices in that movement. Representing Harlem and leading one of the major churches there, Powell had assiduously cultivated a national civil rights constituency, and he saw himself as a spokesman for African Americans across the entire United States. As he wrote in his autobiography: “Millions were depending on me to do a task for them, and not just the people in my District. …Millions of Negro people in the South had no Congressman to speak for them, no one to whom they could turn with their basic problems of discrimination and segregation.”Footnote 44 After becoming chairman, though, Powell had begun to fade from the public eye, especially as more militant factions took over the civil rights movement and he himself became more pragmatic as a legislator. Sensitive to this loss of influence, he was privately itching to reassert himself in 1965.Footnote 45
It was this desire that came through in a March 1 telephone call, when an irate Johnson berated the chairman for being slow in discharging the bill. “What the hell is happening with your committee? I thought you told me two months ago that you were going to pass a bill for me!” Johnson snapped.Footnote 46 When Powell tried to respond, Johnson interrupted, suddenly reminded of the appropriations fiasco, “And what the hell are you blackmailing me on a $400,000 appropriation for you! We couldn't pass $1 billion, $200 million for school kids. …You've damn near defeated the best education bill I've got! And I hope you're gonna be proud of it!”Footnote 47 Powell then tried to raise some concerns he had about an unrelated “anti-Negro” provision of the president's Appalachia bill as well as other anxieties about continued de facto segregation under the ESEA. If those concerns were addressed, he hinted, he could probably procure the votes needed to get the bill out of committee. But Johnson refused to negotiate this time, roaring back:
Johnson: I just sure thought I had better leadership on that committee than what I've got. …I'm awfully disappointed in you. Just very disappointed in you.
Powell: Now Mr. President, don't you think I was entitled to the money?
Johnson: No, I don't think you're entitled to a damn thing that you did ! I think you told me, and looked me straight in the eye, and said, “I'll report this bill, and I'll get it on the floor,” and you did not do it.
Powell: By March 1st, I told you…
Johnson: Oh hell no! …You told me you were going to do it. Then you ran off for three weeks and they couldn't even locate you! I asked the Speaker to call you and tell you that this was serious. This is bad. This is the thing we ran on all over the country. Your people are being damn well taken care of in it!Footnote 48
Johnson then insinuated that Powell was somehow involved in a mass conspiracy with House Republicans. “For God's sake, Adam,” he entreated, “don't get sucked into it. They used you for three weeks and murdered me! They got thirty-two amendments written while you were gone. … I want that bill reported out tomorrow morning.”Footnote 49 Powell, realizing he could no longer stand in the way of the legislation, consented, and the next morning the bill was reported out of committee.Footnote 50
The House Rules Committee
Having cleared HEL, the next hurdle for H.R. 2362 was Howard Smith and the Rules Committee, another historical bastion of conservative opposition. But here, too, auspicious political circumstances prevailed, for in January 1965 the Rules Committee had undergone some quiet rule changes that helped facilitate the aid-to-education program. Following the 1964 election, an organized coalition of northern liberal representatives known as the Democratic Study Group used their newfound numerical strength to secure a parliamentary rule change known as the “21-day rule,” which stipulated that after twenty-one days of nonaction by the Rules Committee, the Speaker of the House himself could unilaterally bring a piece of legislation to the House floor.Footnote 51 Given that Speaker John McCormack was a strong supporter of the Great Society agenda, this effectively neutered the conservative obstructionists on the Rules Committee. Consequently, H.R. 2362 passed to the House floor on March 22 with little of the difficulty seen in previous years.
The House Floor Debate
Despite having cleared HEL and the Rules Committee, the ESEA's supporters were not out of the woods yet, for on the House floor they also had to fight off a slew of amendments that threatened to shatter the delicate consensus assembled months earlier. The most threatening amendment challenges came not from Republicans, however, but from Oregon Democratic Congresswoman Edith Green. An eleven-year veteran of teaching and a former lobbyist for the Oregon Education Association, Green had first been elected to Congress in 1954 on a pro-education platform.Footnote 52 Given her long, distinguished career in the field, she was recognized as an expert in education policy and joined HEL as a freshman, where she would serve for the next eighteen years and eventually become chairwoman of the Higher Education Subcommittee. During her two decades in Congress, Green “shaped every major educational bill”Footnote 53 and earned the nickname “Mrs. Education”Footnote 54 for her steadfast commitment to educational improvement. She fought attempts by Eisenhower to cut education spending in the 1950s, wrote and sponsored the 1963 Higher Education Facilities Act, and at one point was on the short list for HEW Secretary. Later, she would author and sponsor the 1965 Higher Education Act, which established federal financial aid to undergraduate students, and would see the crowning achievement of her career with the enactment of Title IX in 1972.
Suiting the character of a prolific legislator, Green was said to possess a sharp intellect and be equally courageous and industrious.Footnote 55 She had been a gifted orator her entire life, and one of her colleagues noted that she was “one of the very few who can actually change votes on the House floor through oratory.”Footnote 56 Green was also recognized for being a tenacious, determined, and meticulous critic who demonstrated a fierce streak of ideological independence. Many people who worked with her found her to be ruthless, abrasive, and iconoclastic, and Powell referred to her as his “problem child” on HEL.Footnote 57 As one of her colleagues stated, “She's a bareknuckle fighter who's capable of really whiplashing her opponents. She plays to win and she doesn't concern herself with the Marquess of Queensberry rules.”Footnote 58
By 1965, Green had become the leader of a centrist coalition of congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats that could command influence on any controversial piece of education legislation, and the ESEA was no exception. Sensing that Green might be troublesome, just as she had been during the Kennedy years, the White House actually reached out to her early in the legislative session in the vain hope of precluding any complications. The day after the ESEA was introduced, Cater and White House Special Assistant Bill Moyers had lunch with Green to “massage her ego” and “feel out her position” on the president's proposal.Footnote 59 According to Moyers, the congresswoman expressed support for the program but also raised concerns about the fairness of the Title I formula. Following lunch, Green met with the president himself and, despite her reservations, she reportedly promised him her “full support.”Footnote 60
It did not take long for Green to break her promise, though, and she challenged the legislation almost immediately in committee markup sessions, where she tried to amend the bill out of concerns over the church-state issue and the fairness of Title I. In these instances, however, Perkins and Powell used their authority as chairmen to silence her.Footnote 61 Once H.R. 2362 was on the floor, though, Green had more autonomy, and she again offered an amendment to change the Title I formula. Green's amendment proposed altering the formula so that every state would receive a straight $200 per poor student to be disbursed to the various localities. Arguing that the current (A/2)(B) multiplier formula would only exacerbate education funding gaps between rich states that spent a lot of money on education and poor states that did not, Green cast herself as a defender of underprivileged students in the nation's rural South. In one Dear Constituent letter, she pointed to facts and figures that she highlighted often in debate:
In Mississippi, in which per capita income is only $1,379, the program formula would provide only $120 for each child. …On the other hand, New York, with a per capita income of $3,000, receive[s] $353 per child. …Another example, on the County level: Sunflower County, Mississippi, and Westchester, New York, have equal numbers of [poor] children. …Yet Westchester County receives three times the amount of money under the present formula as does Sunflower County.Footnote 62
Indeed, Green's papers reveal a woman who was obsessed with the funding formula, containing many copies of projected state, city, and county allocations under ESEA as well as comparison figures with different hypothetical formulas (including her own) with notes scribbled in the margins highlighting the most significant differences between regions. At one point, Green even sent tailored letters to her colleagues informing them, down to the dollar, just how much more money their states would make under her plan.Footnote 63
In the wake of Green's critiques, many members of Congress began scrutinizing the formula for the first time, and before long it seemed the entire House was squabbling about it, including some northerners who began arguing just the opposite of Green: that the South was actually receiving a disproportionately large share of ESEA funds because some small southern states were expected to receive a higher percentage of ESEA dollars than some larger western and northern states. The administration and its allies in Congress, furious at Green for stirring up trouble and bringing about a tidal wave of amendments, were left frantically whipping up votes to defeat the proposals. One of the key figures in these efforts was HEL Congressman Jim O'Hara, who, in a statement on the floor, pointed out that many people who supported the amendment were simply doing so because they hoped it would lead to the defeat of the bill. A vote to amend the formula was essentially a vote to kill the bill, he argued, and his liberal allies echoed him.Footnote 64 In the end, Green's amendment was defeated 202–136.
Green's efforts in the House would not stop there, however, and Johnson in his private conversations regularly complained about the difficulties she was causing.Footnote 65 Aside from her posturing as the champion of an equal-allotment formula, Green also took up the cause of disaffected religious interests by advocating for the insertion of a judicial review clause that would have expedited a Supreme Court ruling on the ESEA's constitutionality. In mid-March the Oregonian reported that the congresswoman was receiving “well over 200 letters a day” about the legislation from religious groups who felt their constitutional concerns had been neglected by the frenetic pace of debate.Footnote 66 Green used this as ammunition, and at one point she even presented to Congress a letter from the pastor of President Johnson's church urging the defeat of the bill.Footnote 67 The congressional leadership was once again forced into battle, and, having prepared for the possibility of a judicial review amendment in a strategy meeting days earlier, it called upon Representative Emanuel Celler, the esteemed Jewish chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to counter Green's assertions.Footnote 68 On March 26, Celler reassured his colleagues that the legislation was already subject to court tests, and he argued that the additional amendment would be tantamount to saying that the House had passed legislation it thought was unconstitutional.Footnote 69
The White House also got involved in the judicial review matter, helping the Justice Department draft a reassuring statement on the issue and persuading the National Council of Churches to deliver a telegram to Congress undercutting Protestant support for Green's position. Furthermore, the White House began attacking Green personally, charging that she was guilty of hypocrisy since her own 1963 Higher Education Facilities Act had not included a judicial review clause and, in fact, she had “strongly opposed” such an amendment.Footnote 70 HEL Chairman Powell was likewise “burning mad” over her behavior, and he reportedly told the White House he would punish her by “remov[ing] vocational rehabilitation from her subcommittee jurisdiction; fir[ing] her sister from the committee staff; and entrust[ing] Brademas with sponsorship of the [1965] Higher Education Bill” if she didn't fall in line.Footnote 71 Through dogged efforts such as these, the ESEA supporters managed to beat back her resistance, ultimately securing enough votes to pass a clean version of the bill.Footnote 72
The full reasons for Green's amendment fights cannot be known for certain, but they do appear to be based, at least in part, on a deep commitment to educational equity and deliberative democracy, both of which she felt were threatened by the haste of the debate.Footnote 73 As she wrote in a letter responding to one of her constituents:
The controversy over the education bill was as bitter as any that I have seen during my 11 years in Congress. I felt very strongly that certain amendments should have been added even though there was opposition from the White House and the Democratic leadership. …The rights of the minority must be protected. I fear that some of my colleagues have forgotten the very sound advice of Voltaire: “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”Footnote 74
In addition to Green's protestations, the Democrats had one other lesser battle to fight against House Republicans, who unveiled their own alternative education bill for consideration. The Republican alternative called for the creation of federal tax credits amounting to $100 for each school child per family (up to a maximum of $200 per family) as well as a federal tax credit of $325 per year for all college students.Footnote 75 But with a price tag three times higher than the ESEA, support for the alternative, even within its own party, was severely constrained. Democrats chided the proposal as a “$5 billion raid on the treasury” and a slice of “warmed-over Goldwater.”Footnote 76 Even Green's analysis of the legislation found the proposal to be too “restrictive,” “ineffective,” and “inadequate” to garner her support, and their proposal, like all major amendments and alternatives, failed.Footnote 77 On March 26, after Republican attempts to delay the bill through quorum calls, readings of the previous day's House Journal, and calls for teller votes, the ESEA passed 263–153, including a yea vote from Green.Footnote 78
The Senate
From there, the bill was picked up by the Senate, where it would be shepherded through by Senator Morse. Born to a politically active farming family in Wisconsin, Morse was steeped in the tenets of La Follette progressivism and exhibited throughout his life progressive faiths in the power of education and the ability of government to improve the lives of the downtrodden. Attending school only with the financial assistance of one of his biology teachers, Morse had studied law at the progressive, policy-oriented University of Wisconsin and at one point took a seminar at Columbia co-directed by John Dewey, who became his “intellectual hero.”Footnote 79 Morse later served on the faculty of the University of Oregon before being elected to the Senate in 1944.
Given his ideological and professional background, it goes without saying that Morse was as firmly committed to education as anyone, and the ESEA was in capable hands. As Chairman of the Education Subcommittee, he had been intimately involved in the drafting of almost every federal education proposal for the past decade, and his ability to muster bipartisan coalitions in support of education was legendary. As his biographer noted:
Although few historians have credited him sufficiently. …Morse would be the Democrats’ man-in-the-Senate on education, dutifully carrying every New Frontier and Great Society bill through the upper chamber, doing so with unprecedented bipartisan support and, to the amazement of many, with an understated brilliance that was at the time unequaled in the Congress.Footnote 80
Between 1963 and 1968, Morse was deemed so critical to education legislation that Johnson took care to involve him early in any education proposal. Special Assistant Joe Califano recounted the president's thinking to Morse's biographer: “On [an] education bill, [Johnson] might say, ‘Look, I want you to talk to Wayne Morse about that. See whether he thinks it's a good idea because if he doesn't like it…you might as well forget it.’”Footnote 81 In the ESEA campaign, Morse was an integral part of the legislative brain trust, being credited afterward with coming up with the ESEA's poverty rationale as well as the plan to first pass the bill in the House and then pass it in the Senate without amendment.Footnote 82 A few days before the ESEA was unveiled, Morse even set up a meeting between the Democratic members of his subcommittee and key administration officials so that the senators could acquaint themselves with the proposal and suggest any last-minute changes.Footnote 83
Following the legislative battle plan, after the House passed the ESEA, Morse and his colleagues, who had already completed subcommittee hearings on the legislation, took up H.R. 2362 for consideration. Despite Morse's proven abilities to muster coalitions and beat back amendments, however, Johnson appeared nervous in a phone call with Moyers about the bill's prospects in the Senate.Footnote 84 But in hindsight this worry appeared unfounded, in large part because by the time the bill reached the Senate, one of the trickiest amendment challenges had already been dealt with. Earlier in the year, Senator Robert Kennedy had expressed his intention to offer an amendment providing for increased monitoring and oversight of ESEA funds, suggesting that he would offer it himself if the bill were to reach the Senate. Recognizing that any new amendment in the Senate would lead to a conference committee and perhaps sink the legislation entirely, Keppel lobbied Kennedy to permit Brademas on the House Education Subcommittee to insert the provision during markup, so that the Senate could vote on a clean bill reported out of the House. Kennedy consented, and the provision was quietly inserted prior to the House floor debate, neutralizing the threat of his amendment in the Senate.Footnote 85
With that problem solved, the rest of the bill's course through the Senate was uneventful. On April 6, following unanimous votes from Morse's subcommittee and the full Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, the bill reached the Senate floor. Once there, it faced a barrage of amendments similar to that it had weathered in the House—the closest of which again involved a flat-rate reworking of the formula, which was defeated 53–38 even though thirty-five states would have received more money under the proposal.Footnote 86 The sacrifice of dollar gain by individual senators for their states demonstrated the determination of Morse and his allies to pass the bill unamended so as not to jeopardize the entire package. As floor manager, Morse emphatically reminded colleagues, “We've lost good education legislation in conference in the past and ended up with no bill at all.”Footnote 87 He even intervened in exchanges between senators and their own constituents, helping, for instance, Senator William Proxmire draft a response to a constituent concerned about the issue of federal control.Footnote 88 As a result of this consistent pressure and helpfulness, Morse held his pro-aid collation together, and on April 9 the bill passed the Senate 73–18. Afterward, Morse received a great deal of adulation from his colleagues, including Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who wrote to him, “Mr. Education—otherwise known as Senator Wayne Morse—proved his leadership and debating abilities on the floor of the Senate last week. Your cogent arguments and brilliant leadership were instrumental in making the Elementary and Secondary Education Bill successful.”Footnote 89
The Three Rs
As the previous sections illustrate, the ESEA's rapid passage was a result of skillful maneuvering and leadership on the part of entrepreneurs in the White House and in Congress, all of whom labored to pass the bill with only limited debate and amendments. However, the ESEA's passage was also noteworthy for how policymakers avoided and overcame acrimonious debate over the Three Rs: race, religion, and reds.
Reds (Federal Control)
By the time the Eighty-Ninth Congress was sworn in, it is true that some things had already been done to diminish fears of federal control, but scholars who say that it was a moot point are probably oversimplifying.Footnote 90 Even after the NDEA and the accomplishments of the Eighty-Eighth Congress, fears of federal control continued to command attention and in some ways appeared ineradicable.Footnote 91 In the House Minority Report on H.R. 2362, for instance, eight conservative members of HEL wrote that the bill represented “the most direct and far-reaching intrusion of federal authority into our local school systems ever proposed in a bill before Congress.…The clear intent is to radically change our historic structure of education by a dramatic shift of power to the federal level.”Footnote 92 And during one congressional hearing, Representative Goodell sparred with HEW Secretary Anthony Celebrezze over the issue of federal control, saying, “We are kidding ourselves. …When you say [the federal government will provide money] in one mouthful and then turn around and say control is completely at the local level, you have a contradictory situation.”Footnote 93
In the face of these critiques, supporters of the legislation labored early and often to mollify federal control anxieties. “Federal assistance does not mean federal control,” Johnson stated in his special message on education, “and we do not intend to forsake our tradition that schools and colleges should be controlled at the local level.”Footnote 94 During congressional hearings on the bill, Keppel repeated this argument: “Nowhere can the federal government tell the State or local school board [how to spend the money]. …We were extremely careful to make that specifically understood.”Footnote 95 In the Senate, Morse himself dealt with this issue by denying that the ESEA was actually a general aid bill, choosing only ever to refer to it as “impact aid legislation,” as he did in a speech before the Dayton Junior Chamber of Commerce: “The new categorical aid proposals contained in the [ESEA] are really just an extension of…the impacted aid statutes. …The aid proposed is not a general federal bill.”Footnote 96 Thus, even though the ranks of small-government conservatives had been decimated by 1965, fears of a federal control–related legislative failure were nonetheless present, and the bill's supporters labored diligently to assuage these concerns.
Religion
While the issue of federal control was overcome mainly by persuasion and numerical strength, the second R (religion) presented a trickier challenge. Indeed, the religion issue had been one major reason for the failure of Kennedy's 1961 bill, and few 1960s domestic issues, outside of civil rights, proved as divisive as church-state relations in education. In 1965, moreover, the religion situation was anything but auspicious.
In 1965, 14.6 percent of the nation's schoolchildren (or 6.8 million students) attended private schools, 68 percent of which were Catholic.Footnote 97 With so many students in private schools, public opinion was bitterly divided over whether or not those students should receive federal support for education, with one poll showing 51 percent of respondents opposing federal aid to parochial schools and 49 percent supporting it.Footnote 98 At the same time, powerful education interest groups such as the NEA were prepared to torpedo any legislation purporting to use public dollars to support “the proliferation of private schools.”Footnote 99 In contrast, Catholic groups like the NCWC contended that any denial of equal funds to parochial schools was itself a violation of the First Amendment's demand of governmental impartiality on religious matters. Jewish groups, meanwhile, tended to oppose any aid bill that would provide funds for private schools, pointing out that such aid would inherently favor Catholic groups over other religious sects.Footnote 100
At the same time that religion loomed as an obstacle to education legislation, private schools were hurting financially and clamoring for federal relief. Between 1940 and 1963, in the wake of the baby boom and increasing construction costs, enrollment in private schools had skyrocketed by 129 percent (compared to only 53 percent in public schools), draining the resources of these schools and precipitating sharp tuition hikes that pushed many of them to the brink of extinction.Footnote 101 Due to budget constraints, a full 86 percent of Catholic schools had no clerical help, and 62 percent of their principals were forced to take on full-time teaching duties.Footnote 102 All the while, the number of nuns available to teach in these schools had remained flat, forcing schools to hire an increasing number of more expensive lay teachers and to absorb average class sizes of forty to seventy students.Footnote 103
Politically, too, the climate was discouraging. Both Republicans and Democrats in their 1964 platforms had backed away from firm commitments on education, largely on First Amendment grounds. Moreover, the Eighty-Ninth Congress included 107 members who described themselves as Catholic, marking the first time in history that Catholics made up the largest religious denomination in the body.Footnote 104 Indeed, aid supporters had many reasons to be wary in trying to pass an education bill that Republican Senator Robert Griffin warned was “likely to ignite a Civil War in almost every community across the nation.”Footnote 105
The situation thus demanded incredible finesse to keep antagonistic interest groups at bay, and here the 1964 behind-the-scenes negotiations between the legislative brain trust and religious and educational interests proved particularly important. The principal person in this group was Keppel, the activist Commissioner of Education whom Time magazine once praised for having “changed the Office of Education from a custodian of highly forgettable statistics to the nation's most energetic nerve center for academic ferment.”Footnote 106 In 1964, Keppel was able to draw on the contacts and goodwill he had fostered with key interest groups during the Kennedy administration to bring competing interests to the table. Also involved in these negotiations were Representative Perkins and two equally invaluable HEL congressmen: Brademas, a former educator who represented the Indiana district containing the University of Notre Dame and who had close relations with both the NCWC and the NEA, and Carey, a pro-aid Catholic who was a longtime spokesman for parochial school interests. This legislative team met with religious and educational interests throughout 1964, often at informal dinner parties at Brademas's house, where ideas could be floated in an effort to find a legislative compromise. In one particularly fruitful meeting on December 13, Keppel personally met with over a dozen influential monsignori of the Roman Catholic Church, and he left with two strong impressions, which he relayed to his superiors: (1) the church did not seem as adamant about receiving an equal share of “direct aid” as in years past, and (2) the church was no longer seeking aid to substitute its own educational expenditures, but was merely looking to supplement them.Footnote 107 As such, Keppel sensed that this attitude “offer[ed] encouragement for the ‘supplemental services’ [i.e., Titles II and III] provisions”Footnote 108 that Carey and Cohen had thought up and put into the still-secret educational package.Footnote 109 Given the brain trust's productive meetings with Catholic leaders and the overt signals that the NCWC and NEA were prepared to be more flexible than in past years, Cater advised Johnson in late 1964: “As soon as you have made your decision on the education program, I recommend that we begin immediately behind-the-scene work to convince Catholic leaders it represents the best and most logical start in federal aid to lower education.”Footnote 110 Johnson seemed to follow these suggestions, reaching out to both religious and education groups early and often throughout the bill's legislative circuit.
Having had so much deliberation with interest groups, the legislative brain trust thus came up with an ingenious compromise on the religion question: they offered Title I money only to public schools, but Title II and III money to both public and private schools. Under this formula, the bulk of the general aid money for poor children would be focused on improvements in the public education sector, as determined by local school boards themselves. The Title II and III money for libraries, textbooks, and supplemental community centers, however, would be made available to students in both public and private schools, but only after being channeled through local, secular school boards.
The design of the ESEA thus neutralized the religion issue in two ways. First, no religious organization could conceivably come out against an antipoverty program. And second, by allocating ESEA dollars largely on a per-pupil and supplemental basis, the bill could be seen as aiding poor children rather than the religious institutions directly—an important legal distinction. This philosophy, known as the “child-benefit theory” seemed to have significant judicial precedent. In the 1930 case Cochran v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court had ruled that the state of Louisiana could provide textbooks and other instructional materials to students in private schools because the books served a “public purpose.” Additionally, in the 1947 Everson decision, the Supreme Court had ruled that public funding for busing students to and from private schools was constitutionally acceptable because such funding benefited the child and not the religious institution directly. A similar rationale had also been used in Congress when it voted to allow some funds under the NDEA and GI Bill to be diverted to parochial colleges and universities. Thus, while a penumbra still existed in the First Amendment as it related to federal aid for parochial schools, the ESEA's authors shrewdly located a compromise that seemed to have judicial sanction and legislative precedent.
Race
The solution of the religion question was critical, as it enabled aid supporters to unite enough northern and Catholic support behind the legislation that they could essentially ignore the final R (race), which aid supporters failed to solve entirely. Between 1940 and 1965, the race issue had overwhelmed education debates, and a familiar pattern had emerged over these years. Congress would take up an education bill that didn't make a statement either way regarding the disbursal of federal funds to segregated schools. Then, a civil rights advocate would attach an amendment to the bill prohibiting the disbursal of federal funds to segregated school districts. This amendment—known as the Powell Amendment, after Adam Clayton Powell, who usually sponsored it up until he became HEL chairman—would then draw support in Congress from civil rights supporters as well as people who opposed general aid to education and saw in the amendment a way to ensure the bill's demise. Once the amendment was added, the bill would be soundly defeated in southern-dominated committees or on the House floor. Indeed, race-related amendments were the reason that aid bills in 1943, 1956, 1957, and 1960 failed.Footnote 111 Appropriately, the Johnson administration was wary of this hazard, and one staffer wrote to Cater in 1964: “Beware of the trap of permitting civil rights and education aid to become bound up with one another. …Education [should be] pursued as a more independent entity.”Footnote 112
Some scholars have suggested that the race issue had already been sufficiently solved by Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited federal funds for any institution that discriminated on the basis of race.Footnote 113 However, this solution did not manifest itself quite so neatly. Even though Powell did not offer his amendment, the ESEA still experienced some bumps related to race. As noted earlier, Powell expressed concerns that Title I funds would only entrench de facto segregation because they would be divided among existing (segregated) school districts. Green too was privately concerned about the race issue, and it permeated her thinking on the judicial review amendment. In a letter to one Portland reverend, she wrote about her concerns about aiding private schools:
I am advised by friends in Oklahoma that there are several of the very fundamentalist protestant church groups who are basically opposed to integration who are now starting their elementary schools in already existing church buildings. As I understand it, attendance is limited to those who are members of that particular church which is segregated. …This might turn out to be a very clever way by which the arch-segregationists could get around the Civil Rights bill.Footnote 114
In the Senate, Morse handled a similar concern posed by an NAACP official, and he had to secure an assurance from Keppel that ESEA funds could not be used to assist segregated private schools.Footnote 115 Moreover, resistance to the ESEA from southerners was stubborn in both chambers, and it was only through sending a disproportionate amount of ESEA dollars to the South that many southerners even considered supporting the bill.
Thus, sensing that southern opposition was mostly inflexible, the bill's supporters decided mainly to muscle over the race-related opposition rather than resolve the issue directly. Having overcome the other two Rs, they felt they had potentially solidified a large enough majority of support among representatives from the North to pass the legislation without significant southern support. Tellingly, fifty-four of the fifty-seven Democratic votes against the ESEA in the House were from the South, and of the forty-three southern votes for the legislation, almost all came from the border states.
Conclusion
This article has shown that the passage of the ESEA was a messy process, one that required tremendous leadership from entrepreneurs both in the White House and in Congress. What lessons might be learned from this history? The most obvious (yet oft-forgotten) lesson is the indispensability of political compromise, even in seemingly propitious political circumstances. In her recent American Educational Research Association Brown Lecture, scholar Marta Tienda concluded her remarks on how to solve educational inequity by declaring, “The biggest challenge is…political will. …Nothing short of an astute politician with the courage and political adeptness of LBJ…is needed.”Footnote 116 On the contrary, what this paper has shown is that the passage of progressive education legislation is never the product of a single person; it requires a coalition of leaders across multiple venues who act collectively and forge compromise on charged political issues.
A second observation concerns how the ESEA's legislative maneuverings established a trajectory leading to current, problematic developments on three fronts: funding, federal control, and racial segregation. Today, the federal government continues to provide most of its educational funding through the ESEA, which has retained its core multiplier formula for Title I. This formula ensures that money goes to virtually every district, but also, as Edith Green warned, exacerbates educational funding inequities across states. Additionally, when states use ESEA dollars to supplant (rather than supplement) local funding sources, they essentially turn the ESEA's equalization logic against itself.
It is also true that the passage of the ESEA precipitated the incremental buildup of federal power, culminating in No Child Left Behind in 2002. As federal education expenditures rose after 1965, there was a natural impulse, like Robert Kennedy demonstrated, to make sure the money wasn't wasted. Consequently, the federal government today leverages ESEA dollars to promote ostensibly proven policy reforms like standardized testing while concerns about local control remain marginalized.
And finally, racial segregation continues to haunt our schools, and the decision in 1965 to mostly ignore the race issue by providing funds to existing residential school districts has only entrenched the problem of de facto segregation. As the judiciary's commitment on this issue wanes, this remains a serious policy problem.
All of this can leave observers feeling that the ESEA has fallen short of its ideals, but it is important to remember that public policies need not solve problems perfectly and without aftereffect to be successful. Policies can also be successful when they merely replace old problems with newer, more tractable ones. The ESEA was meant to address an epidemic of poverty and simultaneously signal a national commitment to education, and it accomplished both goals to some extent. While the law was imperfect, it would be difficult to argue that the education problems of today are not preferable to the ones facing the nation in 1965.
And thus, it is only by understanding the perspective of 1965 that we can grasp the magnitude of the political achievement when President Johnson found himself perched on a wooden school bench for the ESEA's signing ceremony on April 11, 1965. Aware of the day's historical significance, Johnson began his remarks by thanking his allies in Congress and then proceeded hopefully: “By passing this act, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than five million educationally deprived children. …No law I have signed or will ever sign means more to the future of our nation.”Footnote 117 He then lifted his pen and signed the ESEA into law. With that, the ESEA's supporters had accomplished something that no other administration or Congress in the past 176 years had done: establishing general federal aid for the cause of education. It was, Senator Morse declared, a “legislative miracle.”Footnote 118
