The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Johnson had long taken a serious interest in education. His experience teaching impoverished children in Texas had given him an appreciation of education as a tool young people could use to lift themselves out of poor economic circumstances; this is what he thought his own education had done for him. Johnson also envied people in Washington who were better educated than he was—some of President Kennedy’s advisers and staff, for example, who disparaged Johnson’s intelligence and the extent of his education. “He was a nut on education,” explained Vice President Humphrey. “He felt that education was the greatest thing he could give to the people; he just believed in it, just like some people believe in miracle cures.”22

  During his time in Congress, Johnson had come to believe that federal money could strengthen educational institutions. In 1944, as a congressman, he had been a strong supporter of the GI Bill of Rights, which helped returning World War II veterans go to college. During the 1950s, when he was Senate majority leader, he headed a bipartisan coalition of legislators who championed federal spending on education. In 1958, a year after the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite embarrassed the United States by creating the impression that the communists were more advanced in scientific research and technology,23 Congress passed legislation that authorized more than $800 million in federal funding for colleges and universities. Public opinion supported Johnson’s view of education: people generally believed it was a good idea for the federal government to be involved.24

  Since the mid-1950s, Congress had considered several bills that would have provided federal financing for public school teachers’ salary increases and the construction of school buildings. All had been defeated. Most recently, President Kennedy had proposed $2.5 billion in grants that states could allocate at their discretion to teachers’ salaries and school construction as well as some other kinds of expenditures. Congress rejected this proposal.

  There were four main reasons why Congress had never passed federal aid to elementary and secondary schools. The first was that a lot of people believed in an American tradition dating from the nineteenth century that public schools should be under local control. The second reason was that federal aid to education was a wedge that divided the parties. Republicans tended to oppose using federal money to help teachers, whose unions generally leaned toward the Democrats. They also defended the localist tradition in primary and secondary education. The third reason was that Catholic Democrats, who were very influential among urban politicians in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other big cities, opposed these proposals because their parochial schools would not receive any funds. Protestant and Jewish Democrats—and the generally Democratic-leaning teachers’ unions—resisted Catholic demands for federal grants to parochial schools. The final reason had to do with race. Before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, education legislation proposals were opposed by southern Democrats who feared the funds would create an opening for the federal government to integrate first schools and then other public institutions.25

  Johnson was confident that he could find a way through this political minefield. The election had provided him with more support on Capitol Hill for all his domestic initiatives. The passage of the Civil Rights Act, by guaranteeing a strong federal presence in the states to eradicate segregation, had dampened southern opposition to education legislation. There was a long tradition of southerners’ looking to Washington for funds, and now, as segregation in schools was illegal, there was no reason for them not to climb onto the federal gravy train for their schools, just as they had done for their military bases, dams, and highways. “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is passed anyway,” one administration official told a group of southern congressmen. “If you now vote to deny federal aid to education, you are not helping yourself, you are just making it worse, because you might comply in some places and might as well pick up the money.”26

  Johnson believed he had restructured his education proposal to avoid the traditional Democratic infighting over parochial schools. Unlike Kennedy’s proposal, which provided grants for school construction and teachers’ salaries, Johnson’s bill focused on federal assistance to impoverished children regardless of where they went to school. Under his plan, education became an extension of the War on Poverty. This shift in design—from funding buildings and teachers for all public school kids to providing money and services targeted for poor students—had many authors. In Congress, the so-called pupil-centered approach to education policy had been the brainchild of Senator Wayne Morse and two Senate staffers, Stewart McClure and Charles Lee, on the Labor and Public Welfare Committee. Morse, the Oregon maverick and ex-Republican, known as the Tiger of the Senate, was a former law school dean and was chairman of the Subcommittee on Education of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee. Morse’s insight was that shifting the target of aid from all children to a particular category of children would diminish some of the opposition that had traditionally hamstrung this issue. The federal government would distribute funds for services that aided poor students regardless of whether they were in public or parochial schools.27

  Johnson called on civil rights and labor leaders to help him make sure this legislation made it smoothly through the Eighty-ninth Congress. He spoke by phone to Martin Luther King on January 15 and told him, “We’ve got to try with every force at our command—and I mean every force—to get these education bills that go to those people under two thousand dollars a year income . . . We’ve got to get them passed before the vicious forces concentrate and get them a coalition that can block them . . . Your people ought to be very, very diligent in looking at those committee members that come from urban areas that are friendly to you to see that those bills get reported right out.”28

  In the bill that was introduced in the House by the Kentucky Democrat Carl Perkins, chairman of the General Education Subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee, over $1 billion would be allocated to school districts where 3 percent or more of the student body belonged to families that earned less than $40 a week, which included roughly five million of the nation’s forty-eight million students. Local school districts were required to submit to the state their plans to provide services to these children, which could include everything from new after-school programs to new facilities earmarked for the kids of poor families. The state education departments would then make decisions about which plans to approve. School districts applying for these funds would be required to include in their design certain services that would be made available to students of similar income brackets who were enrolled in private schools, most of which would be urban parochial schools often attended by kids from poor ethnic families. The proposal allocated $100 million in grants to subsidize the purchase of books in libraries and other related materials. Parochial schools could receive these funds as long as the books that were purchased would be acceptable in a public school, that is, devoid of religious content. Finally, the proposal authorized about $100 million to establish supplementary education centers that would offer curricula not included in the schools, including instruction in foreign languages, music and art, and science labs. The programs would be run in independent institutions within school districts so that qualified children who were enrolled in parochial schools would have access to them.

  The early responses to Johnson’s pupil-centered proposal were positive. Catholic organizations expressed cautious support for the legislation. A spokesman for the Roman Catholic Church said, “This emphasis on the child, the student, I applaud.” Officials from the National Education Association, who were usually at odds with church officials whenever education legislation was being discussed, stated that the bill did not violate the separation of church and state even though parochial school children would benefit from the funds.29

  The legislative strategy for aid to education was in the hands of liberal committee chairmen, who would use their muscle to push a bill rapidly through the House before any internal party disag
reements developed into conflicts. Carl Perkins was first in line because his General Education Subcommittee was where the bill entered into the legislative process. His constituency, primarily unionized coal miners, ranked toward the bottom of the income ladder and at the top of the charts for unemployment, so the district stood to benefit from the proposed funds.30 Perkins conducted open hearings on the education program to limit the opportunity for opponents to attack the legislation behind closed doors, where they could avoid the political fallout.

  Perkins ran his committee, which was one of the most liberal in the House, with great skill and ruthlessness. He didn’t allow opponents time to speak in committee meetings. He stacked the hearings with people who supported the measure so that the hearings didn’t become a forum for opponents to voice their criticisms of the legislation for reporters. The subcommittee worked with great speed, accepting Johnson’s principle that delay was usually a bad thing because it gave opponents time to cause trouble; there were hearings and deliberations for ten straight days. As Larry O’Brien told the president, Perkins “pushed the committee night and day and did a tremendous job of achieving” a markup of the legislation for the full committee.31 The markup was the work the subcommittee or committee did in reviewing each section of the bill, rewriting language, and voting on amendments before sending the bill to the next stage of the legislative process.

  On February 5, the subcommittee reported out the bill to the full committee by a vote of 6 to 0. Only the six Democrats voted for the bill. The three Republicans on the subcommittee had boycotted the final meeting and refused to vote on the bill, to protest how Perkins had decided to manhandle them on such an important matter. Charles Goodell charged that the subcommittee had considered the legislation in a “hasty and superficial” manner.32 “This isn’t going to be an education act,” Goodell said, “it’s going to be the ‘railroad act of 1965.’”33 This was characteristic of the focus of Republicans’ complaints about committees in the wake of the 1964 election; they tended to criticize as overly partisan the way every proposal was handled by every liberal majority during the legislative process. The abstaining Republicans also suggested that the federal expenditures for education wouldn’t help needy kids as much as they would fatten the wallets of politicians and activists in Democratic constituencies.

  When the full committee met, Adam Clayton Powell was at the top of his form.34 He rushed the deliberations so that his opponents wouldn’t have time to organize a forceful response. He blocked proposals that would have raised the cost of the legislation or provided funding for school building construction, which, according to O’Brien, would have “completely unzipped the religious consensus” by bringing back old tensions.35 On March 2, the committee approved the $1.3 billion bill by a vote of 23 to 8.

  Even before debate began on the House floor, the whip counts were positive.36 The legislative committee of the National Education Association estimated that as of March 2 there were at least 242 positive commitments in the House.37

  Gerald Ford’s promise of a “constructive” approach seemed to be an instant nonstarter. Republicans attacked Johnson as a big-spending liberal. They called him the “wildest spending economizer” in history and ridiculed his claims that he would keep the budget under $100 billion. They charged that he was using “bookkeeping gimmicks” and masking the long-term costs of the program. The Great Society, they said, was an “empire-building scheme with ever bigger government as its central goal.” Education, Gerald Ford said, was the great example: “Federalized schools, text books, and teachers, federalized libraries, laboratories, auditoriums, and theaters . . . are now in prospect for our states and local communities.”38

  With the twenty-one-day rule menacing him, Howard Smith had no hope of holding up the bill. It moved swiftly to the floor, where it carried by 263 to 153. There were 41 southern Democrats who voted in favor, 54 in opposition, while Republicans voted against the bill by 96 to 35. There were 187 northern Democrats who supported the bill, with only 3 voting no. Thirty members who had voted against an education bill in the Eighty-seventh Congress voted in favor of this one, based on their understanding of the election as a mandate for President Johnson.39

  When the bill reached the Senate, Johnson reminded Senator Morse, whose Subcommittee on Education would take up the bill first, that for “fifteen years you’ve been raising hell with me and every time I go to my telephone you call me about education. Every time I go to the floor I hear Wayne Morse talk about education.” Now, Johnson said, the time had come to pass the bill. Morse didn’t need the reminder. He told the president he would “take on the opposition” and that the president should not worry about the bill’s passage.40 The centerpiece of their strategy was to pass the House bill without any amendments. If the Senate did that, the rules stipulated that the bill would not have to go to a conference committee, and there would be no requirement to send the final version of the bill back to the House Rules Committee, where Howard Smith would have one last chance to cause problems for Johnson.41 Despite the twenty-one-day rule, Johnson was not in the mood to take any chances that could “endanger the whole bill.”42

  The Republican attitude toward the education bill was entirely different in the Senate, where reelection required winning votes from a statewide constituency, from what it was in the House, where many Republican members had to court voters only in relatively small, homogeneous districts. House Republicans elected from those districts could afford to remain more rigidly conservative than could senators who had to appeal to a broader base. Republican senators were also more desperate to avoid any association with Goldwater’s stands against federal aid to education that would surely hurt them among the moderate voters to whom they had to appeal.

  Morse’s Subcommittee on Education voted unanimously in favor of the bill: 10 to 0. The full committee followed with a unanimous vote of its own. The bill was reported to the Senate floor without any amendments, where, after Morse warded off over ten proposed amendments, it passed by a decisive vote of 73 to 18. Fifty-five Democrats and 18 Republicans voted in favor of the legislation. Because the Senate had passed exactly the same bill as the House, there would be no conference committee, and the bill would go directly to the president for his signature.

  Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act accomplished what Johnson had most desired—federal assistance to “educationally deprived” children. As a result of the law, federal aid for grades K–12 increased from 3 percent of total education spending in 1958 to 10 percent ten years later.43 The legislation authorized the federal government to provide financial aid to local school districts with high concentrations of low-income families. State education agencies could dispense the money they received from the U.S. commissioner of education as grants to districts. A local district could be eligible for funds only if it had a minimum of one hundred students in families that made $2,000 a year or less in income or relief money. To receive the money, a local district would send an application to the state’s education agency that explained how funds would help low-income kids in public, private, and parochial schools. Title II provided $100 million in grants for library materials and textbooks. Title III authorized $100 million for supplementary educational services, including labs, language programs, vocational classes, artistic construction, mobile libraries, and other educational technology. Title IV provided money for educational research and training. Title V provided $25 million to the states to improve the operations of their departments of education.

  The new law was unlike any previous legislation in the way it provided federal aid to local school districts, but what it could accomplish had been vastly oversold. Schooling was only one challenge for children living in low-income communities. Educational enhancements would have only limited effects on their lives. There would also have to be changes in homes and communities and the promise of good jobs after a young person’s schooling was finished. The formula the legislation use
d to dispense funds, as Republicans had warned during debates, often neglected some of the poorest children, and weak guidelines for allocation of the funds created room for school administrators to use money for purposes other than those for which it was intended.44

  Despite these limitations and others that would become clear over time, the legislation was still historic. It provided the biggest injection to that time of federal funds into the educational system, and it established a strong precedent for federal engagement in improving education for the poorest young people in America. Republicans would later find it difficult to roll back these gains, and over the coming decade there would be bipartisan agreement to expand the government’s commitment to education.45

  The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was not the only education legislation passed in 1965. In a separate bill, Congress approved Johnson’s request to use $150 million of poverty funds to provide grants to preschool programs for poor children. The programs, established on an experimental basis in the summer of 1965 and known as Head Start, were based on the theory, supported by social science research, that poor children were about a year behind other kids by third grade and three years behind other kids by eighth grade, in part because their school districts did not have nursery schools or kindergartens. The other major victory on education occurred with the passage of the Higher Education Act. This ambitious legislation provided federal funding for university libraries, African American colleges, and community service programs. It also provided low-interest loans to students.