The Uncertain Triumph

Federal Education Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Years

Hugh Davis Graham

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780807896730, 9780807815991
• eBook ISBN: 9780807879702
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: History of Education

Using the Kennedy and Johnson archives to analyze the evolution of educational policy from the perspective of the executive branch, Graham finds that the central theme was executive planning through presidential task forces. Mission agencies, clientele groups, and congressional committees produced a cascade of education programs in the 1960s as the administration was collapsing under the weight of the Vietnam war, inflation, and collective violence, yet the last two decades have witnessed a decline in test scores and basic literacy.

Originally published in 1984.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

1 / JOHN F. KENNEDY AND EDUCATION
From Congress to the White House

KENNEDY AND FEDERAL AID

In his memoir, Kennedy, Theodore Sorensen claims that “the one domestic subject that mattered most to John Kennedy [was] education. Throughout his campaign and throughout his Presidency, he devoted more time and talks to this single topic than to any other domestic issue.”¹ But Myer [Mike] Feldman, So-rensen's chief lieutenant, concluded more recently that Kennedy had no deep personal concern for public education—save for the training of the mentally retarded, which was related to the circumstance that had touched his family with tragedy—and that Kennedy's accelerating commitment to federal aid as a presidential candidate and as president owed far more to practical politics than to the kind of bedrock emotional commitment that drove the former schoolteacher Lyndon Johnson.²

The preponderance of evidence supports Feldman's private assessment. Kennedy attended four elite private schools, graduated from Choate and, after brief studies at the London School of Economics and Princeton University, attended and graduated from Harvard University. Then came one semester at the Stanford Business School, followed by naval service during World War II, and his election to Congress in 1946. Such a career of wealth and private schooling would not be likely to generate devotion to the public schools. When young Congressman Kennedy was appointed to the House Education and Labor Committee, he served quietly in the Eighty-first Congress; then early in the Eighty-second Congress, in 1949, he introduced a bill providing for federal funds for buses, health services, and textbooks for private and parochial schools.³This gesture was popular in his heavily Catholic Eleventh Congressional District in Boston, but it was clearly doomed in a chamber and also a committee that had been historically hostile to federal aid to education, and not surprisingly Kennedy's bill died quietly in committee. Far more visible in the Eighty-first Congress had been S. 246, a Senate-passed bill providing for federal aid to elementary and secondary schools, and one that enjoyed the cosponsorship of “Mr. Republican,” the conservative Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio. Public debate over the bill was dominated by a bitter dispute between Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, who wanted “auxiliary services” for parochial schools included in any federal aid bill, and Congressman Graham Barden of North Carolina, who chaired the special subcommittee on education and flatly opposed taxpayer aid to parochial schools. Spellman called Barden a “new apostle of bigotry,” and when Eleanor Roosevelt joined the fray by opposing federal aid to church schools in her syndicated newspaper columns, Spellman accused her of launching an “anti-Catholic campaign” and of writing columns that were “documents of discrimination unworthy of an American mother.”⁴ When S. 246 came before the House Education and Labor Committee in 1949, Kennedy supported it generally but pressed an amendment calling for federal payment of half the cost of bus service for private and parochial school students.⁵ When the committee defeated his amendment by a vote of sixteen to nine, Kennedy cast the deciding negative vote in a thirteen to twelve refusal to report the Senate-passed bill for floor action.

Kennedy was elected to the Senate in 1952, and although he was appointed to the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, which handled education legislation, he generally steered clear of the volatile federal aid debate throughout the 1950s, as the church-state issue yielded primacy to the growing school desegregation issue, and a Republican president sparred inconclusively with a Democratic Congress. In Politics and Policy, James Sundquist ably surveys the political snarls of the “Years of Frustration” between Eisenhower's election in 1952 and the orbiting of Sputnik in 1957.⁶ During these years, President Eisenhower persuaded Congress to create the new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He first appointed Oveta Culp Hobby, and then Marion P. Folsom, to preside over DHEW in the cabinet and witnessed half a decade of raucous partisan squabbling over the controversial issues that the federal aid question posed: school desegregation and the Powell amendment,⁷ the National Education Association and aid for teachers’ salaries, the baby boom and school construction and federal control, and the always smoldering church-state controversy. Only the Soviet launching of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 jarred the combatants out of their rancor and forced a consensus that superior Soviet performance in science and engineering demanded prompt federal funding of higher education in the interest of national defense.

The result was the $1 billion National Defense Education Act of 1958 (NDEA), which the Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson reasonably and proudly referred to as “an historic landmark … one of the most important measures of this or any other session.”⁸ Sundquist called it “the most important piece of national education legislation in a century,”⁹ and in hindsight it is clear that the NDEA ran formidable interference for Johnson's subsequent ESEA of 1965, especially in regard to what Sundquist recognized as “the psychological breakthroughs it embodied.” This was less because of its specific categorical provisions than because NDEA explicitly asserted a legitimate national interest in the quality of American education. But a more central question for the future of federal aid was whether NDEA's short-term assistance to higher education in Cold War crisis might generate momentum toward a permanent and more generalized federal role that was regarded as legitimate and necessary. And a corollary question was whether and how such a role might include elementary and secondary schools. When the congressional by-elections of 1958 brought sweeping Democratic victories that produced gains of 48 seats in the House and 15 in the Senate,¹⁰ the Democrats looked confidently toward the Eighty-sixth Congress with margins of 282 to 154 in the House and 64 to 34 in the Senate.¹¹ Because Eisenhower was constitutionally barred from a third term, the Eighty-sixth Congress presented Democrats with unusual opportunities to embarrass the Eisenhower-Nixon administration and recapture the White House in i960. In that sense, the presidential campaign of i960 began when the Eighty-sixth Congress convened on 7 January 1959, and an aid-to-education bill was to figure prominently in Democratic strategy.

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1960

Accounts of the partisan jockeying over education in 1959 by Sundquist, Munger and Fenno, and Bendiner ably document the frenetic but inconclusive maneuvering of the preelection period. It culminated with tortured parliamentary logic on 2 February i960 in a tied Senate vote on a motion to table a move to reconsider a vote on an amendment to a school-aid bill that subsequently passed the Senate. But the bill never made it to conference with a companion House-passed bill because a conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans on the House Rules Committee blocked a conference committee vote on a bill that President Eisenhower probably would have vetoed anyway.¹² The result of this intensely partisan maneuvering was that the successful goal of the Democrats was to trap Vice-President and certain GOP presidential nominee Richard Nixon into breaking the Senate tie by voting against federal aid for teachers’ salaries and for school construction. He would thereby earn the enmity and the Democrats would earn the appreciation of the NEA's three-quarters-of-a-million voting teachers and their families.

On election eve in i960, then, both houses of Congress had passed a general aid-to-education bill for the first time in the twentieth century, primarily because of the new Democrats elected in 1958 and the new post-Sputnik mood. Because both bills would fund school construction, the major differences, which promised to cancel each other out in conference compromise, were that the House bill this time around contained the Powell amendment, and the Senate bill included aid for teachers’ salaries. But the customary Senate-House reconciliation was blocked on 22 June by a seven-to-five vote in the House Rules Committee when all four Republicans were joined by three southern Democrats (committee chairman Howard Smith of Virginia, William Colmer of Mississippi, and James Trimble of Arkansas) in refusing to authorize a conference. Although Eisenhower was thereby spared having to sign a bill he disapproved of or to veto an aid-to-education bill on election eve,¹³ the issue was primed for the fall campaign between Kennedy and Nixon. Furthermore, as Sundquist observed, not only had the Democrats cemented their alliance with the NEA, they had implicitly escalated their vision of the federal commitment from a temporary response to baby boom and Cold War crisis to a permanent role in boosting educational quality. However, the precise rationale and mechanism for such a permanent role, especially at the elementary and secondary level, remained unclear.

When Kennedy announced his candidacy at a kick-off press conference on 2 January i960, he listed six main issues, the third of which was rebuilding the stature of American science and education (the arms race and freedom and order in the emerging nations were first and second; the farm economy and urban decay were fourth; economic growth was fifth; and America's moral purpose completed the list).¹⁴ Kennedy and Nixon were nominated by their respective party conventions in July, and their campaigns were dominated by Cold War posturing, especially over Quemoy and Matsu and Cuba. When they occasionally clashed on domestic issues, it usually took the form of Kennedy's attacking the flat Republican economy, and Nixon's defending seven years of peace and prosperity and attacking Democratic fiscal irresponsibility. During the campaign, Kennedy raised the education issue early and often, hammering at Nixon for casting a “tie-breaking vote killing a Democratic bill giving the states money to increase teachers’ salaries.”¹⁵ On 25 September, the eve of the first radio-television “debate,” Nixon released his study paper on education, and it revealed a comprehensive program of federal aid, although one that was devoid of dollar figures.¹⁶ For elementary and secondary education, he proposed a program of debt-servicing and matching grants that would relieve state and local governments of heavy construction costs and thereby, “first in importance,” release their funds for “urgent increases in teachers’ pay…. And we will do it without menacing the invaluable freedom of our schools by inhibitive Federal control.”¹⁷ For higher education, Nixon called for “greatly expanded” programs of subsidized loans for dormitories and matching grants for the construction of classrooms, laboratories, and libraries; expanded NDEA loans; a new national scholarship program based on need and competitive examinations to be administered by and its costs shared by the states; tuition tax credits for higher education; matching grants to build new medical schools; and more federal investment for vocational education, the handicapped, and adult education. Nixon even suggested as a harbinger of the National Institute of Education that he was to establish a dozen years later, the creation of a “national clearinghouse” for research, demonstration, and gathering and disseminating information about local experience and experimentation. And he concluded with a call for the creation of a permanent top-level commission on education, a sort of CEA for education to provide advice and continuing evaluation.

It was a bold counterstroke, and it was far more specific than any previous campaign statement of Kennedy's. That same day, the New York Herald-Tribune published the candidates’ responses to seven questions on education. But the candidates answered selectively and thereby blunted perception of their differences.¹⁸ Nixon ducked the Herald-Tribune's question on aid to private and parochial schools but encouraged consideration of tuition tax credits. Kennedy ducked the tax credits but called for aid to public schools only. Nixon was for state matching grants without any equalization formula; Kennedy was for supplemental federal funds to assist the poorer states. Nixon proclaimed that “the problem of teachers’ pay is the greatest single challenge confronting our American educational system today,” but he insisted that federal control must be avoided by assisting local construction and debt service only, thereby releasing local funds for increased teacher salaries. Kennedy's first statement was, “Federal aid to education via the States is a must.” But in that same first response he said that federal aid should “encompass” teachers’ salaries as well as school construction, and he again attacked Nixon for his tie-breaking vote against “giving the States freedom of choice to use Federal aid to improve teachers’ salaries.” As for loans and scholarships and all the rest, both men were for more. Both also carefully avoided cost estimates. In such a format, their differences were blurred.

The next day, however, their differences were sharpened in the first radio-television debate in Chicago, when Charles Warren of MBS asked Nixon to explain the discrepancy between his remark in 1957 that teachers’ salaries were “nothing short of a national disgrace” and his tie-breaking Senate vote against federal aid for teachers’ salaries in i960. Nixon's response, in part, was as follows:

I think that the reasons that I voted against having the federal government uh… pay teachers’ salaries was probably the very reason that concerned Senator Kennedy when in January of this year, in his kick-off press conference, he said that he favored aid for school construction, but at that time did not feel that there should be aid for teachers’ salaries—at least that's the way I read his remarks. Now, why should there be any question about the federal government aiding… teachers’ salaries? Why did Senator Kennedy take that position then? Why do I take it now? We both took it then, and I take it now, for this reason: we want higher teachers’ salaries. We need higher teachers’ salaries. But we also want our education to be free of federal control. When the federal government gets the power to pay teachers, inevitably in my opinion, it will acquire the power to set standards and to tell the teachers what to teach.¹⁹

In reply, Kennedy ducked the allusion to his January kick-off press conference and quickly turned to the February tiebreaker:

When uh… the Vice President quotes me in January, sixty, I do not believe the federal government should pay directly teachers’ salaries, but that was not the issue before the Senate in February. The issue before the Senate was that the money would be spent for school construction or teacher salaries. On that question the Vice President and I disagreed. I voted in favor of that proposal and supported it strongly, because I think that provided assistance to our teachers for their salaries without any chance of federal control and it is on that vote that the… Mr. Nixon and I disagreed, and his tie vote uh… defeated… his breaking the tie defeated the proposal. I don't want the federal government paying teachers’ salaries directly. But if the money will go to the states and the states can then determine whether it shall go for school construction or for teachers's salaries, in my opinion you protect the local authority over the school board and the school committee.²⁰

Education figured only marginally in the second and third debates, and the fourth was devoted entirely to foreign policy. Most of the debates and most of the campaign, in fact, featured jousting over international issues. Domestic issues centered on the performance of the economy, and to a lesser degree on civil rights, on which both candidates rather carefully hedged. Nixon's substantial education program appeared to have blunted somewhat the edge of Kennedy's attack, but Kennedy kept pressing his appeal for federal aid for construction and teachers’ salaries, securing an informal but de facto endorsement from the NEA,²¹ and toward the campaign's close, on 2 November i960, he pledged in a speech in Los Angeles that “in 1961, a Democratic Congress—under the leadership of a Democratic President—will enact a bill to raise teachers’ salaries as well as fund school construction....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• THE UNCERTAIN TRIUMPH
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 / JOHN F. KENNEDY AND EDUCATION From Congress to the White House
• 2 / KENNEDY AND THE LEGACY OF ASSASSINATION
• 3 / TASK FORCING TOWARD LYNDON JOHNSON'S GREAT SOCIETY
• 4 / REORGANIZING THE GOVERNMENT
• 5 / EXPANDING THE TASK FORCE DEVICE From Moyers To Califano
• 6 / FORGING THE CALIFANO SYSTEM 1966–1967
• 7 / PLANNING FOR THE FINAL ROUND 1967–1968
• 8 / THE PARADOX OF 1968
• 9 / EPILOGUE
• Notes
• Method and Sources
• Index