Keppel had selected the members of the task force, starting with John Gardner, its gifted chairman. They were close friends, greatly admired each other, and looked at educational problems through the same lens. In fact, Keppel’s father had headed the Carnegie Foundation before Gardner took over.
John Gardner had been born in Los Angeles in 1912 and raised in then pastoral Beverly Hills. After an M.A. at Stanford, he then got a Ph.D. in psychology at Berkeley. He taught at the Connecticut College for Women and Mt. Holyoke. During the war he worked with noted Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Afterward Murray helped him get a job at Carnegie, where he rose rapidly to become president in 1955. With the position he held and his impressive writings in a style Current Biography called “clear, distilled, and aphoristic,” he emerged as one of the nation’s leading authorities on education. He had a “patrician bearing and calm manner [that] exudes an air of quiet strength and integrity.” He was a progressive Republican, but had edited a volume of Kennedy’s speeches. He made a very big impression in Washington, not least with Lyndon Johnson.
The President told Gardner that “he wanted our ideas, he wanted our best thinking, he wanted our most innovative thinking. And he wanted us to forget politics.” Johnson added, “I’ll figure out how to do it.” Keppel played a decisive role on the task force. He was, Gardner said, at “every meeting, he knew everything that was going on, he contributed ideas, he took ideas out of the meeting. There was a complete exchange. … So some of the ideas went into the pot immediately.” The task force scoured the country for suggestions. For example, it paid heed to a seminar the Office of Education held in 1963 for improving the education of the poor and for dealing with segregated schools.
The other members of the task force were James E. Allen, Jr., New York State Commissioner of Education; Hedley W. Donovan, editor of Time; Harold B. Gores, president of Educational Facilities Laboratory; Clark Kerr, president of the University of California; Edwin H. Land, president of Polaroid; Sidney P. Marland, Pittsburgh’s superintendent of schools; Professor David Riesman of Harvard; the Reverend Paul C. Reinert, of St. Louis University; Raymond R. Tucker, the mayor of St. Louis; Ralph W. Tyler, director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto; Stephen J. Wright, president of Fisk; and Professor Jerrold R. Zacharias, of MIT.
This was, Gardner wrote in the report, “a fateful moment in the history of American education.” The system needed basic overhaul. If the U.S. was to build a “Great Society,” education must be its heart. The key was “access.” Millions of students were denied a proper education because they lived in states too poor to provide one, or in central cities in which the schools were beggared, or suffered from physical or emotional handicaps in localities which offered no or, at best, inadequate special education, or could not find the money to pay for a college education.
Thus, the thrust of the report was to raise the federal share of financial support for primary and secondary education from its current 3.5 percent, compared with 96.5 percent from state and local sources. This would be done with equalization formulas skewed to give poor states and ghetto schools a bigger share. Special education for the mentally retarded, the deaf, the speech impaired, the emotionally disturbed, the blind, and the crippled required additional funding. For college students loans, scholarships, and work-study should assist the academically qualified to pay for the costs of higher education.
The task force recommended a number of categorical programs: preschool teaching run by Head Start under the Office of Economic Opportunity; supplementary educational centers to assist local school systems in broadening their offerings; national laboratories to gather and develop technologieally innovative methods of teaching; vigorous enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to overcome school segregation; and expansion of university extension programs to include courses concerned with community problems.
When President Johnson read the Gardner report in mid-November, he pounced on its recommendations for a legislative strategy. In the week following Thanksgiving he met at his ranch with Secretaries Celebrezze and Wirtz, along with Moyers, Cohen, Keppel, and Cannon. There would be two bills, one to be called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the other the Higher Education Act. The schedule for the major messages was laid out. Johnson had hired Douglass Cater, formerly on the staff of The Reporter magazine, as a White House assistant to write speeches and coordinate programs, including education. Cater and Keppel wrote the education message.
Meanwhile, Keppel was working on the major hurdle ESEA must overcome, the church-state controversy. When President Kennedy had brought Keppel on board in 1962, he had insisted that he establish immediate contact with the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC). Over the preceding two years Keppel, an Episcopalian, had developed trusting relations with the Catholics as well as with their opponents, the National Education Association and the National Council of Churches. This positioned him to act as mediator. His first task was to clear away each side’s adherence to hallowed principles. For Catholics this was that Congress must treat parochial schools equally. NEA and the National Council, along with many Jews, insisted on a rigorous separation of church and state, that is, no assistance to parochial schools. Keppel’s burden was to move the argument from these principles to practicality.
In retrospect, the formula that emerged seems ridiculously obvious, but it struck everyone at the time like a bolt of lightning. It was to provide aid not to schools but to pupils, which was known as the child benefit theory. After its dramatic success many claimed pride of authorship.
“With all humility,” Wilbur Cohen admitted, “I worked out this device which I think broke the log jam.” His boss, Secretary Celebrezze, also a humble man, took a different position. “I presented it. … They agreed to it. What I was trying to do was help the student.” Kermit Gordon was more detached: “The strategy and the conceptual brilliance—the political brilliance—of the legislation, I think, was almost wholly attributable to Larry O’Brien’s work.” Cater was convinced that the idea came from the Gardner task force. Gardner personally, however, credited Keppel and Senator Wayne Morse.
In fact, the child benefit theory was invented many years earlier. It first found expression in Cochran v. Board of Education in 1930. Governor Huey Long had gotten the Louisiana legislature to enact a law to provide every school child in the state, including those in parochial schools, with free textbooks. The statute was challenged on several grounds in the state court, one as an establishment of religion in defiance of the First Amendment. Long himself argued the defense before the Supreme Court. In an opinion for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes cited with approval the Louisiana court’s holding: “The schools … are not the beneficiaries of these appropriations. They obtain nothing from them, nor are they relieved of a single obligation because of them. The school children and the state alone are the beneficiaries.”
In 1947 the Supreme Court on a closer question voted five to four in Everson v. Board of Education to extend the child benefit theory to transporting children to and from school. The court sustained a local ordinance in New Jersey which allowed a town to reimburse parents for the cost of bus trips to both public and parochial schools.
In 1964 Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act provided for “special remedial and other noncurricular educational assistance for the benefit of low-income individuals and families,” presumably attendees of both public and private schools. That same year Senator Morse had introduced a bill to amend the impacted areas program to allow the inclusion of children in families suffering from economic hardship as measured by unemployment and welfare assistance, again without reference to public or parochial schools.
Keppel, perhaps better informed than the others, was more statesmanlike. When asked where the idea came from, he said, “Oh, from a bunch of people. Since it worked politically, there are a lot of fathers of this bill.”
The conditions for med
iation on church-state were bright for the first time. All the parties knew that the President would insist on the enactment of legislation and that he would not permit a religious conflict to block the way. “Don’t come out with something that’s going to get me right in the middle of this religious controversy,” he told Cohen. “I don’t want the Baptists attacking me from one hand and the Catholics from another.”
The elementary and secondary education bill sidestepped teacher salaries, the issue that had divided the NEA and the NCWC. NEA had long asked for federal support for the pay of its members. The baby boom had sharply increased the cost of running the Catholic schools. In fact, enrollment in their elementary schools had risen during the past 20 years by 129 percent compared with 69 percent for public schools. Average class size in parochial schools was 42 pupils. There were not enough nuns to do the teaching and the Catholics had been forced to enter the teacher labor market, where salaries for unionizing teachers were now rising rapidly. The church recognized that for constitutional and political reasons it could not get the government to pay its teachers. ESEA would do nothing for teacher salaries.
By 1965, both NEA and NCWC were weary of their historic conflict. The result had been to block the passage of any legislation. They were ready to move from principle to practicality. “Now,” Cater wrote, “they both accepted the fact that the other side had to be given something.”
In the latter part of 1964 Keppel met regularly for dinner with the education lobbies, particularly the NEA and the NCWC, to explore areas of agreement. Sometimes Celebrezze and Cohen joined them, and, more important, so did John Brademas, who represented the Third Congressional District in northern Indiana and sat on the House Education Subcommittee.
His father was a Greek immigrant who ran a restaurant. “John,” he said, “I’ll never leave much money to my children but I will leave you all a first-class education.” His mother was a Hoosier schoolteacher of Scots-English-Irish-Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. Her father had been a high school superintendent and college professor who had accumulated a huge library. Brademas was an educator almost from birth (he would become president of New York University). He also developed a keen interest in politics. He went to Harvard, was a Rhodes scholar, and took a Ph.D. in government.
Brademas had been widely exposed to religious teaching. As he told the House,
I am the Methodist nephew of a hard-shell Baptist preacher. My mother belongs to the Disciples of Christ Church. My father is Greek Orthodox, and before coming to the Congress of the United States, I taught at a Roman Catholic college. If I can find myself a Jewish bride, I would represent the finest example of the ecumenical movement.
One of his largest constituents was the University of Notre Dame in South Bend. Robert Wyatt, the current president of NEA, had headed its Indiana affiliate and was a friend. So was Monsignor Frederick Hochwalt, who represented the NCWC.
The Monsignori, as Keppel called them, were a “convivial gathering” and his relations with them were on a “good footing.” But they knew the weaknesses in their bargaining position. In a meeting in mid-December they left Keppel with two strong impressions. They did not want aid that would provoke a court test. This would cause delay and create acrimony. Though they did not say so, obviously, they might lose. They also stressed that they did not want federal money as a substitute for their own costs, but as a supplement. Monsignors Hochwalt and Hurley, however, visited him privately to emphasize their need for help with teacher salaries. It would not be part of the legislative package and it would certainly cause a court challenge that the Catholics could easily lose.
Wiser heads prevailed. In February 1965 Jack Valenti of the President’s staff met with Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi, the Apostolic Delegate. He was, Valenti wrote, an “extremely able man” who spoke flawless English and had worked in Portugal, Paris, India, the Philippines, and Washington. He strongly favored ESEA as it was and said the “great majority” of the bishops shared his view. Even crusty Cardinal Spellman of New York agreed. He expected that Cardinal Mclntyre of Los Angeles would be alone in opposition. The bishops seemed to have accepted the view that their main aim should be to establish the principle of federal aid for their schools.
The parochial schools would gain only limited assistance under ESEA. The basic Title I program of aid to low-income families would provide payments only to public agencies. But “shared services” would be encouraged, that is, resources in public schools would be available to private schools that served the poor. Under Title II library resources, textbooks, and instructional materials would be provided only to a state public agency, but it could pass them on to pupils in all the schools in the state, including those enrolled in private schools. This would be the main assistance to parochial schools. The Justice Department thought that constitutionality would hinge upon the mechanism used by the state. Title III would create supplementary educational centers to provide physical education, music, languages, advanced science, remedial reading, television equipment, and teaching innovations for both public and private schools. Justice was optimistic about constitutionality. Title VI would finance laboratories at universities for research and development of methods of education, which would be available to parochial schools. But there was a prohibition on the teaching of religion. Title VI would forbid “any payment under this Act … for religious worship or instruction.”
Keppel estimated that nonpublic schools could receive between 10.1 and 13.5 percent of the dollars appropriated under ESEA. Parochial schools had about 15 percent of the enrollment. The President wanted to know why they did not get 15 percent of the benefits. Cater explained that the parochial schools had been expanding twice as fast as the public. The law should “not encourage continued growth of the parochial school system at a faster rate than the public system.”
Chester Relyea of the general counsel’s office of HEW drafted the elementary and secondary education bill, with important help from Samuel Halperin, acting deputy commissioner in the Office of Education.
The President delivered a special message, “Toward Full Educational Opportunity,” to Congress on January 12, 1965. Youngsters from poor families, he pointed out, suffered a serious handicap. Almost half the nation’s school districts offered kindergarten, but only about 100 of the 26,000 districts provided nursery schools. In the summer of 1965 the OEO would offer a community action preschool program called Head Start to begin in the fall.
Elementary and secondary education were the bedrock of the U.S. system. They now enrolled 48 million students and soaked up 71 percent of educational expenditures. They were in bad shape and the President advanced a program to help them.
Most important was major assistance to public schools that served children from low-income families, for which he asked $1 billion, two-thirds of the total. Differences in income distribution significantly influenced school quality. The five states with the lowest incomes and the poorest schools spent less than half as much per pupil as the five with the highest incomes and the best schools. Big cities spent only two-thirds as much as their suburbs. In the 15 largest cities 60 percent of tenth graders from poor neighborhoods dropped out before finishing high school. The President urged equalization formulas that would assist low-income states and the urban slums.
School libraries were a national disgrace. Almost 70 percent of public elementary schools had no libraries at all and 84 percent were without librarians. Many schools averaged less than half a book per child. The President wanted federal assistance to allow both public and private schools to buy books and hire librarians.
There had recently been dramatic advances in teaching the “new” math, the sciences, foreign languages, remedial reading, and the physically and mentally handicapped. But these methods had hardly penetrated the school system. The President proposed the creation of federally funded supplementary education centers and services to bring these and other techniques to the schools.
The National Science Foundation had developed
new instructional materials for teaching science. Johnson proposed institutionalizing this program by creating a system of regional laboratories to undertake research in teaching and to train teachers.
State departments of education were notoriously bureaucratized and sleepy. The President, with Keppel pushing, thought that a little extra federal money would wake them up. “The last thing in the world I wanted,” Keppel said, “was all those 25,000 school districts coming in with plans with my bureaucrats deciding whether to approve them or not. I wanted that stuff done out in the states.”
Finally, Johnson outlined the higher education program: scholarships, loans, and work-study for qualified students to attend college; aid to “less developed” institutions; support for college libraries; and increased funding for university extension programs that addressed the problems of the local community.
The reaction to the President’s message was enthusiastic. NEA declared that it was “one of the strongest commitments to meeting the urgent needs of the public schools ever to come from the White House.” Monsignor Hochwalt stated, “This emphasis on the child, the student, I applaud.” The New York Times called the message “a skillful effort to fix national priorities while avoiding paralyzing controversies.” The Washington Post agreed. “Lyndon Johnson’s genius for finding a way out of blind alleys is brilliantly exemplified in his message to Congress on education.” Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State disagreed. “This is federal aid to parochial schools by a method which attempts to circumvent the constitutional issue.” Cater found that telegrams to the White House ran three to one in favor and that “opposition is exclusively directed at aid to parochial schools.” The U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously endorsed the education proposals.2
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