Building the Great Society

by Joshua Zeitz

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  In the wake of his sweeping victory over Barry Goldwater, LBJ intended to use the Democratic Party’s commanding majorities in Congress to break the dam that had for decades stalled the expansion of the welfare state. Resolving the impasse over education funding—a seemingly unending stalemate to which there was no obvious answer—took priority.

  In December, LBJ, a consummate pragmatist who was more intent on reaching a deal than preserving a barrier between church and state, asked Doug Cater why the administration could not simply allocate funds to nonpublic schools in equal proportion to the percentage of children they educated. The idea was a nonstarter, his aide replied. Catholic schools had seen enrollment growth of 129 percent in the prior decade, resulting in pupil-teacher ratios that were far out of balance when compared with public institutions. Any aid package that subsidized this growth would draw liberal opposition. “Federal policy should be to improve the excellence of education for all children,” Cater insisted. “But it should not encourage continued growth of the parochial school system at a faster rate than the public system.” Yet behind closed doors, there appeared for the first time in many years to be room for compromise. Meeting with a dozen Catholic monsignors in December, administration officials learned that given the Supreme Court’s increasingly liberal disposition, the church was not eager to force a judicial case that might definitively close the door on broad categorical aid to parochial schools. Legislation that went too far in funding religious schools would surely trigger such a legal test. The clerics assured Francis Keppel, the commissioner of education, that they would treat federal aid as supplemental rather than as an offset for their current education budgets. It finally appeared that a reasonable compromise might be in sight.

  Meeting earlier that month with John Hay Whitney—newspaper publisher, diplomat, and scion of a wealthy Republican family (his grandfather had served as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary and, later, as secretary of state under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt)—the president explained that he was eager to reach an accommodation on the “church-state dispute,” given the increasingly charged debate over school desegregation. In fact, enactment of the Civil Rights Act was a blessing as well as a curse to the cause of education reform. While it would soon enmesh thousands of school districts in contentious negotiations with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and in federal court cases, it removed a hot-button issue from debate. Liberals in Congress would no longer insist on the poison pill that was the Powell Amendment, because it was no longer necessary. The new civil rights law already stipulated that segregated institutions were ineligible for federal aid.

  As late as 1962, William V. Shannon of the New York Post wrote that “religious and philosophical antagonisms engendered by school questions are so bitter that a solution through normal . . . methods is no longer possible.” Now the door seemed to budge, if just a crack. Johnson’s War on Poverty would provide the wedge to jar it wide open. On December 1, Keppel proposed shifting the formula from general aid to “categorical” aid. Rather than disburse funds to schools, the government could use the schools as pass-through agents for the disbursement of resources to economically disadvantaged children, whether they attended public, private, or parochial institutions. “The great majority of all school districts in the Nation would receive payments under the proposal,” the commissioner advised, making the new formula politically difficult to resist. The idea was not new. Congressman John Dent, a Pennsylvania Democrat who helped steer the administration’s antipoverty bill through the House in 1964, believed that the same allocation formula applied to community action programs might work for elementary and secondary education: the federal government could calculate the number of poor children in a particular area and disburse funds proportionally according to need. Senator Wayne Morse, a liberal Democrat from Oregon, had already suggested such an idea. In later years, Johnson’s aides would disagree about the provenance of the formula. Wilbur Cohen, a veteran civil servant of the New Deal era who played a leading role in shepherding Johnson’s education and health-care agenda through Congress, was certain that the proposal was his. Keppel recalled differently: “The NEA [National Education Association] thinks they thought it up, and the Catholics think they thought it up, and I think I thought it up. I don’t know. It just got put together.”

  Regardless of who originated the idea, the president quickly approved it. For one, it was consistent with his long-standing core belief that education was a key to unlocking opportunity. It was both strategically and tactically convenient inasmuch as it aligned a perennial liberal aspiration—aid to primary and secondary education—with the guiding principles of the Great Society and circumvented the religious question by associating money with students rather than schools. In addition, the formula appealed to LBJ’s pragmatism; the president understood that he would enjoy just one crack at the problem. Keppel and Cohen were waiting in the Fish Room in January 1965 when the president bounded in, “looking cheerful as he can be,” the commissioner remembered. Johnson surveyed the room and abruptly turned the mood. “Look,” he implored, “we’ve got to do this in a hurry. We’ve got in with this majority of sixteen million votes in the Congress. It doesn’t make any difference what we do. We’re going to lose them at a rate of about a million a month.” Urging both men to expedite legislative action on education and health care, the president “turned around with that characteristic gesture,” Keppel would recall, “and said, ‘I want to see a whole bunch of coonskins on the wall!’”

  In its final form, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) broke the long-standing impasse by providing compensatory education dollars to each state based on the number of children in households earning less than $2,000 annually. Title I provided aid to public schools to support supplemental programs that would benefit poor students (including those who attended private institutions). Title II funded textbooks and libraries in public and private schools alike. Title III underwrote supplemental programs in music, science, remedial skills, and physical education for poor children. Ultimately, less than 13 percent of funds supported private school students—enough to mollify the Roman Catholic Church, but wrapped in the War on Poverty in such a way as to make the scheme palatable to liberal Protestants. Critics would later dismiss the ESEA as a convoluted effort to fund education by making it an antipoverty program; the problem, they claimed, was that by traveling so circuitous a route to political compromise, the administration neither attacked poverty nor improved educational outcomes. In this assessment, alleviating poverty required lifting incomes through cash transfer programs, and improving education outcomes demanded a less targeted, more holistic approach to spending. Many low-performing students were not, in fact, poor, while in many districts local officials simply used Title I funds to offset or supplement regular budgetary expenses, thus obviating the intent of Congress to target programming to economically disadvantaged youth. Because the funding formula left states with broad discretion as to how and where they allocated funds, by 1977, according to one study, almost two-thirds of students benefiting from the program were not poor and over half were not low achievers.

  The administration viewed matters differently. At the time, Keppel spoke for the president as well as for most administration officials when he argued that “income correlates highly with the number of years of schooling completed.” He sincerely believed, as did most of the Great Society’s architects, that additional funds “could interrupt the cycle of poverty where we have a fighting chance.” Only in later years did policy makers focus on a multiplicity of cultural phenomena, including the disintegration of two-family households, and structural economic conditions—like stagflation and the decline of manufacturing and organized labor—that contributed in outsized proportions to poverty’s growth and sustenance. At the time of the bill’s passage, it was still an article of liberal faith that more education funding generated better educati
onal outcomes and that better educational outcomes would lift children out of poverty. The very logic behind this thinking lay at the heart of opportunity theory.

  Moreover, if liberals sincerely believed that broader access to education would help poor children break the cycle of poverty, they also believed that the federal government had an obligation to shoulder a portion of the nation’s primary and secondary education burden. If tying aid to the number of poor children in a particular state or district was the mechanism by which to achieve this goal, then it was a method worth embracing. As one congressman later acknowledged, “In 1965, the issue was not good education policy versus bad. The question Congress had to settle in 1965 was whether there was ever going to be federal aid to the elementary and secondary schools of this nation. . . . The 1965 bill, in all candor, does not make much sense educationally, but it makes a hell of a lot of sense legally, politically, and constitutionally. This was a battle of principle, not substance, and that is the main reason I voted for it.” In big cities especially, federal assistance proved critical, and officials could make the case that even offsets of ordinary course expenditures benefited poor children. As Benjamin Willis, the superintendent of schools in Chicago, explained to Congress, urban centers had in recent years attracted “large families from the rural South”—white and black alike—who “have little education and limited vocational skills.” Their children “require specialized programs of education if they are to overcome the disadvantages imposed upon them by their limited background.” More so than small towns and suburbs, “a large portion of the tax dollar in the great cities is required for non-school governmental services,” including public transportation, police and sanitation, and public welfare. (Willis might have added that few conservatives raised concerns when the federal government funded a sprawling interstate highway system that primarily benefited suburbanites.) “Site and construction costs are considerably higher in the large cities than in smaller communities.” Metropolises like Chicago could spend more on educating disadvantaged youth if they had more money—full stop.

  Between 1958 and 1968, federal spending on primary and secondary education rose from $375 million to $4.2 billion, or from less than 3 percent to over 10 percent of total education funding. As Johnson predicted, once institutionalized, it would likely grow. By 1985, the federal government’s share of all K–12 school spending rose to 16 percent; the percentage provided by state governments rose from 41 percent to 55 percent; and the portion shouldered by local governments fell from 51 percent to 31 percent. Because many local and state governments rely heavily on regressive property and sales taxes, in many cases these swings shifted some of the burden for funding schools from working-class and poor families to middle-class and wealthy income taxpayers. Furthermore, in the early 1970s Congress plugged some of the loopholes in the program by imposing “maintenance of effort” requirements on states and localities; to continue receiving ESEA funds, local and state governments must set their own education budgets at a high fraction of the prior year’s appropriation, thus ensuring that federal dollars were truly supplementary. As the federal government gradually imposed additional regulations and restrictions governing the allocation of Title I money, state authorities centralized and professionalized their education departments and school systems to ensure ease of compliance and the continued flow of federal dollars. Partly as a result of this steady evolution, the number of independent school districts in the United States, which stood at 150,000 at the beginning of the twentieth century, fell to 15,000 by 1990.

  At the bill signing in Johnson City, Texas, at the small one-room schoolhouse he had attended as a child, LBJ believed “deeply no law I have signed or will ever sign means more to the future of America.”

  “As a son of a tenant farmer,” he told the nation, “I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty. As a former teacher—and, I hope, a future one—I have great expectations of what this law will mean for all of our young people.” Much as conservatives once feared, and as liberals had long hoped, Washington, D.C., came to play a greatly expanded role in K–12 education. Even if federal education policy did not achieve the dramatic reduction in poverty that Great Society planners once prophesied, it did, as LBJ promised, “put into the hands of our youth more than 30 million new books, and into many of our schools their first libraries . . . reduce the terrible time lag in bringing new teaching techniques into the nation’s classrooms [and] strengthen state and local agencies which bear the burden and the challenge of better education.” ESEA contributed to a vast upgrade in facilities, teachers’ salaries, library access, and supplementary programming for economically disadvantaged young people, and later for broader categories. By those measures, it achieved much of what its framers set out to do.

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  Charles Roberts, who covered the White House for Newsweek under both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, observed that “where President Kennedy used to use his staff against the bureaucracy, President Johnson puts greater store in the wisdom and experience of his Cabinet officers and career government workers.” Having risen politically during the New Deal era, when great power resided among hundreds of high-ranking departmental and agency leaders, LBJ understood the utility of governmental veterans who knew how to make programs work. Kennedy once told Roberts that “when things are noncontroversial, bureaucratically coordinated and all the rest, it may be that there is not much going on”; Johnson grasped the impossibility of the White House, with its relatively small staff, executing the Great Society’s grandiose legislative agenda alone. This appreciation for agencies and bureaucrats knew some limits. LBJ expected the cabinet departments to do his bidding. Horace Busby, whose portfolio of responsibilities included serving as cabinet secretary (the White House official responsible for corralling members of the cabinet), earned plaudits for his success in giving the executive agencies a real seat at the table, as had not been the case in many years. “His choir-like directions of cabinet meetings,” observed a reporter for the New York Times, “has turned them into precision affairs rather than rambling sessions.”

  In later years, Califano was the administration’s undisputed orchestrator of domestic policy, but in 1965 and early 1966, when LBJ’s prize initiatives—the education act and Medicare—were on the verge of launching, Doug Cater was (as Harry McPherson would recall) the “liaison man” with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, a sprawling and patchwork organization that comprised siloed fiefdoms—the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Office of Education, the Public Health Service—with little internal cohesion. In 1964, the office of the secretary of HEW totaled just sixteen professionals. Of the department’s roughly eighty-three thousand employees, approximately seventy-one thousand were functionaries in the Public Health Service and Social Security Administration. HEW was effectively “a holding company for highly independent administrations and bureaus,” a White House commission informed the president. “While its program burdens are enormous, the department is grossly understaffed at the top.” A reporter who covered the department argued that it was “utterly ridiculous to be trying to run a $6 billion and $7 billion business with only a handful of people.” Within HEW, no function was more inadequate to the task than the Office of Education, a small, hidebound outfit that was “not well equipped to administer effectively its many new responsibilities and that does not get strong support from the Secretary’s office in solving its administrative problems,” according to one observer. With roots in the late nineteenth century, the U.S. Office of Education employed a small army of professionals—most of them former public school teachers and principals—whose principal role was to compile data from state and local education officials and churn out arcane and generally uncontroversial studies about pedagogy. A government study found that its functionaries were “dedicated to servicing local, State and institutional policies rather than a national policy.”

  So irreleva
nt was the office that when John Kennedy learned from news reports that his first commissioner of education had quit his post, he replied with exasperation, “What’s all this about this fellow resigning as Commissioner of Education, apparently by way of Capitol Hill? What’s going on! I never heard of the fellow!” McGeorge Bundy, the president’s national security adviser, replied coolly, “Mr. President, that’s exactly the trouble. You never heard of the fellow!”

  If Kennedy was indifferent to the workings of government bureaucracy, LBJ was not. With Califano’s and Cater’s support, Francis Keppel, who served as commissioner of education between 1962 and 1965, initiated a major overhaul of the office—“an old agency largely devoted to data-gathering and operating in deference to State and professional groups” that would now bear the operational burden of ESEA. Though some advocates called for the establishment of a cabinet-level Department of Education, the Johnson administration was already in the process of creating the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Transportation. There was no political will to create a third. Moreover, Keppel advised that if the White House elevated his office to cabinet level, conservatives would howl anew at the specter of federal control. In fact, he argued, there was so much convergence between the Great Society’s education, health, and antipoverty programs that it made sense to house them under one umbrella department, albeit with a radically overhauled Office of Education. Over the course of several months, he smashed a number of bureaucratic idols and, in the process, alienated many people and organizations—especially state educational officials—who were invested in the status quo. “The anguish can only be imagined. The ensuing, if temporary, administrative chaos was shattering. For days and weeks, people could not find each other’s offices—sometimes not even their own. Telephone extensions connected appropriate parties only by coincidence. . . . Those who could not live with the status loss resigned. And all of this came at a time of maximum work load.”