Interactive Timeline final paper (any question please let me know days before the work is due)

· Webb. L. D. (2014).  History of American education: Voices and perspectives . San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.

· Chapter 7: Depression, War, and National Defense

· Chapter 8: The Struggle for Equal Educational Opportunity

History of American education: Voices and perspectives .

Chapter 7

7.2 Impact of the Depression on Education

For the first 2 years following the stock market crash, both the public schools and colleges and universities escaped the brunt of the Depression. In fact, from 1929 until 1931 enrollments and staff grew and salaries and total expenditures remained stable. College fundraising remained high, and in the academic year ending in June 1932, colleges and universities collected $6.5 million more than they did in 1930 (Orr, 1979).

Most school superintendents viewed the current economic condition as a temporary storm they could weather by "creative retrenchment" and greater "compactness and efficiency" (Tyack et al., 1984). They still had faith in scientific management and the cult of efficiency. However, as school districts began to feel the impact of the Depression and educators daily saw its impact in the lives of their children, their faith failed and they, like most other Americans, began to blame greedy business leaders for the plight of the nation.

Financial Impact

By 1932 education at all levels was in serious financial trouble. College and university enrollments were down, along with student fees and state appropriations. During the 1930s state appropriations to higher education declined an average of 40%, even as many private school students transferred to more affordable public institutions (Schrecker, 2009). Gift support was also down more than 70% at private colleges (Schrecker, 2009).

Colleges and universities responded to the drop in revenues by reducing capital expenditures (expenses for building construction and repairs), increasing faculty loads, reorganizing curriculum, hiring freezes, and cutting salaries. A survey by the American Association of University Professors found that 84% of colleges had reduced faculty salaries, sometimes more than once, with the average being about 15% (Schrecker, 2009). Public institutions that relied on state appropriations suffered the most (Orr, 1979).

Elementary and secondary public schools found themselves in even worse shape than the colleges and universities. The public schools competed with other public institutions for tax revenues. Those revenues declined, since businesses and homeowners were often seriously in arrears in paying property taxes and the unemployed millions paid no taxes at all. By the end of the 1933–1934 school year, although total enrollments had increased by 750,000 since 1930, total revenues were down by almost $278 million (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 1993).

Retrenchment Strategies

The decline in revenues led many states, especially those in the hard-pressed South and Southwest, to close schools or shorten the school year. For example, in Alabama in 1933, 85% of the public schools were closed and 7,000 teachers were out of work (Moreo, 1996). By the first quarter of 1934, an estimated 20,000 schools nationwide had closed, affecting over 1 million pupils. Ten states were estimated to have schools with school terms of less than 3 months and 22 with terms of less than 6 months (National Education Association [NEA], 1933).

One of the initial retrenchment strategies of the schools was to increase class size, especially at the secondary level. In many districts, adult education, summer schools, kindergarten, and everything but the most basic subjects were eliminated. Similarly, all but the most necessary positions were eliminated. School nurses, supervisory specialists, and elementary principals were among the first to go. Schools for the handicapped were also eliminated or radically curtailed (Carlson, 1933).

The schools that did stay open were usually short on equipment and supplies. Old and damaged textbooks were the norm. As the Depression deepened, students were increasingly asked to bring their own supplies, or, in extreme cases, to pay tuition. In one such community, the NEA (1933) reported that 200 parents were unable to pay the $3 per month tuition for grade school students or $5.50 for high school students. Some students had to stop attending school because they could not afford the materials. Many others were not able to attend because they did not have proper clothes or shoes. Testimony before the U.S. Senate estimated that 3.5 million young people were unable to attend high school because of poverty (Moreo, 1996).

Impact on Teachers

The Depression also had a serious impact on teachers. They were public employees, mostly unorganized, and worse, in terms of being able to exercise any political pressure, 80% were female and thus particularly vulnerable to arbitrary dismissal on the basis of age, health, marriage, weight, or some minor infraction of a bureaucratic rule (Moreo, 1996).

Being married put women at particular risk. Removing more senior married teachers for new, unmarried ones was an economic measure as well as an attempt to limit the incomes of families in which both the husband and wife were public employees, as was often the case. Eighteen states considered bills to bar married women from teaching, many districts adopted policies of not hiring married women, and "Married Teachers Not Wanted" signs were common (Moreo, 1996).

Throughout the country, most teachers who retained their positions saw their salaries cut. Between 1930 and June 1933, the average salary reduction in the cities was 13.7%. Half the rural teachers were being paid less than $750 per year, and one in five was receiving less than $450 per year (NEA, 1933). In many districts teachers received no salary for months or were paid in script (certificates of indebtedness or tax anticipation warrants), with the school board promising to pay them when revenues were collected.

Merchants sometimes accepted these warrants, but often did not. Banks might cash the warrants but often charged a fee or discounted the warrant. In other areas teachers worked for room and board, reverting back to the colonial practice of "boarding 'round." In some rural areas teachers were reported to live in the schoolhouse and cook gift vegetables on the wood-burning stove (Graves, 2002; Moreo, 1996).

The response of teachers and other educators to their declining economic conditions and to the encroachment on their professionalism was mixed. Some, like the social reconstructionists discussed later in this chapter, called for social engineering through education. Others called for school personnel to become more politically active and to organize to fight tax cuts and tax policies that unduly favored the business community. Membership in the NEA, AFT, and state and local associations grew.

Educators entered the once distained arena of politics as candidates and lobbyists. Most of their efforts were directed at the state level, and by and large their campaigns for greater state aid were successful: The state share of school budgets almost doubled during the 1930s, from 16.9% in 1929–1930 to 30.3% in 1939–1940. Teachers also sought greater state regulation of certification, greater state oversight of curricula, and greater job protection through teacher tenure (Tyack et al., 1984).

the changes in school terms, staff, and expenditures for rural and city schools, and the percentage of change in expenditures by state universities, between 1930 and 1934—the time when a number of the New Deal programs described in the following pages began to reach education. Overall, as the data indicate, rural schools in the South, Appalachia, and the Dust Bowl (a region in the southwestern plains that suffered from intense drought during the 1930s) were particularly hard hit. Higher education expenditures were also heavily affected by the Depression. Nationwide, universities decreased their spending by almost 18%; in nine states the decrease was 30% or more, and one, Mississippi, had a staggering 81% decrease.

The financial plight of the schools was beyond the ability of most states to solve. In time some relief did come from the federal government—not as direct federal aid, but through the series of New Deal programs described in the next section.

7.3 New Deal Education Programs

Until the Great Depression, the relationship of the federal government to education was clear: The provision of education was viewed as the responsibility of the states and local school districts. However, beginning with the creation of new federal employment programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Public Works Administration (PWA) in 1933, and the National Youth Administration (NYA) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, this established relationship changed.

The New Deal reformers were concerned that the schools did not serve the poor well. So, although the New Deal as a whole was not directed at education, each of these New Deal programs either had an educational component or worked with the schools to accomplish its goals. Like other New Deal programs, they were designed specifically for the poor and staffed mainly by people on relief. Not designed by education experts, and based on the belief that all kinds of people could teach and that learning could take place in all kinds of locations, these New Deal ventures constituted a new vision of public education (Tyack et al., 1984).

Civilian Conservation Corps

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was one of the federal emergency agencies created under Roosevelt's New Deal to provide "work relief" for the unemployed. It provided temporary work for over 3 million young men aged 18 to 25, who lived in CCC camps and worked on various conservation projects like reforestation, wildlife preservation, flood control, and forest fire prevention. Approximately 150,000 African American youth were enrolled in 150 CCC companies (Social Welfare History Project, n.d.), and a separate CCC program enrolled 85,000 Native Americans (Szasz, 2007). Most of these young people were from rural backgrounds and had not finished high school.

Not long after it began, the CCC introduced an educational component for its workers. The army, which administered the CCC camps, also administered the education program. Instruction was provided by Forest Service and army officers, local public school teachers, WPA and NYA employees, or other qualified persons, many of whom were volunteers.

Attendance in the classes was voluntary. About one third of the courses were vocational, one third were academic, one fifth were remedial, and the remainder were avocational. Many of the courses were offered in conjunction with the work of the camps and, being administered by the army, stressed discipline along with content (Tyack et al., 1984). By the end of the 1930s, over 90% of CCC workers were enrolled in some educational program.

National Youth Administration

The NYA administered two programs: one that provided part-time employment to needy high school and college students to help them continue their education and one that provided employment to needy out-of-school youth aged 16 to 25. Money was allocated to high schools based on the number of children from poor families in attendance. Between 6% and 10% of secondary students were in the NYA during its 9 years of operation. They worked in school offices, cafeterias, shops, laboratories, and as groundskeepers.

Under the terms of the NYA college student employment program, the college selected the students to participate and supervised the work to be done. Approximately 98% of eligible institutions, including junior colleges and normal schools, participated in the program, as did 12% of all college students. Students worked on research projects, in libraries, in clerical positions, and in community service projects.

Sixty percent of the participating students were male, and 6% were African American or from other minority groups (Lindley & Lindley, 1938). A special affirmative action fund for promising African American graduate students enabled about 200 African Americans to receive their doctoral degrees during the 1930s, compared to 41 in the period from 1900 to 1930 (Tyack et al., 1984). The Division of Negro Affairs in the NYA was headed by Mary McCloud Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College, and friend and advisor to President and Eleanor Roosevelt.

College enrollment, which had dropped in the first years of the Depression, would have dropped further without NYA support of undergraduate and graduate students. At its peak in 1939–1940, approximately 750,000 students in 1,750 colleges and 28,000 secondary schools participated in NYA programs.

The second major NYA work relief program, the one for out-of-school youth, pioneered a new concept in education—education through work. That is, 2.7 million youth working in various community projects and for various state and local agencies and institutions, as well as in its cooperative residential centers, were involved in learning by doing. A boy on a construction project might take a related training class on blueprint reading, and a youth on an agricultural project might take a class on the chemistry of soils (Tyack et al., 1984).

Public Works Administration

The Public Works Administration (PWA) was created in 1933 and concentrated on funding (it did not do the construction) large-scale public works projects, such as bridges, dams, and airports. It also funded the construction of hospitals, libraries, and almost 7,500 schools— 70% of all schools built between 1933 and 1939.

The PWA was critically important to schools, colleges, and universities faced with not only growing enrollments but also unsafe and dilapidated buildings. Between 1934 and 1939, $1.7 billion in federal funds (with $300 million state and local matching funds) provided for the building of 102 public libraries and 59,614 classrooms (Moreo, 1996). Fourteen percent of all PWA funds were spent on school buildings, including the building of 225 Negro schools and the renovation of 118 others (Weaver, 1938).

The WPA was created by Executive Order in 1935 to provide direct federal government employment to the unemployed. Whereas the PWA was a lifesaver to schools by providing facilities, the Works Projects Administration, the largest of the New Deal programs directed specifically at putting men and women back to work, employed 100,000 teachers to serve in adult education programs and in the 1,500 WPA-operated preschools across the country. The preschools taught some 150,000 children. The WPA also operated summer schools for students who had failed subjects during the regular school year, as well as programs that provided special enrichment activities, including field trips.

The WPA adult education program served as many as 4 million adults, primarily in their own communities, in classes taught by unemployed people with similar backgrounds. Perhaps its most important feature was the adult literacy program. Between 1933 and 1938, 1.5 million adults, about one third of whom were African American, were taught to read. Other adult education programs ran the gamut from

cooking and nutrition to family budgeting, personal hygiene, care of the sick and other family welfare concerns. . . . All the more remarkable was the fact that despite reductions in the number of classes and teachers, enrollments continued to climb. In addition, as waves of immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany arrived, they immediately sought out classes in English and citizenship training. (Moreo, 1996, p. 126)

The WPA also employed relief workers to perform a variety of noninstructional work in the schools. WPA workers repaired and painted buildings; constructed or repaired furniture, fixtures, and equipment; worked in the cafeteria; and performed a variety of other tasks.

Another important noninstructional program was the WPA nutrition project, which used surplus food to provide free hot lunches to needy children, primarily in the cities. For example, in New York City almost 120,000 free lunches were served each day (Moreo, 1996).

General Federal Aid Debate

Despite the benefits provided by these programs, the general plight of the schools, as well as the major inequalities that existed among the states, led the NEA and other educational groups to conclude that more federal aid was necessary. The education establishment also resented the fact that educators were not trusted to operate the educational components of the various New Deal programs and that educational funds were given to the CCC, NYA, and the WPA and bypassed established school systems. What educators wanted was general federal aid with no strings attached.

However, even though they were successful in getting Congressional sponsors for several general federal aid bills for education, they were never able to secure passage, largely because of Roosevelt's opposition to them. Roosevelt's lack of support stemmed less from concern about the potential impact of general federal aid on the federal budget, and more from a genuine belief that compared to other sectors, the schools were in pretty good shape. He preferred to target funds to the unemployed and to those who would benefit the most from the new educational services (Tyack et al., 1984).

Roosevelt was not alone in his rejection of general federal aid. Many educators also opposed it, primarily because of their fear of federal control. This fear was so great that some districts rejected all federal aid. Many predicted that it would lead to a national system of education and would undermine local control. Others were concerned that aid would (or would not) go to private, parochial schools. Perhaps the strongest opposition to general federal aid to education came from the Southern governors, who feared that with federal aid would come a demand for uniformity that would threaten racial segregation.

Yet, Southern schools, and particularly the rural schools attended by African American children already disadvantaged in terms of educational expenditures, were hit particularly hard by Depression-driven cuts in funding. A study during the middle of the Depression found that in the Southern states African Americans constituted 25% of the student population but received only 12% of total revenues. Yet, despite these inequities, the number of African Americans attending high school doubled during the 1930s, and the number of graduates tripled (Tyack et al., 1984).

The plight of southern African Americans was exceeded only by that of Native Americans. Even before the Depression, the 1928 government-commissioned Meriam Report documented the intolerable conditions on the reservations. These only grew worse as the Depression took hold. The Roosevelt administration's response became known as the Indian New Deal.

7.4 The Indian New Deal

As described in previous chapters, the education of Native Americans had historically been viewed as a means of assimilation. By the end of World War I policies based on this idea had brought Native Americans to the edge of disaster: "They were suffering from short life expectancy, disease, malnutrition, a diminishing land base, and a stagnant, unrealistic school system" (American Indian Education Foundation [AIEF], 2003, p. 2). The granting of citizenship in 1924 did not bring any improvements.

In response to a number of public reports by reformers determined to improve their plight, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) commissioned the Brookings Institute to undertake an independent study of the condition of Native Americans. The institute staff spent 7 months visiting reservations, schools, and agencies and in 1928 published its results.

The resultant study, the Meriam Report, recommended more self-determination for Native Americans and noted that much Native American poverty was a result of the loss of their land and government policies that encouraged them to remain dependent on government handouts.

The report also criticized the BIA educational program, exposing the boarding schools' insufficient industrial training, overcrowded dormitories, inadequate diet, and reliance on physical punishment. It recommended that they be reserved only for older children and that younger children be educated in community day schools (Kidwell & Swift, 1976). And, consistent with the progressive educational views of the author of the education section of the report, W. Carson Ryan, it urged that children be educated in a cooperative environment of home and school (Watras, 2004).

Soon after Roosevelt took office, he appointed John Collier, a progressive activist, as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Several New Deal measures were subsequently enacted and collectively became known as the Indian New Deal, an attempt to remedy the conditions described by the Meriam Report.

More important, it signaled a reversal of the policy of assimilation. Collier was convinced that Indian policy should focus on the renewal of Native American sovereignty, establish their economic independence, and recognize and value Native American culture and language. Consistent with these beliefs Collier felt the curriculum in the schools should include Native American culture and heritage. And, in an effort to stem the deterioration of tribal languages, as well as to facilitate English language acquisition, Collier supported bilingual education.

John Collier stands with the Chiefs of the Blackfoot Indians in South Dakota.

Some of Collier's earliest efforts were directed at stopping the sale of tribal land and providing for the organization of tribal councils as legal bodies. He believed self-governance was central to the economic and political recovery of Native American peoples and to building a trusting relationship between the tribes and the federal government. Many of Collier's ideas were included in the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

That same year the Johnson-O'Malley (JOM) Act was also passed. The JOM provided supplemental funds to public schools to provide for the special needs of Native American students, including transportation, school lunches, and expenses such as those associated with graduation (Kidwell & Swift, 1976). It also allowed the federal government to enter into contracts with states or territories to educate Native Americans in the public schools.

Overall, however, Native American education policy was not determined by legislation but by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and its director. Collier's choice as director of the Education Division of the BIA was a former president of the Progressive Education Association, Willard Beatty. Consistent with progressive principles, Beatty promoted a child-centered curriculum that was more relevant to the culture and needs of the Native American student and stressed the importance of the relationship between the school and the community it served. Both Collier and Beatty sought to phase out the boarding schools and to replace them with public and day schools. During the 1930s the number of day schools almost doubled and enrollment tripled.

Native American education was also the beneficiary of many of the New Deal work relief programs. Significant funds were allocated through the WPA for the building of hospitals, water and sewer treatment plants, irrigation and drainage projects, and much-needed schools. A separate Native American CCC known as the Indian Emergency Conservation Work (IECW) program was geared to the unique needs of Native Americans and provided a tremendous opportunity for vocational training. During the 9-year life of the program (April 1933 to July 1942) some 85,000 Native Americans served in the IECW (Szasz, 2007a).

Many of the gains made during the New Deal were lost during World War II and after. During the war, funds for the reservations decreased. The critics of progressive education found a target in the Native American day schools and renewed emphasis was given to assimilation, including the continued operation of the off-reservation boarding schools (Watras, 2004).

7.5 Efforts to Refocus the Schools and the Curriculum

Although the Depression clearly had a major impact on the schools, their governance remained the same; what went on behind the schoolhouse door changed little during the Depression. In spite of all the talk about, and attempts to introduce, progressive educational practices, teacher-centered instruction continued to dominate in the 1930s (Cuban, 1984).

Moreover, the Depression and the New Deal did little to change the inequalities of educational opportunity that had characterized the educational experience of the poor and minorities throughout American history. For example, in 1930 the national average education expenditure per child was $87, per Southern White child $44, and per Southern African American child $12 (Moreo, 1996).

Although the states assumed a larger share of public school expenditures, and although state-supported programs sought to bring greater equalization, the property wealth of the local school district remained the major determinant of per pupil expenditures. The low-property-wealth rural and inner-city schools contained the majority of the poor and minorities. In fact, the number of urban poor grew as Dust Bowl migrants and rural Mexican Americans and African Americans, displaced from farms, moved to the cities.

Disgust and disagreement with the status quo led some educators to attempt to change the direction of the educational enterprise. One such group, the social reconstructionists, wanted to see the schools move in a completely new direction and take the lead in creating a new social order. Another, the essentialists, wanted the schools to return to the traditional, basic education model.

Social Reconstructionism

The experience of the Depression had a significant impact on many progressive educators, who came to believe that the schools had a responsibility to redress social injustices and bring about social change. In "Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?," an address to the 1932 convention of the Progressive Education Association that serves as a Primary Source Reading for this chapter, George C. Counts, a professor at Columbia University, challenged the child-centered progressive philosophy as lacking a theory of social welfare.

Counts called on educators to focus less on the child and more on the social issues of the time, to "face squarely and courageously every social issue, come to grips with life in all its stark reality . . . develop a realistic and comprehensive theory of welfare, fashion a compelling and challenging vision of human destiny" (1932/1978, p. 7). In effect, he asked the schools to take the lead in planning for the reconstruction of society and the building of a new social order.

The social reconstructionists, as these like-minded educators were called, were convinced that many of the economic ills of the country were a result of an outmoded economic model that stressed unbridled competition and individualism, which resulted in tremendous social and economic gaps between the rich and the poor. The role of the school, they argued, was to guide students in using the tools of the scientific method to study and solve the "real world" problems facing our democratic society (Stern & Riley, 2001). What modern technological society called for, according to Counts, was a planned society and an economic model built not on individualism, but on collectivism.

Liberal progressive educators such as William H. Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg joined Counts in his deep concern about socioeconomic conditions in America, his attack on the class bias that permeated the schools, and his belief that educators should do something to address them. In 1935 these individuals joined with other social reformers to form the John Dewey Society for the Study of Education and Culture and began publishing a journal, The Social Frontier, which became the focus of educational extremism during the 1930s.

The position of the most radical reconstructionists, the so-called Frontier Thinkers, was sharply criticized by many conservative progressives and was responsible for a deepening schism within the Progressive Education Association and even among the social reconstruction membership itself. In 1937 Counts left the editorship of The Social Frontier and began to speak out openly against communism.

Although the social reconstructionism movement never gained much of a foothold among the rank and file of American educators, and The Social Frontier never had a circulation above 6,000 (Ravitch, 1983), it served to associate progressive education with "an economic radicalism that smacked of socialism and communism" and ultimately contributed to progressivism's waning popularity in the postwar years (Spring, 1989). However, its concern with social change presaged the postmodern and critical theory movements that focused on transformative change in society and education.

Pioneers in Education: Anne Sullivan

Anne Sullivan was born in 1866 in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, to a poor Irish immigrant family. At age 5, she contracted trachoma, an eye disease that seriously damaged her vision. Early in her life, her mother died and her father abandoned the family. In 1876 Anne and her brother were sent to live at the Tewksbury Almshouse for the poor, which housed not only the poor and homeless, but also prostitutes and the mentally ill. Conditions at the almshouse were deplorable, and Anne's brother died within a few months. When a state inspection team visited the almshouse, Anne approached an official and pleaded to be allowed to attend a school for the blind.

In 1880, at age 14, Anne was sent to the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, where she first learned to read and write. While at Perkins, she also received eye surgery that improved her vision. She learned to use the manual alphabet to communicate with Laura Bridgman, a resident who was the first deaf-blind person to be educated. Having never attended school, Anne lacked social graces, was ridiculed by her classmates, and felt insecure and defensive and often displayed a quick temper. However, she slowly settled down, excelled at her studies, and was chosen valedictorian of her graduating class in June of 1886.

Soon after her graduation, Michael Anagos, the director of Perkins, told her of a contact he had with a family in Alabama who wanted a teacher for their deaf, blind, and mute daughter. Anagos recommended Anne for the position. In March of 1887, at the age of 21, Anne traveled to Tuscumbia, Alabama, to become the teacher of Helen Keller and to begin their 49-year relationship.

Anne developed her own methods for teaching Helen. Starting with her experience at Perkins and with Laura Bridgman, Anne began trying to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words in her hand. Helen did not make the association until one day when Anne spelled "water" in one hand while running water over the other. Helen then began to realize that these marks being made in her hand were associated with water. After that breakthrough Anne's bright and enthusiastic pupil soon learned almost 600 words and the multiplication tables up to 5, as well as how to read Braille. Anne wrote long reports and letters to Anagos and others at Perkins, and her success with Helen, which was reported by the Perkins school, attracted the attention of such celebrities as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

Anne believed that Helen would progress even further if she could attend Perkins, and in 1888 they traveled to Boston, where Helen enrolled at Perkins and continued to be taught by Anne. For several years the pair lived part-time in Boston and part-time in Alabama. In 1900 Helen enrolled in Radcliffe College. Anne went with Helen to class, spelling out all lectures and readings into her hand. While at Radcliff in 1905 Anne met and married John Albert Macy, who was working with Helen on her autobiography. The couple lived with Helen in Massachusetts, and Anne continued to travel with her as she made lectures around the country. After Anne's marriage failed in 1914 and after she began to experience health problems, Polly Thomas became Helen's secretary and the three women moved to Forest Hill, New York.

For a number of years, Anne and Helen gave lectures and appeared in vaudeville theaters throughout the country and abroad tell their story. They also worked and raised funds for organizations serving the visually impaired. By the late 1920s Anne had lost most of her vision and had her right eye removed to relieve the pain. Before her death in 1936 she was totally blind.

Anne Sullivan's extraordinary story and relationship with Helen Keller were immortalized in the play and film, The Miracle Worker, for which Anne Bancroft won the Academy Award for best actress for her role as Anne and Patty Duke best supporting actress for her role as Helen. Anne's child-centered methodology became a model for education of the deaf-blind and her dedication serves as inspiration for all teachers of children with disabilities.

The Eight-Year Study

While progressive education was under attack by the social reconstructionists, it was simultaneously being vindicated by a long-term study conducted by the Progressive Education Association under the leadership of Ralph Tyler. The Eight-Year Study (1932–1940) grew out of a concern that curriculum revision and experimentation in secondary schools was thwarted by college and university admission requirements.

It involved 30 high schools willing to experiment with their curricula in order to discover the effectiveness of progressive educational approaches in preparing students for college. Over 300 colleges agreed to suspend their admission requirements in regard to completion of a traditional curriculum for the graduates of these schools. The faculty of the high schools were expected to undertake curriculum reform and a few "recreated their programmes to better respond to what were perceived as the serious social, economic, and cultural challenges— 'needs'—facing young people in the U.S.A." (Bullough & Kridel, 2003, p. 153). The revised curricula delivered the content from the disciplines in an integrated approach organized around themes rather than as discrete subjects.

The study followed 1,475 students in matched pairs from high school to college. The results, published in 1942, showed that students from experimental high schools not only achieved as well as students from traditional high schools, but they were also more involved and successful in artistic and cultural activities. Nonetheless, within 8 years of its end, most of the experimental schools involved in the study had returned to the traditional college preparatory programs (Watras, 2006).

Although the Eight-Year Study and its findings did not have an immediate impact, its results served as the basis for Ralph Tyler, the project director, to develop a theory of curriculum development, the Tyler Rationale, which did influence curriculum development for decades. Tyler saw curriculum development as a rational process that involved the development of objectives and learning activities that facilitated the attainment of the objectives, all integrated from grade to grade and activity to activity (Horn, 2002). The results of the study also provided support for the integrated curriculum, a concept that found renewed favor half a century later.

William C. Bagley and the Essentialists

Some of the harshest criticisms of the social reconstructionist wing of progressivism came from a group headed by William Bagley, a colleague of Counts's at Teachers College. Taking their name from Bagley's 1938 speech and publication "An Essentialist Platform for Advancement of American Education," the essentialists were critical of "extreme" progressive education's lack of emphasis on fundamentals. This included the progressives they believed had gone too far in attending to the interests of children while ignoring the basic skills, as well as those concerned with social and economic radicalism—that is, the social reconstructionists (Null, 2007).

Bagley argued that instead of attempting to reconstruct society and use the schools as agents of social engineering, educators would serve society better by preparing "literate citizens knowledgeable in fundamental skills and knowledge that was of unquestioned value and permanence and that provides the basis for intelligent understanding and for the collective thought and judgment that are the essence of our democratic institutions" (Bagley, 1938, p. 251).

Bagley compared American education with the education systems of other countries such as Germany and judged it to be weak, lacking in rigor, full of "frills," and inadequate in preparing youth for productive participation in society. Bagley advocated an organized, sequential curriculum and an instructional process that, although not ignoring the interests of the child, was teacher initiated and emphasized the transmission of those core democratic ideals and enduring skills, arts, and sciences that are essential for social progress. The essentialists also sought to reemphasize the role of the teachers after a period when the popularity of informal learning had weakened the profession of teaching (Null, 2007).

As part of this emphasis on teachers, the essentialists argued that greater discipline was required in the classroom to prepare students for their participation in the workforce as well as for their orderly participation in a democratic society. In Classroom Management, his widely used book on teacher training, Bagley proposed a very rigid and structured classroom environment in which students walked in lockstep to class, placed their desks in a prescribed order, and gave immediate response to comments.

At a time when totalitarian regimes were gaining strength in Europe, the essentialists believed their movement was part of the battle against totalitarianism. Bagley contended, "[D]emocratic societies cannot survive either competition or conflict with totalitarian states unless there is a democratic discipline that will give strength and solidarity in the democratic purpose and ideal" (Bagley, 1938, p. 251).

Many of the essentialists' criticisms of progressive education—namely, that it was weak, full of frills, and a major negative factor in the nation's position in global economics and military competition—have been echoed by critics of the educational establishment ever since. The reform reports of the 1980s and 1990s used much of the essentialists' language, although in the context of political mandates to solve perceived system problems, not as philosophical statements of the purpose of the curriculum and the training of teachers (Null, 2007).

7.6 Impact of the Second World War on the Schools

Germany's invasion of Poland in September of 1939 marked the beginning of World War II. Although it would be more than 2 years before America formally entered the war, America's Lend-Lease agreement with the Allies meant that American factories increasingly were called on to supply the Allied war effort. This helped the American economy recover from the Depression.

The threat of impending war also led educational institutions at all levels to address the task of promoting education for national defense. Before the United States became involved in the war, this meant education to strengthen the foundations of democracy. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, this meant using education resources to promote the war effort (Kandel, 1948).

The joint Education Policy Commission (1942) of the NEA and the American Association of School Administrators suggested that the federal government establish an agency to facilitate and coordinate the interaction of government agencies with schools and colleges. The government responded by establishing the U.S. Office of Education (USOE) Wartime Commission.

The Commission did not mandate that specific courses be taught in the schools as part of the war effort. However, in its report, The Best Kind of High School Training for Military Service, it did outline the type of educational program that would provide the most valuable preinduction training for future members of the armed services. Basically, the commission recommended that the schools emphasize health and physical fitness, education for citizenship, the academic subjects, and specialized training in vocational skills.

The government had forecast that 80% of the 1.3 million high school males between 16 and 18 years of age would enter the armed forces soon after graduation (Ugland, 1979). Six months after Pearl Harbor the war activities of high school youth were brought into focus by the establishment of the High School Victory Corps, a federal program organized by the USOE to encourage instruction and training in pursuits and services needed in wartime.

In addition to their curricular pursuits, Victory Corps members were required to participate in at least one wartime activity or service (for example, air warden, fire watcher, civil defense volunteer, USO volunteer, or home-school-community services such as salvage campaigns). The USOE hoped that the Victory Corps would give substance to the idea of the student reservist and preinduction training and saw this as a way to have a prominent spot in the war effort (Ugland, 1979).

However, most schools were realistic about what they could provide in terms of such training. Although they did follow the advice of the USOE and gave more attention to applied mathematics and science, manual and industrial arts, and vocational education, they also continued to offer a strong academic curriculum. This was due in part to the fact that most of the students who left school to take jobs in the war industries were not headed for college, and those that remained in school were reluctant to depart dramatically from an academic curriculum (Ugland, 1979).

For what were undoubtedly a variety of reasons, the Victory Corps was less successful than its creators had envisioned. One year after its inception less than 25% of eligible students had joined. Enrollment subsequently declined, and the next year the program was discontinued. Nonetheless, the Victory Corps program did have an effect on the curriculum. In combination with the emphasis on preinduction training and the support given vocational training, it served to shape the wartime curriculum toward "education for victory."

Impact of the War on Elementary and Secondary Schools

The war had a heavy impact on schools, teachers, and students. (The impact on one special group of students, Japanese Americans in relocation camps, is the subject of one of the Primary Source Readings for this chapter.) High school enrollments declined from 6.7 million in 1940–1941 to 5.5 million in 1943–1944. Despite "Go-to-School" drives, it was difficult for the 80% of students who did not plan to go to college to resist either the call to arms or the high wages to be found in the wartime industries. And, even though enrollment declined, the teacher shortage that had begun before the war worsened. Not only did large numbers of teachers leave the classroom for the battlefield, but many more, especially women, left to take higher paying positions in industry.

The shortage of teachers, which some historians consider to be the most serious consequence of the war, was felt during the postwar years as well (Kandel, 1948). By the end of the war, more than one third (350,000) of the teachers employed in 1940–1941 had left teaching (Kandel, 1948). Teacher shortages occurred both in the subject matter fields that might be expected and in rural and other areas where salaries were far below those paid in the wartime industries.

The results of the teacher shortages were similar to those experienced during the Depression: school closures, reduced terms, and fewer course offerings. By the middle of 1943 the teacher shortage was seen as a threat to the students still in school. Moreover, it was projected that it would take a decade to make up the deficit created by the teachers leaving the profession and the decline in enrollment in teacher education programs (Kandel, 1948).

The one area of schooling that did not experience enrollment decline during the war was early childhood education. The federal government allocated more than $50 million for the construction and operation of more than 3,000 nursery schools nationwide, primarily to serve the 2- to 5-year-old children of military families or working mothers (Dorn, 2007). Additionally, states and cities joined in the provision of preschool programs that were of a higher quality than the federally sponsored welfare programs of the past (Dorn, 2007).

While teachers and students were leaving the secondary and elementary schools, nursery schools, like the one shown here, experienced steady levels of enrollment due to the increase of working mothers during the war.

Another major impact of the war on the schools was financial. Funding, already low because of the Depression, was further reduced as money was diverted from education to other purposes. Once again these financial difficulties highlighted the inequalities of educational opportunity that existed among regions and districts. Reports from the Selective Service on the young men rejected for mental and physical deficiencies showed higher percentages coming from the predominantly rural and Southern states, the same areas that had the lowest educational expenditures.

The inequalities and their consequences intensified the arguments for federal support for education. Some financial assistance was provided to those school districts overburdened by an influx of children from families employed in defense industries or on military bases by the Lanham Act of 1941. This so-called impact aid was continued under the provisions of Public Laws 815 and 874.

A major war-related initiative sponsored by the federal government was the Vocational- Defense Training Program, later known as the Vocational Training for War Production Workers. Through this program over 5 million people received training in war occupations at public vocational schools. Training was provided to people already employed in war occupations who needed additional skills or knowledge to equip them for more advanced positions, and preemployment training was provided to unemployed persons or persons employed in nonwar occupations.

One part of the program was designed to provide training to youth, especially rural youth, to assist in the production of food for the war effort. Later called the Food Production War Training Program and extended to include adults, the program enrolled 2.8 million people in courses such as Farm Machinery and Equipment Repair; Construction, Food Conservationism, and Preservation; and a variety of other topics designed to help reach the wartime food production goals (Henry, 1945b).

Colleges and universities were also seriously affected by the war. Enrollment declined sharply, as almost 75% of male students went into military service. The instructional staff was also severely reduced as instructors left for military service, to perform research related to the war effort, to enter the diplomatic service, or to provide expertise and service in the monumental task of conversion of industries from peacetime to wartime.

Even college and university athletics were affected by the war. Many institutions reduced or suspended their sports programs. "Even such high profile national events as the Rose Bowl game were altered to accommodate the national emergency, with the traditional New Year's Day game being moved out of harm's way from Pasadena, California to Durham, North Carolina" (Thelin, 2004, p. 257). One institution's apparent suspension of athletics had a more serious purpose: Underneath the deteriorating and overgrown football stadium at the University of Chicago was a secret site of the Manhattan Project, the massive federal program to develop the atomic bomb. Labs were constructed in the locker rooms under the grandstands (Thelin, 2004).

Institutional finances were also affected by the war. Income in 1943–1944 was only 67% of what it had been in 1939–1940 (Knight, 1952). Larger institutions involved in the specialized training described below or in government-sponsored research were not as heavily affected as smaller institutions, but all institutions faced increased costs for current operations (Kandel, 1948).

The impact of the reductions in enrollments, staff, and finances on the nation's colleges and universities was so serious that toward the end of the war, Congress authorized a study of the effects of these reductions as well as the projected impact of the phasing out of the specialized training programs being conducted on college campuses. The results of the study led the committee to recommend emergency federal aid to assist higher education.

A bill introduced in May 1945 to provide this aid did not pass, but the next year President Harry Truman appointed the President's Commission on Higher Education in a Democracy to consider the future of the nation's higher education system. Among the recommendations made by the committee in 1947 was that the federal government continue to provide funding for research. Not only was this done, but in addition the magnitude of these vast research enterprises served to transform many universities into what Clark Kerr (1963) termed "federal grant universities."

Higher Education and the War Effort

Individually, and through the American Council on Education, colleges and universities sought to play an active role in the war effort. They were intent on ensuring that the mistakes of World War I not be repeated. At the outbreak of that war, the War Department had no plan for involving colleges and universities in the war effort, and when it finally did, it effectively took over college campuses. Officials also lacked plans for training scientific and technical personnel and indiscriminately drafted faculty into the armed services to serve in roles that made no use of their academic training and talents (Cardozier, 1993).

As World War II loomed and then overtook the United States, colleges, college students, and the war department were faced with a dilemma: They recognized that the future need for professionally trained individuals demanded that college students remain in school and that college professors remain in their positions, but at the same time these were the very individuals who were required for positions of leadership in military and government service.

One way colleges and universities attempted to meet the manpower demand was by acceleration: moving to 4 quarters or 3 semesters and to a 6-day instructional week. This made graduation possible in 3 years. Even medical schools adopted accelerated programs that reduced the length of medical preparation to 3 years.

One of the most important roles played by colleges and universities during the war was preparing men for military service, for war industries, and for essential civilian activities. By the end of 1943, 380,000 men were involved in specialized training at 489 colleges and universities, many as part of the Army Specialized Training Program, the Army Air Force College Training Program, or the Naval College Training Program (Knight, 1952). In each case the particular branch of service contracted with the college or university to use its facilities and faculties to provide specialized training that its own training facilities were not prepared to deliver.

In addition to on-campus training of military personnel, over 100,000 servicemen and women enrolled in correspondence courses for high school or college credit that were supplied by the United States Armed Forces Institute in cooperation with more than 800 colleges and universities (Henry, 1945a). These experiences, and the continued interest of military personnel in higher education in the postwar period, were major factors in the postwar boom in higher education enrollment.

Training for civilian personnel in areas deemed important to the war effort was provided through the Engineering, Science, and Management Defense (later War) Training Program operated cooperatively by the United States Office of Education and participating colleges and universities. The program supported 12- to 16-week courses designed to address the shortage of engineers, chemists, physicists, and production supervisors in the specialties important to the war effort.

The program also provided war courses for high school physics and math teachers as part of the government's efforts to promote preinduction courses in the high schools. Between the end of 1943 and October 1945, more than 1.3 million men and women enrolled in 12,500 short courses offered by over 200 colleges in 1,000 towns and cities across the country (Kandel, 1948).

Alongside these training functions, one of the most important contributions of universities to the war effort was to conduct government-sponsored large-scale applied research. The effectiveness of universities with these projects had an enduring legacy and provided the foundation for future partnerships between universities and the federal government in a way that would "indelibly transform the missions and funding of American higher education" (Thelin, 2004, p. 259).

Although it is not possible to cite all the contributions the schools, colleges, and teachers made to the war effort, the statement of "Education's Part in the War Effort" issued by the National Education Association in 1946 and presented in the From the Archives feature box enumerates some that have not been mentioned in this discussion.

7.7 Education in the Postwar Era

Enrollment in public schools and higher education surged in the postwar years. Toward the end of the war, in an effort to assist veterans whose schooling had been interrupted by military service, Congress passed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944. The G.I. Bill , as it became known, provided benefits to 7.8 million veterans of World War II to help them further their education at any level. In 1947 more than 1 million veterans were enrolled in college, approximately 48% of the total enrollment of 2.4 million (Kim & Rury, 2007). The law's benefits were subsequently extended to veterans of the Korean, "Cold," and Vietnam wars; eventually almost 15 million veterans received aid.

The G.I. Bill also initiated a great postwar popularization of higher education. As going to college became more common, it provided an incentive to high school students to graduate, and the growing number of high school graduates swelled college enrollments even further (Kim & Rury, 2007). In the decade from 1949 to 1959 higher education enrollment increased 35%, and it more than doubled in the next decade, from under 4 million to over 8 million (see Table 7.2). In addition to absolute growth, in the decades after the war, more men and women representing a greater age range and from more varied social, economic, cultural, and racial groups attended colleges and universities than ever before (Cremin, 1988).

Life Adjustment Education and the Education Critics of the 1950s

The years after World War II constituted a period of not only burgeoning enrollments, but also adjustment—the adjustment of returning servicemen and women; the adjustment of the economy from wartime to peacetime; the adjustment to life in a new residential configuration, the suburb; and the adjustment to a society that was more transient, more mobile, and more prosperous than ever before (Gutek, 1981). In the midst of postwar changes and uncertainties an education movement called life adjustment education came into prominence. Life adjustment education became associated with progressive education and became the target of a group of critics who held progressive education responsible for a perceived decline in educational standards.

Life adjustment education was formally introduced in 1945 at a vocational education conference sponsored by the U.S. Office of Education. It offered a program adjusted to the interests, efforts, and probable future activities of those 60% of students not entering vocational training or preparing for college.

Life adjustment education proposed

curriculum flexibility; student guidance; and attention to previously neglected areas of social living such as hygiene, family living, drivers' education and social relations with peers. Emphasis was upon increasing the holding power of American high schools by presenting students with a more meaningful and relevant curriculum. (Fallace, 2011, p. 575)

Spurred on by a series of conferences, state and national commissions, and numerous publications, it was seen by many as a natural outgrowth of progressive education's goal of making the schools more relevant to the broad spectrum of students. Although other approaches to creating a more functional curriculum had been advanced during the 1930s and 1940s, none gained the favor that life adjustment education did. In less than a decade after its formal introduction, half the states had undertaken some variation of the life adjustment curriculum.

Critics of progressive education saw life adjustment education as a perfect target. Most of the criticism came from academic traditionalists who viewed the proposed reform program as a particularly dangerous form of anti-intellectualism (Wraga, 2010). "It continued an abundance of slogans, jargon, and various anti-intellectualisms; it carried the utilitarianism and group conformism of latter-day progressivism to its ultimate trivialization" (Ravitch, 1983, p. 70).

One of the foremost critics of life adjustment education and progressive education in the postwar period was Arthur Bestor, a professor at the University of Illinois. In his most famous critical study, Educational Wastelands (1953), Bestor deplored the anti-intellectual quality of American schools, which he claimed had been caused by progressive educators who "set forth purposes of education so trivial as to forfeit the respect of thoughtful men, and by deliberately divorcing the schools from the disciplines of science and scholarship" (p. 10).

He also rejected what he claimed was life adjustment education's implication that 60% of students would not benefit from intellectual training as invalidating "most of the assumptions that have underlain American democracy" (Bestor, 1953, p. 82).

Bestor advocated a return to basics—a traditional liberal arts curriculum of well-defined intellectual disciplines and the development of the intellect as the primary goal of education. Like earlier essentialists, Bestor (1956) argued that such a curriculum should be systematic and sequential because "clear thinking is systematic thinking, [and] liberal education involves the logical organization of knowledge" (p. 36). Bestor's criticisms were well received by conservatives and other opponents of progressive education, and he was widely publicized in the popular press.

Beset by its critics, life adjustment education faded from the education scene as the United States became preoccupied with competition in the Cold War. However, criticism of progressive education continued. Two of the leading critics of progressive education were Robert Hutchins and Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, father of the atomic submarine. Similar to Bestor, Hutchins advocated a return to a more traditional curriculum, though he preferred the classical liberal arts curriculum. Consistent with the perennialist educational philosophy, Hutchins argued that the ideal education is one that is designed to cultivate the intellect and that this could best be done by a curriculum that concentrates on the Great Books of Western civilization.

Perhaps even more critical of progressivism was Admiral Rickover (1959), who judged it to be "as hopelessly outdated today as the horse and buggy" and declared that "nothing short of a complete reorganization of American education, preceded by a revolutionary reversal of educational aims, can equip us for winning the educational race with the Russians" (p. 188).

Rickover's criticism of America's schools was based largely on comparisons to their European counterparts. Based on this comparison, Rickover concluded, as had Bestor, that a liberal arts education provided the intellectual discipline needed for critical thinking and problem solving as well as advanced specialized training. He also favored the multitrack, ability grouping of most European educational systems to the American comprehensive high school. He focused his attention on the academically talented, who he believed were central to maintaining America's competitive edge with the Soviets.

At the same time that progressivism was coming under attack for its association with life adjustment education, the deepening Cold War brought growing intolerance for progressive ideals. Progressivism was associated with liberal politics, and progressive textbooks that promoted international understanding and discussed socialism and communism were attacked by right-wing groups as being un-American (Bernard & Mondale, 2001a).

However, in the end it was not its critics that killed progressive education. Rather, it was a victim of both its own successes and its failures. On the one hand, much of what the progressives had initially advocated had been incorporated into the schools. Projects, activities, and pupil experiences had been intelligently integrated into subject-matter teaching; concern for health and vocation had gained a permanent place in the school program; and concern for the individual differences among children had replaced the lockstep institution and rote memorization (Ravitch, 1983).

On the other hand, progressive education failed to recognize the extremism of its unrelenting rejection of the traditional curriculum and failed to give adequate attention to the critical issues facing education in the 1930s and 1940s (Graham, 1967). Essentially, progressive education did not seem to be relevant to the time. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first space satellite, in 1957, the nation suddenly became concerned with intelligence and the need for increased science and mathematics skills, and progressive education seemed out of step.

The Montessori Movement

Concerns about academic standards, and in particular the demands of parents searching for more academically oriented early childhood programs than those offered by most public schools, contributed to a revival of an approach to early childhood education developed by Italian physician (the first female Italian physician) and educator Marie Montessori. Developed in the early 1900s and based on her work with children with developmental and intellectual disabilities in the slums of Rome, news of the Montessori method and its successes soon spread worldwide. The first Montessori school opened in the United States in 1911 in Scarborough, New York, and many others followed; more than 100 were in operation in 22 states by 1915.

Despite its initial popularity, the Montessori movement quickly faded. World War I travel restrictions, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the distain of several influential educators all contributed to the decline (American Montessori Society, 2013). William Kilpatrick, Dewey's colleague at Teachers College, was particularly critical of Montessori's methods. In The Montessori System Examined (1914) Kilpatrick declared her work to be based on a psychological theory that was "50 years behind the times" (Thayer-Bacon, 2012, p. 4).

Renewed interest in the Montessori movement in the 1950s, however, spread quickly in the United States. The Montessori system calls for free activity within a prescribed range of options and within a prescribed environment that supports the child's natural curiosity and encourages collaborative learning. It includes the use of didactic sensory materials (such as sandpaper letters and numbers) and other specifically designed practical activities concerned with social skills, personal health and hygiene, the environment, and self-discipline.

Thousands of schools worldwide declare themselves to be "Montessori Schools." However, since the courts have ruled that the term "Montessori School" is not copyrighted, potentially virtually any school can call itself a Montessori school, and they vary in quality as well as methodology. Some represent the early Montessori method that was more flexible, adaptable, and open to scientific experimentation, while others represent a more structured system that assumes that experimentation is over (Thayer-Bacon, 2012).

7.8 Curriculum Reform in the Aftermath of Sputnik

Few times in history has a single event had such an impact on education as the launching of Sputnik in October 1957. The success of the Soviet space satellite seemed to confirm fears that the United States was losing the Cold War's technological and military races. The fear of hydrogen bombs being dropped from a similar craft onto American cities was matched by the humiliation and loss of prestige from being forced into second place in a critically important area of science and technology (McGrath, 1958).

A Closer Look: Sputnik

The Russian launching of Sputnik resulted in increased funding and testing for American schools.

The popular theory that emerged as a result was that the Russians beat the United States into space because the American school curriculum lacked rigor and paid insufficient attention to math and science. Concerned Americans also highlighted the consequences of the decades-long underfunding and neglect of education, noting that at the time of the launching of Sputnik, there was a reported shortage of 135,000 teachers and 159,000 classrooms. Many more thousands of teachers operated on temporary or emergency certificates. Some classes in the larger cities held 40 or more children, and 800,000 children nationwide attended school for only half the day (McGrath, 1958).

While the launching of Sputnik was a political-military problem, education was seen as a major part of the solution. Ideas for educational reform were taken from business and industry, such as proposals to standardize the curriculum in such a way that "anyone could teach to any group of students" and to increase the output of scientists and mathematicians (Steeves, Bernhardt, Burns, & Lombard, 2009, p. 78).

The Federal Response

The federal government's response to Sputnik was significant in both its magnitude and its direction. In effect, the government became directly involved in education reform and initiated a national curriculum in the areas of mathematics, science, and modern foreign languages.

This was accomplished not by mandate but by support for the development of new curricular materials, the distribution of money to school districts to purchase the new materials and equipment, the training of teachers in the use of the new materials and methods, and student loans and fellowship programs.

Federal support for the development of math and sciences curricula came through funding provided through the National Science Foundation (NSF). Support for the development of a language curriculum came through the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (NDEA).

The NDEA also provided support for students preparing for careers in science, mathematics, foreign languages, and engineering; the hiring of science teachers and the purchase of scientific equipment and supplies; the improvement of guidance, counseling, and testing programs, especially those directed at the identification and encouragement of more capable students; foreign language institutes and laboratories; and increased funding to the NSF.

The fivefold increase in funding to the NSF allowed it to expand its curriculum development and education programs. In 1956 it established the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC), composed of a number of prestigious scientists. Federal support for the work of the PSSC allowed it, beginning in 1958, to spend over $1 million per year for several years on the development of curriculum materials for high school physics.

Classroom teachers were introduced to the PSSC materials through summer institutes conducted at institutions of higher education under contract with the NSF, as well as through in-service institutes. Teachers were given a stipend and sometimes academic credit to attend the institutes. After the passage of the NDEA, school districts could use grant funds to purchase PSSC materials. Within a couple of years, the manufacture and distribution of PSSC materials had been turned over to private companies.

Tools of the Trade: 1960 Physics Text and "Frames of Reference" Video Prepared by the Physical Science Study Committee

One of the groups preparing curriculum materials to upgrade high school mathematics and science programs in response to the launch of Sputnik was the Physical Science Study Committee. With the support of the National Science Foundation, the committee prepared a physics textbook intended to make physics more interesting to students and to promote understanding of its principles, not just rote memorization.

The first edition of the text, Physics, appeared in 1960, and it was published for many years to come. Teachers' guides, films, tests, and recommendations on the creation and use of "inexpensive experimental apparatus" accompanied the text (MIT Institute Archives & Special Collections, 2012).

Sample pages from the "PSSC Physics Teacher's Guide, Advanced Topics" can be reviewed at http://libraries.mit.edu/_archives/exhibits/pssc.

One of the more interesting (and humorous) PSSC films, "Frames of Reference" (1960), which features two university professors demonstrating the difference between inertial and noninertial forces can be viewed at: https://archive.org/details/frames_of_reference.

Another NSF group, the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG), was organized in 1958 and developed the "new math," which was based on set theory. A set was

any collection of things, which could be points, lines, vectors, or any philosophical notion, such as brotherhood. By thinking in terms of sets, children were to learn to understand relationships and discover hidden patterns. Supposedly, after developing this habit of thinking, the student would retain a mental discipline that would be useful in advanced mathematical techniques. (Spring, 1989, p. 82)

The SMSG developed a series of widely used mathematics textbooks. The group's stated purpose was not to compete with commercial publishers but to ensure that its curriculum was being used in schools. Accordingly, the SMSG established a committee to review commercial math texts each year to determine whether they incorporated SMSG curriculum and, if so, to remove any competing SMSG text.

Although the SMSG always denied that its intention was to establish a national curriculum, the pressures it brought on the textbook industry had the effect of forcing the adoption of the SMSG curriculum. The New Math was subject to considerable criticism by many parents and teachers who found it difficult to understand. By the end of the 1960s, it had been abandoned by most schools.

The work of the PSSC and the SMSG became models for other areas of curriculum development. In 1965, under a grant from the NSF, the American Institute of Biological Sciences Curriculum Study Group began work on a biological sciences curriculum, and between 1960 and 1963 the Chemical Education Material Study Group developed a range of curriculum materials for that discipline. The cooperative development by university scholars and education experts of curricula that stressed structure, abstraction, discovery, and curiosity tended to counter the complaints of anti-intellectualism that had dogged the schools for a number of years (Spring, 1989), but at the same time seemed designed to create a "teacher proof curriculum" (Graham, 2005).

The curriculum reforms initiated by the NDEA were further stimulated by former nuclear scientist and Harvard University president James Conant's (1893–1978) widely publicized study of secondary education, The American High School Today (1959), also known as the Conant Report. Conant's experiences both as an educator and in national defense had convinced him of the critical relationship between education and the welfare of the nation. According to Conant (1953),

If the field of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, it may well be that the ideological struggles with communism in the next fifty years will be won on the playing fields of the public schools of the United States. (p. 62)

The primary conclusion Conant reached from his study of American high schools was that the number of small high schools should be drastically reduced by district reorganization because small schools typically were not financially able to offer quality academic and vocational programs. Conant recommended that in the larger, reconstituted high schools all students be required to take 4 years of English, 3 or 4 years of social studies, and 1 year each in mathematics and sciences. The more able students would take additional math, sciences, and foreign languages.

Like Rickover, Conant was concerned that the schools were not challenging the academically talented. However, although he did not support separate schools for those students as Rickover did, arguing instead that the comprehensive high school was more democratic and contributed to social cohesion, Conant did propose that students be grouped by ability within the academic subjects. He also stressed the importance of identifying the academically gifted and channeling them into the university science and technology programs most needed to serve the national interests.

Conant played a major role in the establishment of the Educational Testing Service and advanced placement, and was an advocate for the use of standardized tests for college admissions and for increasing the number of guidance counselors in the high schools.

Conant was also concerned with the training of teachers. To him, most teacher education programs conveyed a progressive education ideology, which on the one hand he applauded for its emphasis on citizenship and the need for practical courses and electives, but on the other hand he viewed as lacking an academically rigorous curriculum (Urban, 2013). In his The Education of American Teachers (1963), he proposed fewer courses in formal education studies and more coursework in general education and an academic major for all prospective teachers, including elementary teachers.

Unlike Bestor and some of the other school critics of the 1950s, Conant did not attack educators and did not condemn the comprehensive high school or suggest any radical alteration of it. As a result, his recommendations were seen by most educators and school boards as ideas for improvement, not as attempts to transform the schools, and they had considerable influence on educational planners and policymakers. Over the next decade, the number of school districts decreased from 40,520 to fewer than 18,000 (NCES, 1993), as many small high schools were consolidated.

New Learning Theories

The importance of psychology to the science of education and to understanding how learning takes place had been advanced in the first quarter of the 20th century by Thorndike and integrated with his work on intelligence testing. Thorndike developed a theory of learning that he labeled psychological connectionism, in which he compared the mind to a switchboard where connections are made between a stimulus and a response. The connection is made as a result of the law of effect: A reward is given when the appropriate connection is made between the stimulus and the response.

According to Thorndike's stimulus–response theory, learning depends on this connection being made between the stimulus and the response. Thorndike's suggestion that individuals differ in not only their intelligence but also in their innate ability to form connections (that is, to learn) played a major role in the recognition of individual differences and their importance in learning.

The foundation laid by Thorndike was advanced in the postwar period by Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner and provided support to efforts to reform the curriculum. Piaget advanced the stage concept of cognitive child development. According to Piaget, children progress through four sequential stages of cognitive development that are age related and progressive in the sense that one stage must be accomplished before the next: (1) sensorimotor (birth to age 2); (2) preoperational (2–7 years); (3) concrete organizational (7–11 years); and (4) formal operational (11+ years).

At each stage the child must reconstruct and integrate concepts formed at previous stages. According to Piaget's theory of readiness, children should not be introduced to new concepts until they have reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development.

Bruner also contributed to the stage theory of cognitive development. According to Bruner's theory of cognition, learning is a process by which children construct new ideas and concepts based on their previous learning. Moreover, according to this theory, learning occurs in three stages of complexity: enactive (action-based), iconic (image-based), and symbolic (language-based). Progress from one stage to another is influenced less by the developmental level of the child (as Piaget believed), and more by the environment.

Like the progressives, Bruner also believed that children learn best when they are interested in the material and are engaged in active problem solving. And, learning is easier when teaching is concerned with providing an understanding of structure, the relationship between things, rather than simply the mastery of facts. According to Bruner (1960), "[A]ny subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development" (p. 33).

Bruner's theories of cognition had a major impact on teachers, curriculum development, and policymaking in the 1950s and 1960s. He participated in the work of the NSF and was instrumental in the design and implementation of a number of education programs, including the landmark social studies curriculum development project, "Man: A Course of Study." His stage theory of learning provided the rationale for the spiral curriculum sequencing pattern whereby subject matter is presented over a number of grades with increasing complexity and abstraction. Together, Bruner's and Piaget's theories of the way children construct knowledge provided the theoretical framework for the constructivist theory of cognitive development.

Chapter 8

8.1 The Civil Rights Movement

Throughout their history, Americans had considered a good education to be the vehicle for upward mobility and a hallmark of the American democratic tradition. In reality, however, many young people in America received little or no education, or an education that was dramatically unequal and inferior to that received by the majority population. For example, in 1950, 72% of children with disabilities were not enrolled in school (Anderson, 2001).

As the parents of minority children, children with disabilities, and female children became more and more aware of the unequal educational opportunities their children experienced, campaigns to obtain better opportunities became the centerpiece of the larger crusade for civil and political equality. Lacking, for the most part, political or economic influence, "getting the best education possible for their children motivated ordinary citizens to show extraordinary grit, courage, and endurance, challenging Jim Crow and other legal and customary forms of racial, ethnic, gender, and disability subordination" (Anderson, 2001, p. 127).

Although the discussion of the civil rights movement begins with African Americans, perhaps because the basic vision of what was wrong was most visible in the history of African Americans in the nation, the general principles of the movement were later applied to advancing the rights of other racial and ethnic groups, women, and those with disabilities. The basic goals of the civil rights movement were to end the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson and secure the individual rights that are guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

8.2 School Desegregation

The schools became a stage for much of the drama of the civil rights movement. The landmark 1954 school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka served as a "major catalyst" in efforts to address the inequities in public education (Tyack & Cuban, 1995).

The Brown decision, presented as a Primary Source Reading for this chapter, was a reversal of the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which had said that separate facilitiesfor African Americans and Whites were not unconstitutional as long as they were equal. Since the 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had traveled throughout the South gathering evidence that African American schools, always separate, were never equal. In 1954, the year when the Brown decision was rendered, per pupil expenditures for African American students in the South were only 60% of those for White students (Patterson, 2001).

By the early 1950s the NAACP was ready to take its challenge of separate but equal to the U.S. Supreme Court and began recruiting parents of African American elementary students who might be willing to join in a lawsuit. The case, filed as Oliver L. Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, was a consolidation of cases from four states (Delaware, Kansas, Virginia, and South Carolina) and the District of Columbia. It was argued by Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

At the time the suit was filed Topeka operated 18 elementary schools for Whites and 4 for African Americans. Many African American students were forced to attend segregated schools far from their homes even though White schools were nearby (Linder, 2011). The unanimous decision, delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren on May 17, 1954, was unambiguous:

To separate [African American children] from others of similar age and qualifications because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. . . . We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore we hold that plaintiffs and others similarly situated . . . are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. (p. 468)

With these words, the courts declared de jure (by law) segregation to be unconstitutional. At the time of the Brown decision, 17 states and the District of Columbia required segregation in the public schools by law; in four others (Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming) it was permitted.

Recognizing the importance of any order they might make, as well as the uniqueness of each community and that states would require time to come into compliance with its ruling, the Court set no rigid schedule for compliance. But in Brown II, its 1955 ruling implementing Brown I, the court said the states should proceed "with all deliberate speed." School districts were charged with the responsibility of creating desegregation plans under the supervision of the closest federal district court.

Responses to the Brown Decision

The educational response to the Brown decisions varied. In the so-called border states, the response was mostly calm, and over the next several months a number of districts in Oklahoma, Texas, Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, Tennessee, and Arkansas began to integrate (Manchester, 1975). But in the Deep South the decision was met with open hostility, massive resistance, and vows of defiance. Georgia governor Herman Tallmadge vowed that "the people of Georgia . . . will fight for the right . . . to manage their own affairs . . . [and will] map a program to insure continued and permanent segregation of the races" (Manchester, 1975, p. 736). Georgia then passed a bill making it a felony to spend public funds to support an integrated school.

That same year the Mississippi legislature passed a state constitutional amendment allowing the legislature to abolish public schools and provide tuition grants for attendance at private schools. The next year the Mississippi legislature made it illegal for a White person to attend a racially integrated school (Watras, 1997). And, in what was perhaps the most dramatic example of nonviolent resistance, Prince Edward County, Virginia, abandoned its public school system, leaving parents to enroll their children in private schools that excluded African American students.

Southern resistance was not limited to legislative action. Throughout the South, White citizens' councils such as Virginia's Massive Resistance were formed to resist and delay school integration. Harsh words turned rapidly to violent racial incidents. African American children attempting to attend White schools were subjected to verbal and physical harassment. Politicians and political candidates seemed determined to outdo each other in demonstrating opposition to school integration.

Perhaps the most dramatic physical confrontation in the struggle to integrate the public schools, and certainly the one that got the most media attention, took place in Little Rock, Arkansas. In September of 1957, fighting an uphill battle for reelection, Governor Orval Faubus sought to strengthen his position among his right-wing constituents by using the Arkansas National Guard to block the enrollment of nine African American students in Central High School on the pretext that violence had been threatened. Later, violence did erupt, and evidence suggests that to vindicate himself, Faubus was a behind-the-scenes instigator of it (Manchester, 1975).

To enforce a court order that the children be allowed to register, President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard, thus removing them from Faubus's control, and sent in troops from the 101st Airborne Division to ensure that the students were safely enrolled. The use of federal troops convinced many White southerners that they could not use force to prevent integration, but it also enraged many and suggested the need for more subtle means of resistance (Jacoway, 2007).

President Eisenhower's televised address to the nation explaining that the use of the troops was not to force integration but to enforce a federal court order meant little to many. Although enrolled, the students were subjected to unspeakable harassment. Still, eight of the "Little Rock Nine" finished the school year.

The physical violence associated with attempts to desegregate education was not limited to the public schools; it accompanied attempts to integrate institutions of higher education in the South as well. As in Little Rock, on at least two occasions—in 1962 at the University of Mississippi and in 1963 at the University of Alabama—federal troops had to be used to enforce integration. Also in both cases, the governor of the state attempted to block the integration. The incident at the University of Mississippi involved the deaths of two people and injuries to numerous others, and was one of the most violent episodes in the history of the integration of education.

The saga began when James Meredith, a 9-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, applied for admission to the University of Mississippi. The university refused his application several times. A protracted legal battle following his rejection ended with the Supreme Court ordering the university to admit Meredith. Once again a governor, this time Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, tried to stand in the way and vowed on statewide television that "no school will be integrated in this state while I am our governor." After four failed attempts by federal marshals to register Meredith and avoid violence, early one Sunday evening in June 1962 federal marshals again escorted Meredith to the Oxford campus to register.

That same evening President John F. Kennedy went on national television to explain the situation and to appeal to students to remain calm and obey the law. But it was not to be. In the violent confrontation that raged through the night, two people—a French correspondent and an Oxford spectator—were killed and 166, mostly marshals and national guardsmen, were injured, some seriously. The regular army from Fort Bragg arrived just before daybreak and, in the process of fighting their way onto the campus, 40 of them were hit by missiles or shotgun blasts. Finally, shortly before eight o'clock, three marshals accompanied Meredith to the "battered Lyceum. There, at last, he was admitted by a Robert Byron Ellis, the stony-faced registrar" (Manchester, 1975, p. 951).

The Carrot and the Stick: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965

A decade after Brown, school desegregation had made limited progress. Initially, districts attempted to integrate schools by adopting freedom of choice plans. In most instances these plans had little impact on the level of segregation, and 98% of African American children still attended all-African American schools. However, the civil rights movement that Brown had triggered was gaining momentum on other fronts. Freedom rides, sit-ins, boycotts, and other forms of nonviolent protest both appealed to the national conscience and focused national attention on a movement that would not be denied.

Lyndon B. Johnson (seated) shakes hands with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Upon the signing of this act, schools were prohibited from discriminating against students on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

Kennedy pressed for passage of a federal civil rights statute that would end segregation in public facilities and public accommodations, attack discrimination in employment, require nondiscriminatory practices in programs and institutions receiving federal funds, and prohibit unequal application of voter registration requirements. Five days after his assassination in 1963, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, appeared before Congress and sought the civil rights bill's passage, declaring it the most fitting way to honor Kennedy's memory.

Seven months later, Congress passed, and on July 2 President Johnson signed, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most comprehensive civil rights statute in U.S. history and one of the nation's most significant pieces of social legislation.

Details of the Civil Rights Act

The Civil Rights Act further involved the federal government in the activities of the nation's schools. The intent of the law was to enforce the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Title VI of the act prohibits discrimination against students on the basis of race, color, or national origin in all institutions receiving federal funds. It also authorizes the U.S. attorney general to take legal action to achieve school desegregation and provides federal grants for in-service training and technical assistance to school districts to encourage voluntary desegregation or to help districts undergoing court-ordered desegregation. Title VII forbids discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, national origin, and as of 1972, sex. Title IV of the act authorized the withholding of federal funds from any institution or agency violating the law.

Also important to education, by virtue of increasing minority participation in state, local, and school board elections, was Title I, which prohibits the unequal application of voter registration requirements that had been used to suppress minority voting. Thus, so-called literacy tests that went well beyond proving the voter's ability to read and write and

asked increasingly difficult and arcane questions about the voting process, such as what time of day a senator was sworn into office, . . . designed to ensure Blacks in the South and Hispanics in the Southwest would not be able to vote became illegal. (Miksch, 2011, p. 1)

Title IV of the Civil Rights Act authorized a survey to determine the availability of equal educational opportunities for all students in public institutions in the United States. The survey of over 600,000 students and teachers nationwide was directed by James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University, and the report it generated, Equality of Educational Opportunity, was made available to Congress in less than two years.

The Coleman Report

In what has been widely considered the most important education study of the 20th century (Kivint, 2001), the Coleman Report, as it became known, found that for most student populations there seemed to be little relationship between school inputs (for example, expenditures per pupil, class size, number of library books, and facilities) and student achievement. Rather, the single most important variable was the educational and social class background of the family, and the second most important variable was the educational and social class background of the other children in the school. The verbal ability of the teacher was found to be the most important school variable linked to student test scores.

Although it lent little support to compensatory education, as a result of its finding that poor African American students' performance improved in integrated schools, the report provided support for integration, including the controversial practice of busing students to schools other than their local one to achieve racial balance. Subsequent analysis has suggested that the determining factor is really students' socioeconomic status, not their racial or ethnic identity. Nevertheless, the Coleman Report generated considerable discussion over the next two or three decades concerning the extent to which schools make a difference in student achievement, or whether it is too late by the time the child gets to school.

Increasing the Pace of Integration

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was followed by passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), discussed in the next section. As described by President Johnson, the ESEA represented "a major new commitment of the federal government to quality and equality in the schooling that we afford our young people."

The passage of the Civil Rights Act and the ESEA, in combination with the growing intolerance of the Supreme Court to resistance to the Brown decision, created a "carrot-and-stick" mechanism that dramatically increased the pace of school desegregation. The carrot was the increased federal support provided by the ESEA, while the stick was the Civil Rights Act. Federal revenues to education increased from $2.0 billion in 1965–1966 to $3.2 billion in 1970 and to $4.9 billion in 1974.

The courts also became more proactive in moving the pace of integration. In 1964 the Supreme Court ruled that the time for "all deliberate speed" had run out (Griffin v. County School Board). In 1968 the Court said that if freedom of choice plans were not working, other strategies must be used (Green v. County School Board of New Kent County). These strategies could include forced busing, pairing of schools, consolidating schools, altering attendance zones, reassigning teachers, and using racial quotas (see, for instance, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971, upholding district-wide forced busing).

At the same time the courts were dealing with de jure segregation in the South, they were increasing being asked to address the de facto segregation that existed in many communities outside the South. In these communities, state law did not mandate segregation, but local zoning ordinances, housing restrictions, attendance zones, gerrymandering, and other deliberate official actions were designed to segregate minorities. In fact, by the early 1970s African American students in the South were more integrated than those in the North or West.

An early attempt by the Office of Civil Rights to pressure school districts to desegregate by withholding federal funds as authorized under Title IV had ended in failure. At the time, 1965, African American students in Chicago attended segregated and seriously overcrowded schools. Many were on shortened double shifts and as a result received less instructional time than White students. Following an investigation, the U.S. Office of Education announced that it would withhold $32 million in funds to the city's schools. However, pressure from Chicago's powerful Mayor Richard J. Daley led Johnson to urge the Office of Education to settle the dispute. In the end, even though the school board basically did nothing, the federal funds were released.

The courts' actions in districts with de facto segregation were more aggressive. In a case involving Denver, Colorado, Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1973), the Supreme Court held that when official actions had an intent to segregate, they were just as illegal as de jure segregation. Moreover, the Court required the school district to desegregate Mexican American as well as African American students. The Court also held that proof of intent to segregate in one part of a district is sufficient to find the district to be segregated and to warrant a district-wide remedy.

However, the next year, when a federal judge ordered cross-district busing (in that case, busing Detroit students to the suburbs and busing suburban students into the city), the Supreme Court ruled that the scope of the remedy could not exceed the scope of the violation and that the suburban school districts were not responsible for the segregated condition of the Detroit schools (Milliken v. Bradley, 1974). Continuing with the same rationale, in a subsequent de facto case the Court held that the scope of the desegregation remedy cannot exceed the impact of the segregatory practice (Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, 1977). See Table 8.1 for a summary of Supreme Court desegregation cases.

8.3 Education and the War on Poverty

In the early 1960s large numbers of Americans became aware that at least one quarter of the population had been bypassed by the postwar prosperity and lived in dire poverty. The very advances in automation and innovations that had made the United States the richest nation on Earth had displaced coal miners, factory workers, and farm workers. Exposés such as Homer Bigart's New York Times series on Appalachian poverty and high-impact media coverage such as Edward R. Murrow's documentary on migrant farm workers, Harvest of Shame, brought a flood of interest in the elimination of poverty.

As a result, begun in a modest way by Kennedy and elevated to "war" status by Johnson in his 1964 State of the Union address, the federal government set out to battle poverty. The War on Poverty was an integral part of Johnson's larger Great Society program of social reforms and was to some extent a continuation of Roosevelt's New Deal, which Johnson had supported and worked in.

In an effort to win the War on Poverty and further the Great Society, legislation was passed to expand welfare services, support legal services and community development programs, subsidize low-income housing, improve health care, and improve inner-city schools. Medicare and Medicaid and the Food Stamp program were created, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development was established.

Education was viewed as key to the elimination of poverty. Poor children as well as those of certain minority groups, it was noted, often failed to achieve academically. In the optimistic view of many politicians, educators, and social scientists, the "cultural deprivation" (that is, lack of middle-class attitudes and incomes) of the poor was attributable to a lack of education; if the poor were provided the skills and education for employment, they could achieve middle-class economic and social status and break the "cycle of poverty" (Ziegler & Valentine, 1979).

The education front of the War on Poverty was waged by a number of initiatives. The Vocational Education Act of 1963 more than quadrupled federal funds for vocational education. The purpose of the act was to enhance occupational training opportunities for persons of all ages through the provision of financial assistance to vocational and technical programs in high schools and nonbaccalaureate postsecondary institutions. The Manpower Development and Training Act, enacted the same year, was directed at providing retraining to unemployed adults.

The Job Corps and Head Start

The Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964 established the Job Corps to train youth between 16 and 21 in basic literacy skills and for employment. It also established a type of domestic Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). Perhaps the most popular and controversial component of the EOA was Project Head Start, a program aimed at disadvantaged children 3 to 5 years old who would not normally attend preschool or kindergarten. President Johnson called Head Start a "landmark," not only in education but also in "the maturity of our democracy." Head Start, he foretold, would "strike at the basic cause of poverty" by addressing it at its beginnings—the disadvantaged preschool child.

As the name suggests, the intent of the program was to give disadvantaged children a head start in the educational race so that once in school they might participate on equal terms with children from nondisadvantaged homes. Though Head Start has provided educational, social, and nutritional services to over 25 million children over the life of the program, and despite hundreds of studies, controversy remains over its effectiveness and long-term benefits for participants.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Other Important Legislation

The centerpiece of the education legislation enacted as part of the War on Poverty was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The most far-reaching piece of federal education legislation to date, the ESEA allocated over $1 billion in federal funds annually to education, with no matching requirements.

The ESEA included five major sections, or titles. The largest, receiving about 80% of the funds, was Title I, which provided assistance to local schools for the education of children from low-income families. Schools with more than 40% of their student body classified as low income by the federal government were eligible. The compensatory education programs funded through Title I were intended to maintain the educational progress begun in Head Start, and Title I was to become the major education component of the War on Poverty.

Other sections of the ESEA provided funds for library resources, textbooks, and instructional materials; education research and development centers; and strengthening state departments of education. The act was expanded in 1966 and 1967 to include programs for Native American children, children of migrant workers, the handicapped (Title VI), and children with limited English-speaking ability (Title VII).

Another significant act passed during that same session of Congress was the Higher Education Act of 1965, which provided direct assistance to institutions of higher education for facilities construction and library and instructional improvement. The Higher Education Act also provided, for the first time in American history, federal scholarships to students, termed "Equal Opportunity Grants." It also authorized low-interest, federally insured loans for qualified students and established a National Teacher Corps to recruit young people into teaching.

When signing the act at his alma mater, Southwest Texas State College, Johnson reflected on his days as a teacher at a small, poor Mexican school. An excerpt from his speech is presented in the From the Archives feature box.

From the Archives: Remarks of President Lyndon B. Johnson on Signing the Higher Education Act of 1965

Johnson's speech at Southwest Texas State College reflects on his days as a teacher.

In a very few moments, I will put my signature on the Higher Education Act of 1965. The President's signature upon this legislation passed by this Congress will swing open a new door for the young people of America. For them, and for this entire land of ours, it is the most important door that will ever open—the door to education. And this legislation is the key which unlocks it.

To thousands of young men and women, this act means the path of knowledge is open to all that have the determination to walk it. It means a way to deeper personal fulfillment, greater personal productivity, and increased personal reward. This bill, which I will make law, is an incentive to stay in school. It means that a high school senior anywhere in this great land of ours can apply to any college or any university in any of the 50 States and not be turned away because his family is poor. . . .

This bill, which we will shortly make into law, will provide scholarships and loans and work opportunities to 1 million of that 1.3 million that did not get to go on to college. . . .

So to thousands of young people education will be available. And it is a truism that education is no longer a luxury. Education in this day and age is a necessity. . . .

Today, then, we embark on a new adventure in learning. And it has a very special meaning to me. This is a proud moment in my life. I am proud to have a part in the beginning that this bill provides, because here a great deal began for me some 38 years ago on this campus. It was here in these surroundings that I first understood the deeper meaning of the Bible's promise that: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." Here the seeds were planted from which grew my firm conviction that for the individual, education is the path to achievement and fulfillment; for the Nation, it is a path to a society that is not only free but civilized; and for the world, it is the path to peace—for it is education that places reason over force.

As a student, I lived in a tiny room above Dr. Evans' garage. I lived there 3 years before the business manager knew I occupied those quarters and submitted me a bill. I shaved and I showered in a gymnasium that was down the road. I worked at a dozen different jobs, from sweeping the floors to selling real silk socks. Sometimes I wondered what the next day would bring that could exceed the hardship of the day before. But with all of that, I was one of the lucky ones—and I knew it even then. I left this campus to become a teacher under one of the great teachers that I have known. I want him to stand because he did much in my life. Dr. Donaho, please stand. He came here and looked over my credentials and somehow or other offered me a job at $125 a month to teach a Mexican school at Cotulla when I was a sophomore, and it was necessary that I leave that year to teach.

I shall never forget the faces of the boys and the girls in that little Welhausen Mexican School, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor. And I think it was then that I made up my mind that this Nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American. So here, today, back on the campus of my youth, that door is swinging open far wider than it ever did before. The rest is up to you.

Congress continued to pass legislation affecting education during the remainder of the Johnson presidency, including the Educational Professions Development Act in 1967, which provided for the training and retraining of teachers. In 1968, the last year of Johnson's Great Society, the Vocational Education Act was expanded and its funding authorization doubled. That same year the Higher Education Act was amended to consolidate previous legislation and add a number of new program initiatives.

Between the years 1963 and 1969, Congress passed more than two dozen major pieces of legislation affecting education. These laws dramatically increased federal involvement in education and provided vast sums of money for elementary and secondary schools, vocational schools, and colleges and universities. In 1963–1964, federal funds for elementary and secondary schools totaled almost $900 million. By 1968–1969 this figure had skyrocketed to $3 billion, and the federal government's share of the financing of education had risen from 4.4% to 8.8%.

Perhaps equally as important as the increased funding was the shift in federal emphasis from identifying the gifted, which had marked the 1950s, to a concern for the disadvantaged. Concern had shifted from the Cold War to the War on Poverty.

While the War on Poverty was being waged, conflict was also taking place on other fronts, as schools became battlegrounds in the struggle to attain equal rights for minorities, females, and the disabled.

Lyndon B. Johnson.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) was born on August 27, 1908, in Stonewall, Texas, the oldest of five children. After graduating from high school, he worked manual jobs for 3 years before enrolling in Southwest Texas State Teachers College. To earn his tuition and living expenses, he worked a variety of jobs, including picking up garbage and serving as a janitor. After his sophomore year, in need of money to continue his studies, he took a leave and went to teach seventh and eighth grades and also be the principal at the Welhausen School, a small impoverished school serving Mexican children in Cotulla, Texas, 60 miles south of San Antonio.

By all reports Johnson was a strict teacher but was dedicated to enriching the lives of his students. "I was determined," he later said, "to spark something inside them, to fill their souls with ambition and interest and belief in the future" (Unger & Unger, 1999). He was also concerned for their physical well-being, and when he learned that many students often came to school with no breakfast, he initiated a hot lunch program. And, when he learned that the Anglo school had sports equipment and his school had none, he convinced the school board to supply some equipment and he spent part of his first paycheck to buy more.

Johnson biographer Irwin Unger reports that "[t]he Cotulla experience buried itself deep in Johnson's soul" and, according Wilbur Cohen, Johnson's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, "it motivated him on the education bills, on his nondiscrimination, on civil rights, and a great many basic ideas that were developing during his presidency" (Unger & Unger, 1999, pp. 27–28).

Johnson returned to college and graduated in 1930, just as the Great Depression was gaining momentum. Experienced teachers were being laid off and beginning teachers had limited prospects. However, with the help of his father's brother, the chair of the history department at Sam Houston High School in Houston, Texas, he was able to secure a job at that school, where he taught arithmetic and speech and coached the debate team. The debate team had never been very successful, but under Johnson's demanding coaching, both the girls' and the boys' teams won the city and district championship.

Johnson returned for a second year at Sam Houston, but when the opportunity came in the middle of the fall term to follow what he had long identified as his first love, politics, he resigned to take a position as an aide to a U.S. congressman. He returned to Texas in 1935 to become the director of the Texas National Youth Administration (a New Deal program), a position he held for 2 years before being elected to his first political office, U.S. congressman for the Texas 10th Congressional District. And, as they say, the rest is history: Johnson went on to become a U.S. senator, vice president, and upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy, was sworn in as president on Air Force One on November 23, 1963.

As president, Johnson initiated a domestic agenda program that became known as the Great Society, which included the War on Poverty described in this chapter. Education was central to Johnson's belief that these social programs should provide a "hand up, not a hand out." More than two dozen major pieces of legislation affecting education were passed during Johnson's term in office. Many of these, including the landmark Elementary and Secondary School Act, have been discussed in this chapter. President Lyndon Johnson, perhaps more than any other president in U.S. history deserves to be called an "Education President."

8.4 Expanding the Rights of Language Minority Youth

Despite the fact that in many communities in the United States a significant portion of the student population had limited English-speaking ability (LESA), instruction in many of the schools in these communities was given in English only. In the 1960s the growing Hispanic population in the Southwest turned its attention to this problem. Increasing pressure from educators, parents, and special interest groups led Congress in 1968 to amend the ESEA to add the Title VII Bilingual Education Program, also called the Bilingual Education Act (BEA).

The BEA was the first federal recognition that LESA students have special needs that must be addressed if they are to have equal educational opportunities. The BEA provided federal funds in the form of competitive grants to school districts to design and implement bilingual education programs for LESA students. However, despite the prospect of federal funds, many school districts did little or nothing to serve their non-English- or limited-English-speaking students.

The major impetus for expanding the educational opportunities of language minority students was provided by the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lau v. Nichols. Lau was filed on behalf of the 1,800 limited-English-speaking Chinese students in San Francisco who attended schools that provided instruction only in English. The plaintiffs alleged a violation of both the due process clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although not ruling on the 14th Amendment claim, the Court did find that the district was in violation of Title VI. According to the Court,

there is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education. Basic English skills are at the very core of what these public schools teach. Imposition of a requirement that, before a child can effectively participate in the educational program, he must already have acquired those basic skills is to make a mockery of public education. We know that those who do not understand English are certain to find their classroom experience wholly incomprehensible and in no way meaningful. (p. 566)

The Court ruled that schools must provide assistance to LESA students, but it did not specify whether Title VI requires bilingual education, remedial English instruction, or any other specific bilingual remedy. Rather, the court said that school districts were to take "affirmative steps" to ensure that language minority students were given access to the same curriculum as their language majority peers.

The Lau decision was effectively extended to all students and all school districts, not just those receiving federal funds, by Title II of the Education Amendments of 1974, which said that language barriers were to be overcome with instructional programs. Many districts were not prepared, financially or technically, to comply with the Lau decision or Title II.

To assist the many districts affected by Lau, in 1974 the Bilingual Education Act was amended to define a bilingual education program and identify its goals; establish regional centers to provide technical support and training; and fund capacity-building efforts of school districts to expand their curricula, staff, and research for bilingual programs. Bilingual education was defined as a program that provides instruction in English and in the native language of the student to allow the student to progress effectively through the education system. The goal of the program is to prepare LESA students to participate in the regular classroom as rapidly as possible.

Support for bilingual education grew throughout the 1970s, and the Office of Civil Rights began an aggressive campaign to enforce the Lau decision. The result was that hundreds of school districts that had previously neglected student's language needs adopted bilingual programs (Crawford, 1996). In 1978 the BEA was amended again to broaden the definition of eligible students from LESA to limited-English-proficiency (LEP) students and provide additional support to bilingual education through competitive grants to school districts and training grants to colleges and universities.

However, as discussed in Chapter 9, in the 1980s bilingual education became politically controversial when the Reagan administration opposed it and supported the English immersion-type programs that had been used with earlier immigrant groups. At the same time, during a decade when the LEP school population increased by 40%, the Title VII budget was cut by the same percent in inflation-adjusted dollars (Crawford, 1996). Additionally, the issue of language, in this case the preservation of language, was a major consideration in the education of Native Americans.

8.5 Native American Education and the Drive for Self-Determination

While litigation and legislation expanded the educational opportunities afforded Native American and language minority students, Native Americans attempted to gain greater control of, and assume greater responsibility for, the education of their youth, as well as to restore native language and culture to the curriculum. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations of the 1960s, federal Indian policy was directed at creating programs to reduce the dependency of Native American communities on federal aid and at the same time reverse the termination policy begun in the years immediately following World War II.

The goal of the termination policy was to end federal obligations to Native Americans and their communities, and it drew support from individuals across the social and political spectrum. Some people saw the termination of federal involvement as being consistent with the civil rights movement; others believed that previous assimilation programs, including the paternalistic programs of the New Deal, had failed and that it was time to get the federal government out of Native American affairs and save the taxpayers' money (Clarkin, 2001).

Despite what were in some cases positive motives, the termination policy, which in effect represented a "sink or swim" approach to assimilation, had some very negative consequences. Native Americans would be freed from federal supervision and control, but at the same time they would lose any sovereign rights they possessed, and Native American lands would be removed from trust status. Most Native American communities did not support the termination policy but did support the move toward self-determination, allowing Native American people to determine their own futures through their tribal governments. Native Americans would be freed from federal supervision and control, but at the same time they would lose any sovereign rights they possessed, and Native American lands would be removed from trust status. Most Native American communities did not support the termination policy but did support the move toward self-determination, allowing Native American people to determine their own futures through their tribal governments.

Public and political support for self-determination grew as a result of increased Native American activism in the 1960s and, perhaps more important, as a result of activities that followed the presentation of the report of the U.S. Special Senate Sub-Committee on Indian Education, Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge (1969), also known as the Kennedy Report. The report presented the results of an in-depth study of the BIA and the public school education of Native Americans; its account of the failure of the public schools is presented as a Primary Source Reading for this chapter.

The report began with what was to be an indictment of federal policy: "The dominant policy of the Federal Government toward the American Indian has been one of coercive assimilation . . . [which] has had disastrous effects on the education of Indian children" (p. 21). After a lengthy and very negative litany of failures, the report made 60 recommendations. Among them were increased funding of Native American education and the expansion of promising programs; the inclusion of Native American language, culture, and history in the curriculum; increased involvement of Native American parents in the education of their children; and that no services to Native Americans be terminated without their consent.

President Nixon supported the recommendations of the Kennedy Report in a special message to Congress on Native American affairs in July of 1970:

It is long past time that the Indian policies of the Federal government begin to recognize and build upon the capacities and insights of the Indian people. Both as a matter of justice and as a matter of enlightened social policy, we must begin to act on the basis of what the Indians themselves have long been telling us. The time has come to break decisively with the past and to create the conditions for a new era in which the Indian future is determined by Indian acts and Indian decisions. (p. 1)

Self-determination came closer to reality with the passage of the Indian Education Act of 1972 (IEA) and the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act (ISDEAA) in 1975. The IEA provided funds for supplemental programs to meet the special needs of Native American children in public schools both on and off the reservation. Schools were required to involve parents in the design of these programs, which could include the use of culturally relevant and bilingual curriculum materials (Reyhner & Eder, 2004).

The IEA also established the Office of Indian Education within the USOE and the National Advisory Council on Indian Education, which was to report annually to Congress on the status of education for Native Americans. One important feature of the IEA was that it covered urban and eastern Indians, who had historically been ignored by federal programs (Szasz, 2007a). Although very limited compared to the recommendations of the Kennedy Report, the IEA was considered a major victory for Native American people (Szasz, 2007a).

The ISDEAA marked a reversal of the federal government's termination policy. It focused on giving Native American families and tribes greater participation in the governance and education of Native American peoples and provided for their takeover of the operation of BIA schools. The ISDEAA went further than the IEA, which had affected only students in the public schools.

As discussed in more detail in Chapter 9, the victories of the 1970s promised Native Americans freedom of control over Native American education programs. However, the Native American policy set in motion by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s signaled that any celebration was premature.

8.6 Expanding Educational Opportunities for Mexican Americans

Mexican Americans presently and historically have been the largest Hispanic group in the United States. During the 1940s there was a large migration of Hispanics from Puerto Rico and, beginning in 1959, from Cuba. These immigrants were followed in the 1960s and 1970s by Central and South Americans fleeing economic and political instability. Nevertheless, the number of immigrants and their descendants from these Hispanic groups remains small compared to the number of Mexican Americans.

The Mexican American population grew significantly in the 1940s as a result of increased immigration. During World War II almost a quarter of a million Mexican workers were recruited under an agreement between the Mexican and U.S. governments to work as farm and railroad workers. The bracero (hired hand) program was scheduled to end when the war was over, but pressure from large growers who needed the cheap labor was successful in getting the program reinstated in 1947 and extended several more times.

In 1964, in large part because of the attention paid by religious groups, labor organizations, and civil rights groups to the documented abuses of Mexican laborers, the program was allowed to expire. Immigration records indicate that 4.8 million Mexican workers participated in the program, and an estimated 8% of them ultimately settled in the United States (Garcia, 2002). However, the end of the bracero program did not stop the flow of Mexican immigrants, both legal and illegal. In the 1970s the number of legal Mexican immigrants was more than twice what it had been during the 1950s bracero decade (640,000 versus 300,000).

Like other immigrant groups, Mexican Americans actively sought schooling in the United States. Over the course of the 20th century, they received increased access to the public schools, but that access was to segregated schools, schools that were usually of inferior quality, often just shacks or barns, with larger classes, books and materials often damaged and out of date and handed down from Anglo schools, less prepared teachers, and reduced budgets (Regua, 2007).

A large portion of Mexican American students did not attend school, largely because of poverty, the mobility associated with rural employment, and discriminatory education policies (San Miguel, 1997). Some school districts openly denied admission to migrant children. Others operated schools on a shortened school day to allow the students to work the fields for part of the day (Gonzalez, 1990).

Assimilation and Deculturalization

The education provided Hispanic students, like that provided Native American students, was designed to promote, if not force, assimilation and deculturalization. Instruction in the segregated schools was in English, and the use of Spanish was forbidden, even on the playground. In this atmosphere many students dropped out, and because compulsory attendance of Mexican Americans was not enforced, the overall result was a significantly lower level of educational attainment than that of the Anglo population.

Until shortly after World War II, the segregation of Hispanics was permitted in California and other states. Then, in 1944, Gonzalo Mendez moved his family to a farm he was to run for its Japanese owners, who were in an internment camp. When the Westminster School District in Orange County, California, refused to enroll his children in an Anglo school, he joined four other parents on behalf of 5,000 Mexican American families in a class action suit against Westminster and three other school districts.

In 1946 the U.S. district court rejected the school districts' argument that the segregation was not based on race but on the need to provide special instruction to Hispanic children until they acquired proficiency in English (a defense that had been successfully used by the Del Rio School District in Texas in 1930). In fact, the court said, the only special instruction these students needed was to learn English, and this was actually impeded by segregation (Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District, 1947).

Accordingly, the court determined that segregation was illegal because it was a violation of state law and a denial of due process under the 14th Amendment. Although some, including the NAACP and its attorney, Thurgood Marshall, who had filed an amicus curiae brief in the case, were disappointed that the court did not overturn "separate but equal," the decision did have a broad impact.

Encouraged by the decision, the segregation of Mexican Americans was challenged in the courts in other states. Within 2 years de jure segregation had been overturned in Texas and Arizona, and in 1947 California Governor Earl Warren, later to be the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who would issue the Brown decision, signed a bill repealing California's segregation laws.

However, despite these and other court victories, the desegregation of Hispanic children was far from achieved, and equality of opportunity was still an unrealized dream. By the 1960s, increasing frustration with educational inequities resulted in a Chicano/Mexican American civil rights movement that encompassed a host of issues ranging from farm workers' rights, to political and voting rights, to enhanced educational opportunities.

Students played key roles in the Chicano movement: Student groups such as the United Mexican American Students and Mexican American Youth Association were especially active (Nittle, n.d.b). Widespread inequities in education and biased Eurocentric curricula led to an education revolt among Mexican American youth. Encouraged by the students' rights and civil rights movements, they employed many of their techniques:

In high schools they employed walkouts, sometimes called "blowouts," and boycotts to promote their demands for educational quality and equality, more relevant social science courses, bilingual and bicultural education, more Raza teachers, counselors, and school board members.

At colleges and universities various techniques were employed: mass protest demonstrations, sit-ins in administration offices and other direct-confrontation tactics—usually accompanied by emotional rhetoric and sometimes attacks on university property. Some faculty members joined the students in demands for incorporating Chicano history and culture into social sciences courses, admitting more Raza students, creating Chicano studies programs, and increasing Chicano representation of faculties and governing boards. (Meier & Ribera, 1993, p. 220)

The Chicano movement, sometimes referred to as el movimiento, lasted for about a decade, from 1965 to 1975, and had a major impact on high school and college campuses in the Southwest. Chicano studies were introduced, the number of Chicano faculty and staff increased, and in higher education serious efforts were made for the first time to recruit and retain Chicano students. More broadly, the attention that the Chicano movement turned on education served to emphasize its importance and provided encouragement for young Chicanos to continue their schooling. The results were evident throughout the 1970s in the lowering of the dropout rate and the increased levels of educational attainment of the Hispanic population.

8.7 The Education of Asian Americans

The two largest Asian immigrant groups in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were the Chinese and the Japanese. The majority of both groups arrived and settled on the West Coast. As their numbers increased and as they became more successful, resentment against them grew, both for the economic competition that came from their willingness to work for low wages and for their cultural differences. Discrimination and hostility followed, and the dangers of the "Yellow Peril" screamed from newspaper headlines.

The policy response was first to limit their immigration and then to prohibit it completely. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement between the United States and Japan both stopped the immigration of unskilled workers. These restrictions were followed by the 1917 Immigration Restriction Act and the National Origins Act of 1924, which together banned the immigration of nearly all Asians and prohibited legal immigrants already in the United States from attaining citizenship.

According to historian John Dower (1986), the vision of the Asian menace was always more racial than national. It did not come from concern with any one country or people, but from a vague and looming sense of a vast, faceless yellow horde. This racism was very much in evidence in the educational experience of Chinese and Japanese children.

The First to Come: Chinese Americans

The first Asian group to arrive in the United States in any significant numbers was the Chinese. About 4,000 immigrants arrived per year in the decade 1851–1860, and 20 years later that figure had tripled (see Table 8.2). Yet, except for a brief period (1859–1871) when San Francisco operated a segregated public school for Chinese, the only education most Chinese students received was at missionary or Chinese-language schools.

Neither of these institutions satisfied the desires of Chinese parents for an American public education for their children. Six years after the closing of the Chinese public school, 1,300 Chinese Americans petitioned the California legislature for separate public schools. The petitioners noted that although they paid taxes to support education, 3,000 Chinese children were being denied access to that education.

Their petition was denied, as was the subsequent attempt to enroll 8-year-old Mami Tape in the all-White Spring Valley School in San Francisco in September of 1884. When the principal, Jennie Hurley, literally stood in the schoolhouse door barring Mami's admission, the Tapes, a well-to-do Chinese family, sued the San Francisco school district.

The state superintendent of public instruction supported the board's denial, noting that the California constitution declared the Chinese to be "dangerous to the well-being of the state." However, in subsequent court action the California Supreme Court agreed with a lower court decision that to deny Mami, an American citizen, entrance to the public school would be a violation of state law and the 14th Amendment (Tape v. Hurley, 1885).

In anticipation of the court's ruling, the school district persuaded the legislature to pass a bill allowing school districts to establish segregated schools for "Mongolians," which they did (Wollenberg, 1976). Typically these schools were inferior to those attended by White students.

In some districts, Chinese and other Asian students were allowed to attend White schools. However, they were often segregated in different rooms or on different floors. In the classroom, the special language needs of students were largely ignored; schools were reluctant to employ Asian American teachers and attempted to force mastery of the English language (Weinberg, 1997). In 1902 the practice of segregation was legalized by the courts of California in the Wong Him v. Callahan decision, which said that it was not unconstitutional to restrict attendance by Chinese students to segregated Chinese schools as long as the schools offered the same advantages as other schools.

Following World War I, the rigid policy of segregation began to break down as parents became more persistent. Chinese students were regularly admitted to public high schools. However, elementary schools remained highly segregated, in large part because of housing patterns and attendance zones. Even in the years after World War II, when many middle-class Chinese moved out of segregated neighborhoods, schools in the many ethnic neighborhoods (Chinatowns) remained basically segregated. Instruction in these schools was typically in English only, leading to the Lau case previously discussed.

Japanese Americans

The second Asian group to immigrate to the United States in large numbers was the Japanese. Because of tight restrictions by the Japanese government during most of the 19th century, few Japanese migrated to America until a loosening of these restrictions in the century's last decade (see Table 8.2). As with other immigrant groups, as their numbers increased, so did the racism they experienced. As overt discrimination against Chinese children decreased, it was replaced by discrimination against the Japanese.

In 1905 the San Francisco board of education passed a resolution requiring Japanese students, along with Korean and Chinese students, to leave their neighborhood schools and attend the segregated Oriental Public School. Vigorous protests by the Japanese community ensued, including a diplomatic protest that their treatment violated the favored nation treaty between the United States and Japan. President Theodore Roosevelt was able to resolve the potential international crisis and to persuade the school board to rescind the resolution by agreeing to prohibit the immigration of Japanese from Hawaii, Mexico, and Canada.

A Closer Look: Japanese Internment

This video includes a brief introduction to the education of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.

Roosevelt's "Gentlemen's Agreement" neither solved the problem of Japanese immigration nor curtailed efforts to segregate Japanese students. In 1921 the California legislature amended the state education code to specifically name the Japanese as a group subject to segregation.

However, by the end of the decade, only four districts had established separate oriental schools. In the remainder of the state about 30,000 nisei (second-generation) Japanese children attended integrated schools. Although still subject to discrimination, they achieved so well and received so many honors that some White parents objected (Wollenberg, 1976).

After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, some individuals in the War Department became concerned that Japanese along the West coast might have a primary allegiance to Japan and represent a threat to the interests of the United States. They concluded that it was a military necessity to move these people to the interior where they could be monitored. About two thirds of the approximately 110,000 persons subsequently relocated were American born, and 25,000 were of school age.

The hastily constructed camps where they were kept, although surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed sentries, were intended to function as normal communities, with hospitals, newspapers, movie theaters, and schools. The War Relocation Agency (WRA) operated both the camps (such as the one described in the second Primary Source Reading for Chapter 7) and the schools.

The schools were designed using the concepts of progressive education as understood by the WRA. Their goal was to "promote an understanding of American ideas, institutions, and practices," and their primary purpose was to prepare students for reabsorption into normal community life and provide them with an education that would permit them to return to schools outside the camps without loss of credit. The educational programs at five of the relocation centers followed the community school model designed by faculty at Stanford University, while at the remainder a more traditional model was implemented (Cullen, 2011).

WRA insisted that the schools meet the minimum accreditation standards of the state in which they were located, and all camp high schools offered a college prep curriculum (Wollenberg, 1976). The schools met for 11 months a year, in part to make up for the time lost during relocation, and in part to keep the children occupied.

Despite the good intentions of the WRA, the camp schools were always short on supplies and equipment and were never able to hire enough certified teachers. However, they did keep public school life alive in the camps and provided a link and avenue for return to life outside the barbed wire (Wollenberg, 1976). In fact, when Japanese students did return to the public schools after the war, although there were some problems with readjustment, overall their assimilation proceeded well and they continued to excel academically.

Beginning in 1942, nisei students whose education had been interrupted were allowed to resume or begin their college education at institutions outside California. Several private organizations, most notably the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, collaborated with the WRA to overcome the objections of many institutions and eventually were able to place over 4,000 nisei students into mostly smaller colleges throughout the United States (Allan, 2004).

By the second half of the 20th century, most Japanese American children attended integrated schools. But, as with the Chinese, in some communities segregation continued, perpetuated in large part by residential housing patterns.

In the late 1960s, as Asian Americans watched African Americans challenge discriminatory and racist practices, they began to identify ways they too had been subject to such practices. Out of this process was born what some identify as the Asian American civil rights movement. It was largely driven by student activists radicalized by the antiwar and Black Power movements. Challenging stereotypes about Asian "passivity" and rejecting the exoticism and racism of "oriental" labels, Asian American activists mobilized the new consciousness to demand an end to racist hiring practices, biased school curricula, demeaning media stereotypes, residential discrimination, and the gentrification of historically Asian American neighborhoods. ("Seattle's Asian American movement," n.d., p. 1)

On college campuses Asian Americans demanded ethnic studies programs and curricula representative of their histories. Activists on and off campuses demanded an end to the Vietnam War (Nittle, n.d.a).

After the Vietnam War ended, many of the radical Asian American groups dissolved and the movement faded. But the fruit of it could be seen in the hundreds of campus and community groups with Asian American in their name—a term that not only symbolized new social and political attitudes but also a break with the term "oriental" (Nittle, n.d.a).

8.8 Gender Equity in Education

As discussed throughout this text, historically females have not been permitted to participate fully in all aspects of American society and have not been afforded the same rights and educational opportunities as males. Winning the right to vote in 1920 did not change these circumstances. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited overt discrimination in employment, many doors remained closed to women, and they were denied many opportunities.

It was not surprising, then, that in the mid-1960s, taking their cue from the civil rights movement, a number of female organizations formed to, as stated in the 1966 mission statement of the National Organization for Women (NOW), "take action to bring women to full participation in the mainstream of American society." The same document declared education to be "the key to effective participation in today's economy."

National Organization for Women President Betty Friedan talks to the press during a protest.

© JP Laffont/Sygma/CORBIS

Efforts to advance women's rights were an extension of the civil rights movement. National Organization for Women President Betty Friedan (pictured at center) led protests to encourage the fight for women's rights.

The promotion of sex equity—equal treatment and equal opportunity regardless of sex—was one of the major goals of the women's rights movement. A major step in that direction was taken with the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which provided that "no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." This included both academic programs and interscholastic athletics.

Another victory in the movement to extend civil rights to women came in the same session of Congress, when Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in employment, was extended to cover academic institutions. With the legal support of Title IX and Title VII, women brought political pressure on local school districts and colleges and universities to end sex discrimination in admissions, access to courses, extracurricular activities, instructional materials, counseling and counseling materials, employment, and policies and regulations governing the treatment of students and employees.

At the time of the passage of Title IX, most females, and many males, were familiar with sexism both in and out of the schools, but the problem had not yet been labeled. In 1973 Nancy Frazier and Myra Sadker published one of the first books to examine and document the differential treatment of female students. In Sexism in School and Society, they examined a variety of research on sexist practices and found that those practices led to the loss of academic potential, self-esteem, and occupational potential, particularly for girls and women.

The attention Frazier, Sadker, and others brought to the harm done by sexism in schools, as well as the congressional testimony surrounding Title IX, were instrumental in the passage of the Women's Educational Equity Act of 1974 (WEEA), which promoted educational equity for girls and women, including those who experienced multiple discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, or age.

WEEA's major impact was on curriculum and instruction. It sought to expand programs for females in math, science, computer science, and athletics, as well as guidance and counseling activities to encourage participation in these disciplines. WEEA also provided funds to help education agencies and institutions meet the requirements of Title IX and to support programs to increase the number of female administrators.

For Your Reflection and Analysis

In what ways did males benefit from Title IX?

The remainder of the 1970s saw continued legal and political pressure brought against school districts and colleges and universities to end discrimination in access; gender bias in curriculum materials, textbooks, and testing and guidance; inequality in support of athletic programs; and discrimination in employment. As a result, the number of women receiving advanced degrees and their representation across the occupations increased significantly (see Table 8.3). The doors having been opened, women entered in what has remained ever-increasing numbers.

8.9 Expanding Access to Children With Disabilities

In the mid-1970s there were an estimated 3.7 million children with disabilities in the United States (Bernard & Mondale, 2001b). Despite these numbers, most state laws allowed the expulsion or absolute exclusion from school of children who were deemed uneducable, untrainable, or otherwise unable to benefit from the regular education program. Not until two important federal court cases in the early 1970s was the right of children with disabilities to an education recognized by most states and school districts.

Both of these cases came in 1972. In Mills v. Board of Education of the District of Columbia it was estimated that 18,000 of the 22,000 retarded, emotionally disturbed, blind, deaf, and speech or learning disabled children in the District of Columbia were not being served. Rejecting the district's defense that it did not have the money to serve the children, the court ordered that

no child eligible for a publicly supported education in the District of Columbia public schools shall be excluded from a regular public school assignment by a rule, policy, or practice of the Board of Education of the District of Columbia or its agents unless such child is provided (a) adequate alternative educational services suited to the child's needs, which may include special education or tuition grants, and (b) a constitutionally adequate prior hearing and periodic review of the child's status, progress, and the adequacy of any educational alternative. (p. 878)

The second case, Pennsylvania Association of Retarded Citizens (PARC) v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1972), was also concerned with the fact that children with disabilities were not being provided a public education. In an out-of-court settlement the state agreed to provide a free public education to all retarded children between the ages of 6 and 21 and to establish due process procedures to resolve disputes. Following the PARC decision, cases were filed in over half the states seeking similar redress, and the Council for Exceptional Children prepared model legislation for adoption by states.

The decisions in Mills and PARC, combined with intense lobbying by groups representing the handicapped, special education professionals, and parents of children with disabilities, led Congress to pass the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the landmark Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (EHA), now known as the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

A Closer Look: IDEA and the Role of Teachers

This is a brief introduction of the role of initial and ongoing education of teachers under IDEA.

The Rehabilitation Act provided grants to states and public and nonpublic agencies to expand vocational training and rehabilitation services to individuals with disabilities, including the construction of rehabilitation facilities, so that they might be employed to the full extent of their capabilities. Section 504 of the act parallels Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and states that

no otherwise qualified individual in the United States . . . shall solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Under the provisions of the bill every public or private recipient of federal funds was to provide full nondiscriminatory access to individuals with disabilities. There was significant opposition to the bill because of its potential cost to institutions, agencies, and potential employers, and Nixon vetoed it. The Democratic Congress overrode his veto and the bill became law; however, implementing regulations were not enacted until the Carter administration.

The second major piece of federal legislation, the EHA, often referred to as the Bill of Rights for Handicapped Children, served not only to guarantee the educational rights of children with disabilities, but also to define and expand the rights of all children. The EHA provided over $1 billion annually to be distributed through the states to local school districts to help fund educational services for children with disabilities.

In addition to providing these much-needed funds for special education services, the EHA introduced a number of significant principles. Perhaps the most fundamental and important was the right of all children with disabilities to a "free appropriate education and related services designed to meet their unique needs." This meant that, unlike past practices, no child, regardless of their disability, could be denied a public education on the basis that they were considered to be uneducable or unable to benefit from the regular education program.

Second, the law required that every child receive a comprehensive, nondiscriminatory evaluation using multiple measures and procedures before being placed in any special education program and that an individualized educational plan (IEP) designed to meet the individual needs of the child be prepared for every child who is to receive special educational services.

A third important provision of EHA was the extensive due process requirements designed to ensure the rights of children with disabilities to receive a free appropriate education and to protect them from improper evaluation, classification, and placement.

Although not a requirement of EHA, its implementing regulations specified that children with disabilities were to be educated in the least restrictive environment. This requirement did not require inclusion or mainstreaming children with disabilities into regular classrooms (in fact, the EHA did not even mention mainstreaming), but it resulted in encouragement for this practice. Subsequent revisions of EHA as well as court decisions have shown a clear preference for inclusion "to the maximum extent appropriate" and that before any placement is made a careful consideration of placement options be made.

Tools of the Trade: The Individualized Education Plan

Introduced into American education in 1975 following the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Education Act (Public Law 94-142), the individualized educational plan (IEP) is a written document detailing the educational program and services that are to be provided to every student with a disability. The EHA specified that a specific and meaningful education plan be developed for every disabled child receiving special education services. Subsequent reauthorizations of the EHA (currently reenacted as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [IDEA]) have added further requirements as to how the IEP is to be developed and implemented.

Currently law requires that the IEP be developed within 30 days of a child having been determined to be eligible for special education services. The IEP is to be developed by a team composed of the child's parent or guardian, a special education teacher or case manager, at least one general education teacher, a school district representative who is knowledgeable about special education services and children with disabilities, an individual with the expertise to interpret the evaluation results (often a school psychologist), someone from a transition agency if there is to be a transition to such an agency (for example, vocational rehabilitation), and if appropriate, the child's parent or guardian may also invite other individuals who have special knowledge or expertise related to the child or the disability (such as a speech or physical therapist).

The IEP is to include the child's present level of academic and functional performance, a statement of measurable annual goals and benchmarks, how progress will be measured, and the specification of special education and related services needed for the child to meet the stated goals. The services may include program modification (for example, alternative state assessments), classroom accommodation, specially designed instruction, supplementary aids and services (such as assisted technology or classroom aides), or related services (such as speech therapy, sign language interpreter, or medical services).

The specification of program and services is to be based on the needs of the child, not the availability of the services in the district or the cost of the services. Subsequent placement of the child in the least restrictive environment that will enable the child to meet the goals of the IEP is also determined by the IEP, not the reverse. The law requires that the IEP be developed before the school year begins and be signed and accepted (or appealed) by the parent or guardian within 10 days of its presentation to them. The parent or guardian is to be given a copy of the IEP at no cost to them.

The IDEA also requires that the IEP be reviewed annually up until the child graduates from high school or reaches the age of 22 to ensure the child is meeting the specified benchmarks and goals. If adequate progress is not being made, the IEP must be revised. More frequent IEP meetings can be held if the school district or parent feels it necessary.

Often challenged and the subject of considerable litigation each year, the IEP remains at the heart of special education programs that ensure that every child with a disability has available to him or her a free and appropriate education and related services designed to meet that child's unique needs and provide the most educational benefit to the child.

After the implementation of EHA in 1978, the number of children in federally supported education programs increased every year until 2005 (see Table 8.4). The increase was due not only to the growth in the total student population but also to the growth in the number of students classified as having a specific learning disability (that is, having a disorder or delayed development in one or more of the processes of thinking, speaking, reading, writing, listening, or doing arithmetic operations), as well as the addition of autism and brain injury as categories of disability by the Individuals With Disabilities Act of 1990.