ESEA at 50 

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act has had a good run, but it’s time to evaluate how well the 50-year-old law serves the needs of today’s America. 

 

People handle their 50th birthdays differently. Some do their best to ignore it. Some revel in it. But nearly everyone realizes that it is a landmark in their lives. 

The 50th anniversary this month of the signing of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) is such an occasion. As the main source of federal aid to states and local school districts for a half century, this ambitious and encyclopedic law has reshaped American schooling and influenced the schooling of millions of American children. While the federal government had been peripherally involved in public education before 1965, ESEA marked the beginning of broad federal involvement in the daily operation of schools. This change has had a big effect. 

Originally comprised of five major sections, ESEA has provided many billions of dollars over the last half century to improve American education. That law forcefully directed the attention of teachers and administrators toward better serving economically and educationally disadvantaged children. Nearly every public school and many private schools in the country received new books and audiovisual aids to improve library services. Innovative programs were funded in scores of school districts. Educational research was expanded. State governments were nudged to take a stronger role in improving their schools. Public school districts and private schools were induced to forge unprecedented new relationships to provide extra assistance for students from low-income families who attended private and religious schools. 

Nearly every public school and many private schools in the country received new books and audiovisual aids to improve library services.  

After its creation in 1965, ESEA soon settled into a schedule of reviews and renewals by Congress every four or five years.  ESEA thereby opened the door to educational interventions for all types of students. Children of migrant farm workers were educated while their parents worked in the fields. Students who were placed in facilities for neglected children received additional classes. Children who did not speak English learned the language. Gifted and talented children received special attention and assistance. 

ESEA was the exemplar for other federal laws benefitting children. Most notably, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) took children with mental and physical disabilities out of their homes or state institutions for “handicapped children” and placed them in regular classrooms at neighborhood schools. That law further revolutionized the treatment of children with disabilities by guaranteeing them the services they needed to be educated. 

During these regular reviews of ESEA, Congress also established education policies that went beyond specifying the characteristics of funded programs. For instance, intense debates occurred about the merits of busing school children as a means to integrate schools. As a consequence, laws were enacted over the years that progressively restricted that practice and in effect overturned a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Those busing battles also helped to refashion the Democratic and Republican parties into what they are today. 

Below are a few examples of the many concrete effects of policies that came about due to ESEA and other education laws that followed its example:  

• Most students are tested yearly in response to federal prescriptions enacted in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the 2001 reauthorization of ESEA. 
• Young children with disabilities are provided with preschool programs through funding from IDEA.
• Pupils who struggle to keep up academically receive extra instruction and other supports, which are paid for by federal funds under ESEA’s Title I (the main federal program). 
• Immigrant children are learning English in federally funded classes. 

Over the years, ESEA’s legislative prescriptions and the related funding assistance it provides for public education have helped millions of students learn better and ultimately lead more productive lives. These efforts have had their shortcomings, but most observers agree that overall the country is better off as a result.  

Even Chester E. Finn Jr., a former high-ranking official in the first President Bush’s administration and an often-cited skeptic of federal aid, after reviewing major developments in federal involvement in education, concluded: 

None of it worked quite as well as ardent advocates had hoped. All brought unintended consequences, pushback, and sizable financial burdens. But American education is a very different enterprise — and, for the most part, a better enterprise — as a result of these game-changing initiatives from Washington (2011, p. 228). 

Just as reaching age 50 encourages people to think back on their lives, this milestone anniversary of ESEA’s enactment also presents an opportunity for reflection. What accomplishments flowed from that event? What problems did the law create as it evolved? What have we learned from a half century’s experiences with federal intervention in education? How might these lessons refine our understanding of the federal role in education and point us toward ways to do things differently? 

Ideas born of experience 

My views on the federal role in education were heavily influenced by my two careers: as the principal education expert for 27 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, and as founder and CEO of the Center on Education Policy (CEP) for the next 17 years. 

In my first career in Congress, I got to know the original congressional authors of ESEA, including Reps.  Carl Perkins (D-Ky.), Edith Green (D-Ore.), John Brademas (D-Ind.), Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii), and Roman Pucinski (D-Ill.), and Senators Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.). Talking to them and listening to them gave me a good idea of how ESEA came about and the expectations at the time of its creation.  

Through my time working for Congress, I was the legal counsel and staff director responsible for ESEA, its subsequent amendments, and similar statutes. In that capacity, I dealt directly over the years with three different chairmen of the Committee on Education and Labor of the U.S. House of Representatives, set up hearings and chose witnesses to testify, drafted legislation to renew and revise programs, and helped the committee’s chairmen shepherd the legislation through the subcommittee, the committee, and the House. Once the Senate passed a companion bill, I was the chief negotiator for the House in staff meetings preceding Senate-House conference committees to agree on the terms of the final legislation. During the conference committees, I assisted the chairmen, and, once agreement was reached, I worked with them to obtain House approval of the legislation that would become the law. In all these activities, I was the chief representative of the House committee in working with the presidential administrations, dealing with lobbyists of the organizations representing all the groups affected, and explaining the details of the legislation to the news media. I was an “insider,” to use Washington, D.C., lingo. 

When I left Congress at the end of 1994, I set up the Center on Education Policy to provide independent, objective analysis of federal laws and policies, which I believed was sorely lacking amid a sea of reports and publications that used selected facts to justify established positions. CEP also analyzed key state-level policies, and produced publications on the conditions of American public education.  

We need a different federal role for the future. We’ve been too indirect in our approach, and now we need a more specific way to school improvement based on research. 

During my long involvement with the federal role in the schools, I saw the good that came from this assistance and direction, such as the inclusion of children with disabilities in regular classrooms and the provision of extra services to disadvantaged children who needed them to succeed. But I also saw the limitations of federal programs and some of the difficulties they created for educators and administrators, such as imposing too many regulations on administrators while providing too little federal funding to fulfill the promise of the federal laws.  

I’ve come to the conclusion that we need a different role for the future. We’ve been too indirect in our approach, and now we need a more specific way to school improvement based on research. 

The current aid programs and the mandates for extensive testing are rooted in the times in which they were created. They are premised on the belief that indirect educational assistance and external insistence on extensive testing are the primary ways by which the federal government should encourage local educators to improve the schools. Both approaches have brought about some good, such as making better use of student achievement data to identify and address gaps in learning. But providing a little extra help for disadvantaged students, while laudable, is not nearly enough in a school system that permits spending far more money on advantaged students than it does on those who are disadvantaged. That fatal flaw is combined with another — imposing extensive testing on resentful teachers. We must leave history behind us and find a more direct way to improve the quality of American education. This goal is urgent because the world is changing rapidly. 

Doing more for all 

The United States faces two large challenges in elementary and secondary education. All students need to learn more, and every student should receive the same high-quality education regardless of family income or property wealth of the school district.  

Contrary to common belief, U.S. students are not doing worse than they did in the past; rather, despite challenging demographic changes, students are holding their own in academic achievement or even doing better as measured by national test scores. Some other indicators also show progress: High school graduation is at a historic high, college-going rates have increased significantly since 1980, and the proportion of students ages 17-24 who are high school dropouts has fallen by more than half since 1970 (Child Trends, 2014).  

Granting these positive trends, what is different from the past and is pressing on the U.S. is that other countries’ students are taking education very seriously and are doing better than ours on several important measures of educational progress.  

From the 1940s through the 1990s, the U.S. led the world on many indicators of educational achievement, but that record has been eroding as the educational levels of other nations have risen. In 1995, the U.S. ranked second after New Zealand in higher education graduation rates among 19 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries with comparable data, but by 2010, it ranked 13th among 25 countries with comparable data. This relative decline in rankings occurred not because the U.S. was doing worse, but because other countries were doing better (OECD, 2012a). 

Another indicator of the relative performance of U.S. students comes from the international test called the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In results released in 2013, even our top high school students did not perform as well in mathematics as top students in many other economically advanced countries (OECD, 2012b). PISA mainly assesses students’ achievement in reading, mathematics, and science, and is designed to measure students’ ability to solve problems and apply their knowledge to real-life problems. 

In a meeting several years ago, President Obama asked the president of South Korea about his biggest challenge in education. President Lee answered that parents in South Korea were “too demanding.” Even the poorest parents insisted on a world-class education for their children, and his nation had to spend millions of dollars each year to teach English to students in 1st grade because parents won’t wait until 2nd grade (Duncan, 2014). 

A worldwide job market exists today in which U.S. students will have to compete for jobs with Korean students, among many others, once they leave school. We ignore at our peril the economic and technological changes that have led to higher educational demands. 

As Marshall S. Smith, a former professor and high-ranking official in the Carter and Clinton administrations, has noted: 

. . . the challenges of a global economy, a complex and changing international environment, and the technology and communication revolutions have dramatically increased our collective national need to ensure our future prosperity. As a nation, we are ever more dependent on the quality of our human capital to carry us into a productive and safe future. Our schools are better than many think, but we must ask them to change and become smarter (2011, p. 233). 

A final factor that should compel us to improve the schools is the extent of poverty in the U.S. and the implications that has for the life opportunities of children born into poverty. As the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission stated in its 2013 report, America does not compare favorably on this measure with other OECD nations: 

. . . Our poverty rate for school-age children — currently more than 22%  — is twice the OECD average and nearly four times that of leading countries such as Finland. We are also an outlier in how we concentrate those children, isolating them in certain schools — often resource-starved schools — which only magnifies poverty’s impact and makes high achievement that much harder (U.S. Department of Education 2013, p. 15). 

To solve those two big problems — broad improvement of the schools and a better education for disadvantaged students — the U.S. should follow through on its ideals and truly provide a good education for every student.  

A new direction 

To achieve this, I propose a new approach to federal education policy that expands and transforms the federal role. The congressional creators of federal aid in the 1960s believed the obstacle to better schooling was a lack of money: Once sufficient funding was provided to equalize expenditures among school districts, educators would know what to do to improve education. The architects of the standards/tests/accountability reforms of the 1990s and 2000s believed that student academic achievement could be improved by setting high academic standards, using tests to measure attainment of those standards, and holding teachers and schools accountable for poor results. Providing more money to assist with this job was not necessary in the minds of many proponents of this second reform. 

Neither of those two extremes proved to be correct in their assumptions. The past 50 years’ experiences have shown that education is too complex to have easy answers. The truth lies in taking the best from each reform movement. Thus, I propose a significant expansion of federal aid to schools that is not restricted to particular categories of students but that is contingent on states’ willingness to address the most fundamental issues that impede educational progress. This expanded general aid program could be called the United for Students Act (USA). 

The current policy of inserting a little extra help for students into an inequitable system of schooling has not brought about the quality of education we need. 

Under this new policy, the federal government, working with the states, would focus on improving classroom teaching and learning. The objectives of this new approach should be to improve students’ readiness for school, raise the quality of the teaching force, encourage mastery of more challenging curricula, and provide sufficient funding for schools to do the job. The current policy of inserting a little extra help for students into an inequitable system of schooling has not brought about the quality of education we need. The other current federal strategy — demanding extensive testing of students — has not resulted in a broad increase in student achievement. These reforms rooted in past times must be abandoned as ineffective. Instead we should adopt a more direct and equitable way to bring about real improvement.  

In addition, we must put in place legal and constitutional guarantees of students’ rights to a good education. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have called education the civil rights issue of our time. It is — but presidential rhetoric won’t win that battle. What is needed is a guarantee that is as strong as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which helped win the struggle for rights in the 1960s. If this is the civil rights issue of our time, then it deserves the full protection and sanction of constitutional law. 

My own views in this area have evolved. In the nearly three decades I worked for Congress, I helped  create the targeted funding programs and also the standards/testing/accountability framework. In various public forums, I argued for these approaches and defended them against criticism. But my views are different now because progress has not been sufficient and because the world is changing at such a fast pace that I feel we cannot procrastinate. If we want improvement, we must let go of resistance to change and sweep aside old excuses to adopting new and better ways. 

This reorientation of national efforts to improve the public schools will make America a world leader again in the area of education. But I also recognize that others may have different ideas. My hope is that in joining this debate we take the time to consider our past experiences with federal aid and also what research shows us about the impact of federal intervention.  

Having knowledge without taking action is not good enough. American schools can be the best in the world, and American students can be both knowledgeable and creative. But, we must get moving — and right now! 

After all, people celebrating their 50th birthdays either decide to keep going or move their lives in a new direction. Federal policy can’t keep doing what it has been doing. It is time to look to a new future and follow a new path.  

References 

Child Trends. (2014). Appendix 1: Dropout rates of 16- to 24-year-olds, by gender and race/Hispanic origin: Selected years, 1970-2013. Child Trends Data Bank. Bethesda, MD: Author. www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/01_appendix1.pdf 

Duncan, A. (2014, January 13). Speech to the National Assessment Governing Board. www.ed.gov/news/speeches/remarks-us-secretary-education-arne-duncan-national-assessment-governing-board-education 

Finn, C.E. (2011). Agenda-setters and duds: A bully pulpit indeed. In F.M. Hess & A.P. Kelly (Eds.), Carrots, sticks, and the bully pulpit: Lessons from a half-century of federal efforts to improve America’s schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. 

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (2012a). Education at a glance 2012: OECD indicators. Paris, France: Author. www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2012_eag-2012-en 

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (2012b). PISA 2012 results in focus: What 15-year-olds know and what they can do with what they know. Paris, France: Author. www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overview.pdf 

Smith, M.S. (2011). Rethinking ESEA. In F.M. Hess & A.P. Kelly (Eds.), Carrots, sticks, and the bully pulpit: Lessons from a half-century of federal efforts to improve America’s schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. 

U.S. Department of Education. (2013). For each and every child — A strategy for education equity and excellence. Washington, DC: Author. www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/eec/equity-excellence-commission-report.pdf 

 

Citation: Jennings, J. (2015). ESEA at 50. Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (7), 41-46. 

This article is adapted with permission from Presidents, Congress, and the Public Schools: The Politics of Education Reform (Harvard Education Press, 2015). http://hepg.org/hep-home/books/presidents,-congress,-and-the-public-schools. Copyright 2015, President and Fellows of Harvard College.