Ronald Reagan an Education President? Yes, says Mr. Kaplan — but for an interesting set of reasons. The author examines Presidential attitudes toward education and speculates on the effects on education of a second Reagan term or of a Mondale Presidency.
It was a matchless spring morning in Washington, D.C., nearly midway through Ronald Reagan’s fourth year as President. Grinning and waving confidently, the energetic 73- year-old chief executive stepped to the microphone last May 11 to tell an audience of educators and students assembled on the sun-drenched South Lawn of the White House that this appearance before them was “the 43rd time that I have spoken on education in the past 3 1/2 years. And that doesn’t include such things as White House meetings on education and talks with reporters.”
The twin occasions for this gathering were the first anniversary of the publication of A Nation at Risk , the controversial report of the President’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, whose blue-chip members were on hand, and the announcement that 220,000 high-achieving high school seniors (of whom 60 well-scrubbed representatives were in attendance) had been named winners of the five-month-old President’s Academic Fitness Award. Mr. Reagan reminded his listeners that Lyndon Johnson had created the President’s Physical Fitness Award. It had fallen to Ronald Reagan to go the first modern “Education President” one better by stressing mind over matter.
The happy combination of the themes, the weather, and the site provided an idyllic backdrop for the President’s explanation of his interest in education: “I’ve given education so much time and used e. . . what Teddy Roosevelt said was the ‘bully pulpit’ of this office for a very clear and simple reason. It’s because we in this Administration view education as central to American life.” Later, he cited a “huge and growing public mandate for change” in which “the federal government is doing its part.”
Does this status report qualify our 40th President for the rarely bestowed mantle of Education President? In a word, Yes. A close look at the educational resumes of nearly all of his predecessors would surely place President Reagan at or near the top of the short list of Education Presidents. Only Lyndon Johnson, who invented the term and applied it to himself, and Thomas Jefferson, to whom we must automatically award the title of Education President, also deserve membership in this elite society. Although others have flirted with education, only Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter warrant serious mention. This is curious company for an arch-conservative whose public stands on the federal role in education have often been openly hostile. But Ronald Reagan belongs right up there with the titans — for reasons that defy the criteria by which schoolpeople customarily distinguish friend from foe.
With rare exceptions, the range and intensity of Presidential involvement in education have been so negligible as to render comparison among Presidents futile. The bully pulpit has seen almost no sustained service in the interests of education, whether connected to federal responsibilities or not. Only a small percentage of our chief executives have backed their rhetoric with hard cash. The idea that the U.S. could ever have an Education President —let alone two within a generation — would have drawn catcalls throughout much of our history.
For more than a century and a half, the Founding Fathers’ abhorrence of strong central government produced one of its most powerful echoes in education, which was considered all but off limits to Presidential prospecting. Only in truly special circumstances did education ever attract notice anywhere in official Washington.1 When an educational issue extended beyond the borders of the individual states, the occasion normally was the signing and enactment of some weighty document such as the Morrill Act of 1862, the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, or the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (“G.I. Bill of Rights”). Moreover, none of these landmark pieces of legislation caused the Presidents who signed them — Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt — to toss in their sleep. All had committed their main energies to wars that were raging, and the attraction of education was even weaker than usual. There was no perceived need for Presidential leadership.
Nor, except for the remarkable Jefferson, did most of the Presidents before the KennedyIJohnson era accord the schools more than a passing nod. A federal Department of Education appeared in 1867, but it was quickly forgotten, the victim of a profound lack of interest; and its tiny, downgraded successors became backwater agencies responsible for collecting statistics and generating credible, but largely ignored, reports on the condition of education. The frenetic activity of the resuscitated U.S. Office of Education during the 1960s and 1970s would have been unimaginable to almost every President through Eisenhower — who left office less than 24 years ago.
Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the lofty estate of Education President has not been easy, and he could still slip. When he came to Washington stridently opposed to wasting federal dollars on book-learning, no one would have thought that he would ever be considered an Education President. He was determined to eliminate the federal Department of Education and bent on gaining national acceptance for an educational wish list that bore the imprint of the hard political Right. Among other items, that list included prayer in the schools, education vouchers, tuition tax credits, an easing of the pace of desegregation, stricter discipline in the schools, a deemphasis on the 30-year quest for equity in education, and a vague commitment to excellence. None of these issues won the new President many friends in educational circles; indeed, his motives and his knowledge of the issues remain in question. But the items on the President’s list have been bathed in the glow of the most expertly spotlighted bully pulpit in Presidential history, and no amount of hand-wringing by educators can wish them away. Educators carp that this President — supreme master of the electronic media and a world-class pitchman to boot — could confer respectability on mandatory military training for 5-year-olds.
Such criticism is sour grapes, all of it. The issues do not make an Education President, and Ronald Reagan demonstrates that daily. On the contrary, it is child’s play for an alert President to manufacture, shape, and manipulate issues — even those that educators as a group abhor. Nor is an Education President judged by the amounts and destinations of federal dollars appropriated for education. To be an Education President of the first rank, a President must simply be prepared to use the strength and aura of the Presidency to influence the movement and content of education in the nation. He must create the impression, if not the reality, that the federal government is involved in the educational issues of the day. The chief executive’s ability to select and define issues confers on him an extraordinary power to persuade. Only Johnson and Reagan have used it successfully in education.
In 1908 Woodrow Wilson wrote of the President: “His is the only national voice in affairs. Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him. His position takes the admiration of the country. He is the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people.”2 It is easy to exaggerate the ability to shape this awesome power. But the potential influence of the skilled Presidential practitioner — and we surely have one in office now — is almost limitless. Were he alive to observe it in action, Wilson would certainly envy Reagan’s virtuosity. In the once nearly untouchable area of education, President Reagan’s bully pulpit has become a vehicle for moral suasion and the propagation of a new, or at least radically altered, educational faith. Even though his muscular, uncomplicated presentation invites us to overlook his use of data in a way that causes informed educators to shudder, it has proved effective. Just as some Presidents occasionally go over the heads of Congress directly to the people, Ronald Reagan leapfrogs the education profession with a message that many Americans have welcomed and most educators have despised.
Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the lofty estate of Education President has not been easy, and he could still slip.
Spotlighting the giants can diminish the mortals — a notably misleading process when the latter bear such names as Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman. How can we explain their passivity with regard to education, an issue that Jefferson viewed as “a means to solving problems, a handmaiden to constructive citizenship, an end in itself, and an objective worthy of public support for all of these reasons . . .”?3 Jefferson’s preeminence among Presidents and his niche in American intellectual life were perhaps best described by President Kennedy when he called a group of visiting Nobel laureates “the most extraordinary collection of talents . . . that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Although Jefferson’s notions regarding the federal role in education — rewriting the 10th Amendment, targeting Treasury surpluses for education, establishing a national university — may have come two centuries too early, his unquestioning faith in education and his readiness to involve the national government in it have yet to be equaled by any of his successors. Only Lyndon Johnson came close.
Most Presidents shun the swamps and thickets of education for a variety of reasons. First, there is the ever-present press of more critical demands, especially those that concern national security. In our time, the life-and-death issues of foreign policy and national defense have exerted a strong pull on chief executives, who often take office innocent of experience beyond our national borders but hopelessly intent on making an early and lasting mark. Statesmanship is infinitely more rewarding and newsworthy than the glamorless trench warfare of domestic policies and programs — especially “soft” ones, such as education, in which the role of the President has never been clear.
Second, and only slightly less demanding of the President’s time, have been the imperatives for creating economic stability, exercising political power, and confronting national crises that demand Presidential attention. The crises of education are seen, lamentably, as chronic and manifestly unexciting. Despite the bursts of political, editorial, and professional drum-beating occasioned by A Nation at Risk , the extent to which it has stirred the nation to action is at best difficult to assess.
With the signal exception of Lyndon Johnson, who called education “the first work of our times” and made an intensely personal commitment to it, Presidents have been reluctant to immerse themselves in matters for which constitutional interpretation and time-honored practice have assigned the responsibility to others. Only President Reagan has felt compelled to express himself on issues affecting education, and during the second half of his term he has done so frequently and vigorously, even addressing those issues that the usually intrusive Johnson sidestepped. Johnson’s specialty was action, not rhetoric, although his countless speeches and conversations on education displayed an assurance that was seldom evident in his stiff and self-conscious pronouncements on foreign policy.
For President Kennedy, who was strongly motivated to expand the scope and character of federal intervention, there was simply too much barbed wire to traverse. The young Catholic President, a politician to the bone, knew better than to risk the already shaky prospects of items much higher on his legislative agenda than aid to education. The combination of precedent and legislative reality became all but insuperable to the ambitious but fundamentally cautious Kennedy. Moreover, the position of Adam Clayton Powell, the dynamic black leader and clergyman, as chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee in the early 1960s did not prove helpful. Powell was hardly a favorite of the still-powerful Congressional “old boys club,” made up of latter-day Dixiecrats and conservative Republicans, that had steadily obstructed progressive social legislation. Thus Kennedy’s 24-point program for aid to education gained little support in the House, although nearly everything in it became law under the Johnson Administration. Such reluctance on the part of Congress to go along with the chief executive is not unusual. Fifteen years earlier, Harry Truman had flailed the “Do Nothing” 80th Congress for stopping a bipartisan bill for general aid to education after the Senate, led by the conservative Robert A. Taft, had passed it by a vote of 58-22.
Presidents have shied away from education for causes less obvious than those that bedeviled Kennedy. Sometimes t heir advisors have viewed education not as a source of votes but as a profitless digression from attention-grabbing issues — counsel that Reagan may be standing on its head. Republican candidates have traditionally campaigned against the government they aspire to run, and their version of strict constructionism places education out of the reach of federal intervention. Then too, some Presidents have not always been comfortable around educators and intellectuals. The White House intellectuals in most recent Administrations, including such academics as McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walter Rostow, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Arthur Burns, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, were university-based scholars, not public school educators. All were obsessed with demonstrating that they were men of action; with the exception of Moynihan, they have not been education’s Trojan Horses within the President’s courtyard. Indeed, most would have shot a wimpy educator on sight.
The character and characteristics of recent Presidents may explain further t heir ambivalence toward education. Neither of the two Education Presidents of modern times — Johnson and Reagan — attended “name” colleges. Although t heir formative years and subsequent careers left them with widely different attitudes, bot h prided themselves on their simple, small-town origins and acknowledged the debts they owed to teachers. The Presidents between and just before them, on the other hand, matured at such prestigious campuses as the U.S. Military Academy, Harvard University, Duke University Law School, the University of Michigan, Yale University, and the U.S. Naval Academy, before embarking on their careers. Moreover, most Presidents have been financially independent and professedly anti-bureaucratic – traits that do not customarily lead to uncritical support for education, which is perpetually broke and quintessentially bureaucratic.
Comparing the records of Johnson and Reagan defies ingenuity. Does Navratilova play tennis better than Pavarotti sings? Which has had the more substantial influence on his or her field? Are t here any plausible standards for comparison? All we can say with assurance is that both Navratilova and Pavarotti are inordinately talented in their work. So was Johnson; so is Reagan.
The Johnson regime represented education’s high-water mark as an important federal concern. Capitalizing on the slain Kennedy’s efforts to involve the federal government in education, Johnson pulled out all the stops. Education became Presidential business of the first order, a commerce in which the currency was U .S. dollars. Johnson’s opening demands on the Congress exceeded even the pie-in-the-sky financial bargaining positions of the vigorously pro-federal-aid National Education Association. Equity, access, and meeting special needs were hallmarks of Johnson’s record on education. Spurred on by tough legislation and billions of dollars, the federal role in U.S. schools exploded beyond all rational expectations during the years from 1965 to 1969. Under the consecutive direction of two strong U.S. commissioners of education — Francis Keppel and Harold Howe II — and with the executive branch cooperating effectively with a newly pliant Congress, the central government became a new, if somewhat junior, partner of education.
The character and characteristics of recent Presidents may explain further their ambivalence toward education.
By 1968 the obsession with Vietnam and Johnson’s diminished credibility displaced education from its favored position. But the federal commitment, as Johnson had created it, remained substantially intact until 1981. Even a steady run of vetoes of spending bills by Republican Presidents in the 1970s had little practical impact; Congress overrode all but one of those vetoes. And no serious debate on the legitimacy of the federal presence in education took place during t hose years. Of course, there was some discussion of the size and character of the federal role, but such is the stuff of political compromise.
Johnson’s stewardship was unique in another way. While Jefferson might have wished to pursue the value of education as an end in itself, Johnson often used education policy as a step toward achieving other goals. For both Kennedy and Johnson, federal assistance to education was a moral obligation, notably to support national pledges – some of t hem embodied in federal court decisions on civil rights and economic justice – that the states had proved unwilling or unable to redeem. The principal legislative vehicles for this federal action were the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which was sprinkled with provisions related to education, including the original sponsorship of Head Start; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, even in its currently altered state the centerpiece of federal involvement in education; and the Higher Education Act of 1965. The notion that these laws were a brazen attempt to guarantee a dominant place for the federal government in education is a woeful misreading of history.
Education is almost invisible in the Presidential memoirs of Nixon and Carter. But, in t heir separate ways, both linked t he federal presence in education to the national obligation to speed the pace at which America’s dispossessed, deprived, and disadvantaged could improve their lives. Although neither Nixon nor Gerald Ford (who failed even to mention education in his memoirs) enjoyed the backing of most education groups, both recognized that acceptance of a federal role had constructive consequences beyond education. After all, their Republican predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had signed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) into law in 1958. And it was hardly a secret t hat the purpose of t he NDEA was not to shore up American education through an infusion of federal funds, but rather to improve the position of the U.S. relative to the Soviet Union in the race for space.
In most Administrations, entree to the President is virtually denied to the representatives of educational interests.
It would be unjust to dismiss the Presidents between Johnson and Reagan as bit players who rarely occupied center stage in the theater of education. Both Nixon and Carter had their starring roles, though neither appreciably affected the larger course set by Johnson and a cooperative Congress (later altered by Reagan and an even more tractable Congress). Even though a well-informed White House staffer from the Nixon years estimates that the President gave but six hours to substantive educational ‘ issues between 1969 and 1970,4 the Emergency School Aid Act can justly be called Nixon’s creation. The Nixon Administration deserves much of the credit, too, for establishing both the National Institute of Education and the admirable Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. If Nixon’s brand of “new federalism” never got off the ground, it assuredly was neither the first nor the last time that devolution and decentralization would fall short.
Paradoxically for an Administration that never saw itself rocking education’s boat, the Nixon era proved to be a time of great support for educational innovation. Federal funding of efforts to pump life into the preparation of teachers reached their highest levels during t he Nixon years. The Teacher Corps, founded by Johnson but financially strapped, came into its own under Nixon, as did such smaller programs as Trainers of Teacher Trainers.5 A self-described “nut on education,”6 Nixon sponsored the ambitious but ill-fated Experimental Schools Program, which he described as “a bridge between research and actual practice.” To the surprise of many, Nixon’s Office for Civil Rights frequently bared the fangs of strict enforcement, and affirmative action in education became standard practice. But in Nixon’s private view, the role that Washington should play in education remained an essentially limited and negative one, and his relationship with a progressive and generous Congress that overrode his vetoes and uncorked a Niagara of legislation authorizing educational programs was fractious at best.
Of Gerald Ford’s “leadership” in education little deserves to be said. He did almost nothing to help education while he was a member of the House of Representatives, where he tried to thwart t he large nonpartisan consensus that had been developing since the Johnson years. In fairness to Ford, he was forced to attend to the more urgent business of restoring t he shattered faith of a nation, which his brief Presidency accomplished. But little was accomplished in education during his Presidency. Historians will record his signing of P.L. 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, even though his well-known preference was to veto it. Together, the Republican Presidents of the I 970s also spurred the career of one of t heir party’s most dependable educational administrators, Terrel Bell, who occupied senior posts under Nixon and was Ford’s commissioner of education.
Five years after Nixon’s emotional farewell to Washington, Jimmy Carter redeemed his pledge to create a Department of Education, a move widely questioned at the time. Despite the unrelievedly dismal performance of that agency since 1980, it became a useful symbol of education’s fight for survival as a federal priority in the years to follow. Given time and half a chance, Carter’s gifted young brain trust in education (whose members would presumably reappear in a Mondale Administration) might have rendered impressive service. But it was not to be. Over:i.11, however, the Carter record showed a doubling of federal expenditures for education and a markedly tougher stance on equity than the Ford Administration.
The Carter Administration may one day receive delayed recognition for its strong overall performance in education. Unfortunately, the struggle to establish a new Department of Education was protracted, bloody, and confusing. Congressional colleagues noted for their willingness to set aside partisan differences where education was concerned suddenly were at each other’s throats, as the Administration stood helplessly by — unable to rally solid support. Usually friendly education associations either remained uncommitted or opposed the Administration’s efforts. The media split badly on the issue. When the new agency finally opened for business, it had only six months to show results before the I 980 election. It was a classic bind.
Had Carter handled the creation of the Department with assurance and finesse, he might well have become Lyndon Johnson’s educational heir. But he looked awful on this particular education issue and remained silent most of the time on others. Like other shortcomings in a Presidency that bears the stamp of indecisiveness, Carter’s handling of the formation of the Department of Education complicates the task of isolating the considerable achievements of his Administration in education.
The dowser seeking the wellspring of Presidential inspiration on educational issues faces a nearly hopeless task. Policy making at the top is usually haphazard and poorly informed. But that doesn’t trouble very many people. A veteran Congressional staffer said of legislative policy making — and the remark is applicable to the executive branch as well — that the operative instruction seems to be, “Don’t bother me with the facts.”7 Presidential ideas and information on education, as distinct from federal policy toward it, have equally varied, often improbable, origins. Lest we forget, Eisenhower had been president of one of our great universities, although the effect of this experience was scarcely visible to the naked eye. Johnson was at one time a schoolteacher. Carter identified himself as a nuclear engineer. Reagan displays pride in his Andy Hardy childhood. But we may never k now the part that any of these actual or fancied roles play in Presidential policies and pronouncements.
Education’s pipeline to the Oval Office has always been cracked and leaky. A strong in-house education aide, such as Douglass Cater in the Johnson White House, can make a sham of such formal processes as Cabinet meetings; a weak or overburdened aide, on the other hand, may lean gratefully on the questionable services of the Department of Education. In most Administrations, entree to the President is virtually denied to the representatives of educational interests, whose only presence, actual or symbolic, may be as witnesses to the 10-minute ritual of bill-signing. In several Administrations, practical command of key aspects of federal education programs rested in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). By most accounts, the number-crunchers in the OMB of the Reagan Administration, and not the specialists in the Department of Education, have a tight grip on all programs.
A wide gap often separates a President’s nominal chain-of-command counselors (including Cabinet members) from those whose influence really counts — members of White House inner circles, the so-called “Kitchen Cabinet,” personal friends, and family members. President Reagan’s initial· tolerance of educational institutions that discriminate on racial grounds could not have come from Terrel Bell, and Reagan’s pledge to dismantle the Department of Education and virtually eliminate the federal role in education ran counter to everything that Bell had said and done since the 1960s. Yet Washington insiders credit Bell with persuading the President at about midway through his term that education merited his public concern.
The current case is certainly not an isolated example of a President’s erratic behavior where education is concerned. Lyndon Johnson, the premier Education President, was far out in front of the Congress and the bureaucracy for much of his term of office. Scholars of the Johnson era have discovered long handwritten notes that display his impressive mastery of minute details of federal education policies. Like other Presidents, LBJ was not always inclined to await the labored analyses of the civil service.
Despite the putative wisdom of the “Posture and Policy Principle,” which holds that where you stand depends on where you sit, proximity to the President does not always yield real influence. The roster of those without official governmental portfolios in education who have played pivotal roles t hat have largely escaped public notice includes Milton Eisenhower, whose advice was often crucial to his brother; Jerome Weisner, Kennedy’.s science advisor and later president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Joseph Califano, Jr., a jack of all trades in the Johnson White House, especially when the going got rough; Edward Morgan, a key White House aide under Nixon; and Admiral Hyman Rickover, whose counsel was often decisively important to Jimmy Carter.
Every recent President but one has been a college graduate, and the exception, Harry Truman, may have been the best educated of all. It seems reasonable that all that experience of schooling would have created some Presidential respect for educators. Yet only Kennedy and Johnson paid much more than ceremonial attention to the educators in their Administrations. Rarely have Presidents brought their senior education appointees into the inner circles where domestic policy is made. Nor, with the possible exception of President Reagan, have they solicited ideas or information from them. Within a few months of taking office as commissioner of education in the Carter Administration, Ernest Boyer was negotiating for private employment that, among other things, would provide the forum and authority that his role as the President’s top-ranking education official had actually denied him. When the Department of Education finally materialized in May 1980, Carter appointed a federal judge as secretary and a state-welfare-official-turned-foundation-executive as her deputy. Competent and caring though they were, these two appointees did not possess a wealth of wisdom and experience in education.
The Reagan record of dependence on a bureaucracy he professes to loathe probably differs little, on balance, from that of his predecessors. It may count for less, though, because his notions and initiatives require little staff support or budgetary commitment. With a few notable exceptions, including Secretary Bell himself, Gary Jones (Bell’s deputy), Madeleine Will (special education and rehabilitation), and Edward Elmendorf (higher education), Reagan’s Department of Education has become a dumping ground for technicians and political hacks who are poised to torch it on command. The transformation of a chief executive into an Education President does not require a bustling, hopeful, or even especially competent federal organization.
A Democratic President’s dilemma regarding education in 1985 would be profound. The simple logic of platforms and campaign pledges to the contrary, a Mondale Presidency would be hard put to stamp its brand on education. Unlike that of President Reagan, Mondale’s campaign baggage already includes proposals for a dramatic increase in spending. Its contents will doubtless include reforms of existing programs and processes, blueprints for new ones, and attractive dividends for organized education, as well. A proven friend to all strata of the education community, Mondale nonetheless could prove unable to satisfy more than a small fraction of that community in the mid-1980s. Only a few throwbacks to the 1960s have demanded t hat Reagan back up his well-received rhetoric about discipline and excellence with federal cash; for 20 years he has conditioned his audience not to expect too much. A President Mondale, sharing his deeply felt hopes for schools and schooling from the bully pulpit of the Presidency, could send educators and parents into a tizzy of anticipation of a new torrent of federal dollars.
The Mondale equerries doubtless understand that the game and the rules have changed. In what could be one of the more quixotic reversals of the 1980s, a Mondale Presidency might prove to be a non-education Presidency. Reassuring though many educators would find Mondale’s residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (education, after all, courses through the Mondale family’s veins), their access and influence could prove meaningless.· Access to and influence on what? And to what ends? These were the questions that Ernest Boyer was publicly asking as Jimmy Carter’s top education official, but the answers have assumed a decidedly conservative cast in the years since 1980.
Like it or not, the education community may have to learn to live with changing national attitudes that do not always run parallel to the philosophies of the historically pro-education Democratic party. When Ronald Reagan rediscovered the discipline problem in the schools and used outdated and tangential data to transform it into a pandemic of crime and violence, he was belatedly airing an oft-identified national concern that no Democratic President had thought important enough to voice. Moreover, no President of either party could have expressed that concern as convincingly as the Presidential wizard of the electronic media. On this and other items that combine high visibility, low cost, limited risk, and only rhetorical federal involvement, Reagan may be striking pay dirt. If not, he isn’t losing much in the effort.
The Mondale issues, on the other hand, are chronic and therefore dull. Nothing in Walter Mondale’s record or personality demonstrates the capacity to galvanize the nation to embrace these issues, even though their urgency has scarcely dwindled. However persistent the need, the drama has long ago been squeezed out of aid to poor and disabled children. The travails of higher education no longer seriously trouble federal policy makers. Helping to solve the educational problems of new Americans barely activates the applause meter and garners few votes. Well-intended efforts to rethink the federal role or to tinker with the existing system have little appeal.
Valid though it may still be, the traditional education agenda of the Democrats badly needs a new coat of paint — perhaps two. It could also do with some emergency .surgery from the legatees of Marshall McLuhan. A Mondale Presidency would surely be bedeviled by the perception that the issues that catalyzed the nonpartisan consensus of the mid-1960s through most of the 1970s have eroded. Worse still would be the popular belief that the Reagan Administration had brought them under control. And the logical next step for a Mondale Administration – moving from meeting needs to assuring quality — has been preempted by the Reagan Administration.
On one front, at least, a Democratic Administration could score a point or two for organized education. No U.S. commissioner or secretary of education since Francis Keppel in the mid-1960s has been a genuine counselor and confidant of the President on educational matters. Although Terrel Bell has clearly had some influence on Mr. Reagan, most experts view him as a moderately conservative schoolperson with personal doubts about the wisdom of many of Reagan’s stands. A Mondale Administration would presumably attract a strong secretary of education, include a credible White House education aide (to this day, well-placed officials in the Department of Education cannot identify a current senior or middle-level staffer in the Reagan White House who follows education), and attempt to rebuild shattered federal education mechanisms. It must be said in fairness that some of the destruction occurred during the Carter Administration, which rapidly politicized the new Department while burdening it with ponderous and meaningless organizational chores.
The larger policy choices open to a second Reagan Administration are a· politician’s cornucopia. It requires something less than 20/20 vision to see several attractive options for a super-conservative Administration newly buoyed by an electoral mandate. The most obvious is to let the other shoe drop and finish the job begun in the first term — quickly and decisively. This activist approach, which requires a compliant Congress, could embrace slashing the budget, pressing for block grants and vocational education and education for children with handicaps, launching a death struggle to eliminate the hated Department of Education, and vigorously revitalizing tuition tax credits, school prayer, education vouchers, and the rest of the conservative agenda.
At first blush this direction appears to be the most plausible, but it contains politically exploitable weaknesses. With a second four-year term in the offing, a sounder Presidential strategy might be to keep Mr. Reagan at the microphone and in front of the camera, educating and informing those who have yet to see the light, while creating a climate of popular acceptance for the less digestible changes still to come.
A less likely strategy than either of these is that President Reagan would simply declare victory early in his second term, forget about education (which belongs to the states anyway), and let natural forces take over. Gamblers itching to bet the grocery money on this tactic should think twice. But it does have the touch of statesmanship and magnanimity that would appeal to a President who daily breaks new ground in image-building. The problem with this strategy is that it could imperil Mr. Reagan’s querulous but dependable support from the New Right, which an be so useful in so many other places.
Some combination of the three strategies would probably be inevitable. Encouraged by the “huge and growing mandate for change,” the reelected President could hammer away at his favorite educational subjects and hoist a few new, low-cost flags — the content of textbooks, an expansion of voluntary military training in the schools, a new look at achievement testing. In the more practical world of Congressional politics, however, an anti-Administration legislature could choose to lock horns over such issues as spending levels, aid to college students, or even vocational education. Should such a Congress be strongly pro-federal aid, the nation could witness a series of Presidential vetoes, the subsequent drama of sustaining or overturning them, and innovative approaches to skirting the law — the 1980s incarnations of impoundment, deferment, and rescission. This is not a reassuring prospect for those who are concerned about a responsible federal role in education, but a determinedly ideological President with no election to face might see no reason to compromise. And, lest ideologues of the other side forget, the fourth Reagan budget for education came to a Carter-era total of $15 billion. Talk about being co-opted.
But tactics and strategy form only a rough outline of a second Reagan Administration’s designs for education. When fleshed out with the assumptions, relations, and priorities that go into policy making, the final version may not gladden the hearts of American educators.
The continuing “recovery” of education, the product of a generation of dedication by schools, parents, teachers, researchers, and, yes, even politicians and bureaucrats, will be portrayed as the direct result of the Reagan Administration’s exertions. Signs of this trend appeared in May 1984 when the presumptuously titled The Nation Responds implicitly claimed credit for the Administration (but not for the government) for generating most of the good things that had happened in education in the 13 months since the publication of A Nation at Risk. Between· them, these· two documents may symbolize the beginning of a revision of recent educational history that subsumes the timeworn but demanding issues of equity and access into an emerging catechism, in which star billing will go to a magpie’s nest of such issues as excellence, discipline, good teaching, morality, restoration of parental authority, prayer in the schools, a return to the basics, and stringent measures to combat drug and alcohol abuse. The problem in ·analyzing this agenda lies in determining what it means to whom. Is it a call to federally backed action, or is it a series of inoffensive but captivating catchwords? Or, as many devoted supporters of education suspect, are these strongly voiced Presidential concerns of 1984 little more than euphemisms whose ultimate purpose is to turn the clock back 30 years? It may be within the power of the President who will be inaugurated in January 1985 to decide.
References
- Rufus Miles, Jr., A Cabinet Department of Education: Analysis and Proposal (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1976), p. 21.
- Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia, 1908), 67-73.
- Stephen Bailey, “Thomas Jefferson and the Purpose of Education,” in Edith K. Mosher and Jennings L. Wagoner, Jr., eds., The Changing Politics of Education: Prospects for the 1980s (Berkeley, Calif.: Mccutchan, 1978), pp. 12-13.
- Remarks of Chester Finn, Jr., quoted in Joseph N. Crowley, Report of the Washington Policy Seminar, 25-27 May 1977 (Las Vegas: Institute for Educational Leadership and Teacher Corps, 1977), p. 11.
- Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 ( New York: Basic Books, 1983), 257.
- Chester Finn, Jr., Education and the Presidency(Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1977), p. 13.
- Thomas Wolanin, “Congress, Information, and Policymaking for Postsecondary Education,” in Samuel Halperin and George Kaplan, eds., Federalism at the Crossroads (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Educational Leadership, 1976), p. 81.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George R. Kaplan
GEORGE R. KAPLAN is a Washington-based writer.
