4
ESEA and the Big Bang of Federal Education Policy
For most of the nation’s history the federal government had little role in elementary
and secondary education and confined itself to supporting state efforts to create public schools
and to collecting statistical information about them. The policy regime2 in education during
the 18
th
and 19
th
centuries and the first half of the 20
th
was based on a view of public schools
as performing adequately and best controlled by state and local governments. The civil rights
movement and the war on poverty shattered this policy image during the 1960s. The
Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, though vigorously opposed in some
quarters, established the ideational, political, and programmatic foundation for a new policy
regime.
3
A crucial part of the Great Society, ESEA committed the national government to the
defense of civil rights and the promotion of equal opportunity. The policy image at the heart
of the ESEA regime continued to view public education as the appropriate domain of states
and localities and to accept that public schools, on the whole, were functioning well. But it
saw these lower levels of government as unable or unwilling to provide the equality of access
and resources essential to promoting success in education for disadvantaged students.
ESEA programs were thus framed as temporary measures designed to address an
extraordinary crisis for a specific group of disadvantaged students. Both the ends and means
of federal policy were clearly circumscribed; the national government would limit its efforts
to improving educational equity by providing small categorical programs and supplemental
funding for poor schools and children. Strong institutional and ideological obstacles to an
2 For more on the concept of “policy regimes” see Patrick McGuinn, “Path Dependency, Punctuated Equilibria,
and the Politics of Policy Change.” Presented at the September 2004 meeting of the American Political Science
Association, Chicago, IL, and Carter Wilson, “Policy Regimes and Policy Change” Journal of Public Policy
Vol.20, No.3, p.247-274.
3
For more on the passage, provisions, and implementation of ESEA see Patrick McGuinn and Frederick Hess.
“Freedom From Ignorance? The Great Society and the Evolution of the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act,” in Sidney Milkis and Jerome Mileur, ed. The Great Society and the Rights Revolution. Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming 2004.
Convention