When Congress endorsed substantial aid to schools in 1965, the idea
that the federal government had any responsibility for public
education was controversial. Twenty years later, not only had that
controversy dissipated, Washington's role in education had
dramatically expanded. Gareth Davies explores how both
conservatives and liberals came to embrace the once daring idea of
an active federal role in elementary and secondary education and
uses that case to probe the persistence-and growth-of big
government during a supposedly antigovernment era.
By focusing on institutional changes in government that
accompanied the civil rights revolution, Davies shows how initially
fragile programs put down roots, built a constituency, and became
entrenched. He explains why the federal role in schools continued
to expand in the post-LBJ years as the reform impulse became
increasingly detached from electoral politics, centering instead on
the courts and the federal bureaucracy. Meanwhile, southern
resistance to school desegregation had discredited the "states
rights" argument, making it easier for conservatives as well as
liberals to seek federal solutions to social problems.
Although LBJ's landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act
deferred to local control, the legislation of the Nixon-Ford years
issued directives that posed greater challenges to traditional
federalism than Johnson's grand ideals. As Davies shows, the new
political climate saw the achievement of such breakthroughs as
mandated bilingual education, school finance reform, and the
Education for All Handicapped Children Act--measures that, before
the seventies, would have been considered unthinkably intrusive by
liberals as well as conservatives. And when Ronald Reagan promised
to abolish the Department of Education, conservatives worked with
liberals to derail his agenda.
Davies' surprising study shows that the distancing of American
conservatism from its anti-statist traditions helped pave the way
for today's "big government conservatism," which enabled a
Republican-dominated Congress to pass No Child Left Behind. By
revealing the endurance of Great Society values during a period of
Republican ascendance, his book opens a window on our political
process and offers new insight into what really makes government
grow.
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