Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (84 page)

A
MONG THE MANY LIBERAL ACTS
of the 1965 Congress were some that in other less active sessions would have attracted considerable attention. These included a host of measures signifying the onset of a burgeoning environmental movement: clean air legislation, establishment of parks and national wilderness areas, a law to control the spread of billboard advertising on interstate highways.
²³
Congress also approved a Higher Education Act featuring guaranteed government loans for students, and it substantially expanded existing work-study programs. These widened opportunities for students, especially those from low-income families.
²⁴
Liberals created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, thereby substantially engaging the federal government in the promotion of cultural life for the first time since the New Deal. Congress considered laws to improve mine safety and consumer protection. It further increased funding for the war on poverty, although at the modest level of approximately $1.5 billion for the coming fiscal year.
²⁵

These and other measures, however, seemed relatively inconsequential in 1965 compared to a Big Four that passed by the end of the session: federal aid to elementary and secondary education, Medicare and Medicaid, immigration reform, and a civil rights act to guaranteee voting rights. These four laws, important by any standard of twentieth-century reform legislation, had long been on the agendas of liberal groups. They amply displayed the strengths and weaknesses of the Great Society, of Lyndon Johnson as political leader, and of modern American liberalism.

Improving elementary and secondary education ranked high among the goals of liberals in the postwar era. Some of these advocates focused on the need for higher teachers' salaries. Others, especially once the baby boomers reached school age, demanded more resources for school materials and construction. These goals had dominated debate from the 1940s, when conservatives had ignored Truman's proposals, through 1961, when conservatives and Catholics had defeated Kennedy's. Before 1965, a complicated mix of special interests—religious, racial, regional—had joined conservatives to stymie all major efforts for federal aid.

Three changes in this mix facilitated passage of aid in 1965. One involved race. Urban liberals in the past, led by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of Harlem, had opposed federal aid bills that would have assisted segregated schools. But the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which called for the denial of federal assistance to such schools, settled that controversy. Liberals, no longer worrying that aid would abet segregation, were more eager than ever to support general school assistance. The second involved the question of aid to parochial schools. Johnson, a Protestant, was not nearly so politically vulnerable among Protestants as Kennedy had been on this issue, and he resolved to satisfy both the National Education Association, representing public schools, and the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the most active lobby for parochial schools. He did so by devising a bill that would provide federally assisted educational programs directly to parochial schoolchildren rather than to parochial schools. Public schools would be expected to make these programs available to such students by way of expedients like dual enrollment, public television, and sharing of equipment.
²⁶

Johnson also injected the third and most important new element into the mix: a focus on poverty. Drawing on selective memories of his own life, he emphasized the benefits of education to poor people. "Compensatory education," to be extended to children from low-income families, would greatly expand his war on poverty. The bill that he endorsed trumpeted this principle while at the same time offering a formula for distributing aid that was politically attractive. It offered federal money to 90 percent of school districts in the nation and assured NEA lobbyists that local school administrators would enjoy latitude in determining how the money was spent.
²⁷

Thanks to these changes it was clear that aid to elementary and secondary education would pass. In the House a bill calling for $1 billion in the coming year was approved, 263 to 153, with all fifty-six freshman non-southern Democrats who voted on the bill recorded in favor. In the Senate, only eighteen voted no. Johnson signed the bill in April at the site of the one-room schoolhouse where he had learned his ABCs many years before. "As a son of a tenant farmer," he said, exaggerating the deprivation of his past, "I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty."
²⁸

Passage of the act dramatically increased the role of the federal government in school financing. The money, indeed, enticed members of Congress, who approved substantial sums for compensatory education in the next few years. Federal expenditures for schools rose by 1968 to approximately $4.2 billion, more than ten times the amount ($375 million) spent ten years earlier. The federal share of total educational spending during the same period increased from less than 3 percent to roughly 10 percent.
²⁹
It continued to rise in subsequent years, generating a historic change in the nature of financial support for schools in the United States.

By then, however, the principles of federal aid enshrined in Johnson's education bills came under sharp questioning. Conservatives from the start had insisted that the falling off of the baby boom in the late 1950s, combined with rapid increases in school-building, was already easing whatever "crisis" had existed in elementary schools. By the early 1960s, Goldwater pointed out, the number of students per classroom and per teacher had declined from the early 1950s. Teachers, moreover, were receiving more training. Conservatives added that while some districts needed help, there was no need for an avalanche of federal money. Most local areas had done all right in keeping pace with demographic change.
³⁰

Other, less partisan critics took aim at the way the act was administered in practice. The flow of federal money after 1965 did promote a little greater equality in overall per pupil spending on education in the United States. Poor states like Mississippi received a shot in the arm. But many local school administrators managed to skirt guidelines on how to spend the money, using it to cover routine administrative expenses and overhead, which did little or nothing for the poor. By the early 1970s it was an open secret that a great deal of federal educational money aimed at the poor was missing its target.
³¹

Larger doubts centered about the very philosophy of compensatory education as it was established in 1965. Although Johnson's task force on education had studied conscientiously, it did not fully address the consequences of a central socio-economic trend of the postwar era: young people were staying on longer in schools. Many of these students were daughters and sons of parents with relatively little educational background. Others were blacks who had migrated from the South, where their educational facilities had been abysmal. How to instruct these masses of educationally deprived young people was a puzzle, and there was little research that would help to unravel it. Advocates of compensatory education decided in 1965 that more funding was an answer, but neither they nor teachers seemed able to use it very effectively. Money for compensatory education was not the same as money for good education. This, in the careful words of educational historian Diane Ravitch, would at the very least have meant using money and developing expertise to provide "intensive, individuated instruction in an encouraging, supportive environment."
³²

In 1966 there appeared a major study of American schools,
Equality of Educational Opportunity
, undertaken for the Office of Education. Named the Coleman Report after the sociologist James Coleman, its chief investigator, it questioned whether increases in per student spending for schools made much difference in the measurable educational achievement of individual students. The key to such achievement, the report concluded, appeared instead to be the background of students' families, the ethos of their neighborhoods, and the academic zeal of their classmates. For these reasons, desegregation might help, too. These conclusions surely did not mean that spending levels were irrelevant. Parents, indeed, understood that good schools required money, and they moved to districts that generously financed education. Their quest for good schools did much to accelerate suburbanization. The report did suggest, however, that dollars would go only so far and that beyond that point there was no strong correlation between per pupil spending and student achievement. Starting in 1964, average scores on Scholastic Aptitude Tests went steadily down, and per student spending went steadily up.
³³

Complicated reasons explain the much-lamented fall in scores, including the fact that higher percentages of poor and ill-prepared students took the tests, thereby driving down averages. Mindless absorption in television, others said, added to the decline in scores. Still, the faith in spending for compensatory education that had excited Johnson and others lost much of its fire in time. By the early 1970s a number of reform-minded critics had reached a different conclusion: if the government hoped to better the achievement and life-chances of "disadvantaged" children, it must pursue policies to reduce inequalities created by differences of socio-economic class. In the context of American reform ideas, talk about class was a radical, not a liberal, notion, and it had no political prospects.
³⁴

The second of the Big Four reforms of 1965, Medicare and Medicaid, also emanated from a long and complicated series of postwar legislative struggles that had intensified in the late 1950s and early 1960s. From the Roosevelt years on, the pressure of doctors in the American Medical Association, among other lobbies, had held off major changes in the American health care system. In 1965 one-half of all Americans older than 65 had no health insurance. As with the education issue, however, prospects for liberal overhaul escalated as a result of the 1964 election. Certain of chances for reform, LBJ made better medical care for the elderly his top priority and arranged to have Democratic measures introduced in January as House and Senate Bills Number One. Throughout the course of the subsequent legislative process he drove these bills ahead on mostly straight partisan votes. On one key vote in the House, fifty-eight of the sixty-five first-term Democrats voted to defeat a Republican-sponsored alternative to Medicare that might otherwise have passed.
³⁵

What did pass was a Medicare bill that mandated increases in Social Security taxes (paid by both employers and employees) to subsidize the costs of hospitalization for certain periods of time (in general, 100 days) for most people who were over 65 years of age. This was Plan A. The bill also offered Plan B, a voluntary program of insurance to help elderly people cover X-ray tests, up to 100 home-nurse visits, and certain doctors' and surgical fees. Plan B was to be supported by the government as well as by payments from recipients of care. The plans aided some 19 million Americans at an estimated cost in the first year (starting July 1, 1966) of $6.5 billion.
³⁶

Congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, the influential chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, then helped to add a Medicaid program, which few observers had anticipated and which received little sustained attention on the Hill. Like the education act, it reflected the contemporary focus on poverty. It offered federal matching grants to states that provided money to poor people already eligible for categorical welfare programs—the blind, the disabled, the needy aged not covered by Social Security, and families with dependent children (AFDC)—and to a small number of other "medically indigent" Americans who were not in these categories. Medicaid, like AFDC, was a government "entitlement": it guaranteed recipients assistance (assuming state spending) without need of annual congressional approval of appropriations. All these reforms passed with ease on partisan votes. Hailing the results, Johnson went to Independence, Missouri, to sign Medicare in the presence of Harry Truman. "No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine," he said with characteristic flourish. "No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years."
³⁷

Medicare and Medicaid considerably changed the nature of health care in the United States. Growing rapidly in the next few years, they reached one-fifth of the population by 1976.
³⁸
Medicare helped a number of elderly people to receive health services that might otherwise have driven them into poverty. Medicaid enabled many eligible poor people to go to doctors for the first time in their lives. By 1968 it was estimated that low-income Americans consulted physicians more often than did higher-income people (5.6 visits per year as opposed to 4.9 visits).
³⁹
Changes such as these gladdened the hearts of reformers and helped to sustain liberal support for the programs in later years.