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As the cost of education increased, the Federal Government was repeatedly urged to act, but it did so only in response to specific crises and with relatively narrow, mostly vocational aims. Thus the Morrill Act of 1862, which helped set up 68 land-grant colleges to promote agriculture and "mechanic arts," was partly a Civil War tactic. Each war inspired similar federal action, from support of vocational training in high schools during World War I to aid for school districts with heavy concentrations of defense workers and the famed G.I. Bill of Rights of World War II. The Soviet Sputnik in 1957 scared Congress into enacting the National Defense Education Act, which supports science, math and language instruction in public schools and provides loans to college students. Defense and space needs sent federal research grants pouring into colleges—and chased many a good teacher out of his classroom and into his lab. Total federal aid to education now runs to about $5 billion a year.
Yet this aid has had little impact on the bulk of the nation's 26,000 public-school districts. Bills for general aid to education have been pending in all but twelve of the last 96 sessions of Congress, dating back to 1867. Their backers have generally argued that the wide differences between and within states in expenditures on education frustrate equal opportunity. Example: Mississippi spends $273 per pupil, New York $790; within Connecticut, Darien spends $697, 44 Montville $298. Real estate is often overtaxed for local school support, and states risk driving away industry if they raise local taxes; federal aid should ease these problems. Yet all previous general-aid bills died because they became mired in three issues: aid to church-supported schools, aid to racially segregated schools, the fear of federal control.
Lyndon Johnson succeeded because he avoided the mistakes of his predecessors and produced an ingenious bill that neatly defused the explosive issues. It is a bill that combines local autonomy with a great deal of federal initiative and leaves remarkable latitude for the play of creative ideas.
The Poor & Operation Bootstrap
TITLE I, which draws most of the attention and most of the money ($1.06 billion), is designed to aid local school-district projects which help "educationally deprived children." The money will flow to state education officials, who will decide what specific projects originated by local public-school districts qualify. The U.S. Office of Education can veto a project, but its decision could be appealed in the courts. Each district can request a maximum amount equal to half of what the state spends to educate each child, multiplied by the number of children of all families in its district with incomes under $2,000. This will mean, for example, a 25% increase in Mississippi's public-school funds, a 4% hike for New York. No district can use the money to lower the level of its local support of education.