Where Did NCLB Come From? The true story of the federal role in education.(Book review)

See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan

By Gareth Davies

University Press of Kansas, 2007, $39.95; 387 pages.

Gareth Davies, a historian at Oxford University, brings care and precision to his study of the process that produced federal education legislation and regulation in the United States from the mid-1960s into the 1980s. His book illustrates both the possibilities and the limitations of this approach to the history of education policy.

Davies starts out by telling how President Lyndon Johnson, after his 1964 landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, made the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 integral to his War on Poverty. Previously, federal involvement in education had been minimal, even after Congress responded to the Russians' launch of Sputnik by passing the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958.

Initially, ESEA money had few federal strings attached; there was little oversight or accountability The amount of money involved was relatively small--federal aid never amounted to more than 10 percent of the total cost of education--and vocal constituencies in districts around the country fought for every available dollar. Quoting historian James T. Patterson on the growth of "rights consciousness," Davies notes that those constituencies often defended ESEA and demanded its expansion with the language and logic of the civil rights movement.

Davies's biggest contribution comes in his discussion of the post-Johnson years, when he criticizes the master narrative that portrays post- 1960s American politics as "a sustained reaction against Great Society liberalism." While not denying that such a reaction took place, he finds that in education "the persistence and even growth of big government during a supposedly conservative era" matters more. Congressional votes are revealing: four-fifths of House Republicans voted against ESEA in 1965; when it was renewed in 1974, "conservative opposition had all but disappeared."