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COPYRIGHT 2008 Hoover Institution Press
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...
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