In honor of RFK on the 40th anniversary of his death, I offer excerpts from the transcripts of the hearings on ESEA in 1965. RFK called for accountability among educators and proposed national testing to make sure that those receiving federal funds were using it improve student learning.
He proposed NCLB 35 years before Bush did. To be fair, NCLB is just the reauthorization of ESEA with a new name.
It was conceived to send federal dollars to offer more educational opportunities to disadvantaged students, and was packaged as part of LBJ's larger War on Poverty. Student failure in school was linked to adult poverty, so Congress got to work to pass Johnson's bill to help educate poor kids.
This is from the hearing on ESEA, by the Senate Education subcommittee, 89th Congress. Congress was considering whether to spend an additional $1 billion in the following year to improve education, which would double federal spending on schools. Most of the additional money would go to Title I.
Kennedy began his questioning of Francis Keppel, U.S. Commissioner of Education, which was then part of Heath, Education, and Welfare. He asked Keppel what was the definition of an educationally disadvantaged child, and Keppel talked about children who grow in up impoverished families without access to books, and similar things. But then he shifted his questioning away from the child's background and to the child's school experience.
Kennedy: Now, is the child an educationally deprived child if it receives an education that is substantially inferior to the average U.S. education at that grade level?
Keppel: Certainly, sir.
Kennedy: Is an educationally deprived child, necessarily, therefore, from a family of low income?
Keppel: No sir. Clearly there can be deprivations and are in our society for a host of tragic family reasons. I think it is fair to say that the administration is to start where we can be utterly sure that the need is desperate--that is, in the case of children of families earning under $2000 per year.
Kennedy: I do not know whether it would possible to work on a stricter definition, but I think it would be of help to the committee. You describe, and I think forcefully, the family and home background of a child and I think does make for difficulty and creates the kind of problems that you described. I think you would also agree that it is not restricted to that, that from your experience of studying the school systems around the country, that the school system itself has created an educationally deprived system?
Keppel: I am sorry to say that is true.
So here's where Kennedy goes after schools, insisting that it's not just the kids and their families and poverty-status that create educational disadvantage, but it is also the schools themselves that do this. Kennedy: And then I come to this other point, that if you are placing or putting money into a school system which itself creates this problem, or helps to create it, or does nothing or very little to alleviate it, are we not just in fact wasting the money of the Federal Government and the taxpayer and investing money where it is really going to accomplish very little if any good?
Keppel: Senator, I think there is an assumption behind your question which is that the school systems are not prepared to change their habits. It seems to me that with the encouragement of the great private foundations in recent years, as well as encouragement from government research, there is a change going on in all school systems, both urban and rural, recognizing that children who have the special deprivation in terms of homes and schools need special help.
Keppel goes on to say that the schools are ready to change and help kids in better ways. Kennedy pushes again on the idea that giving money to schools that are already not serving deprived kids won't do any good. Then the questioning turned to mandatory testing.Kennedy: Obviously I am completely in accord with the objectives of the bill. All I wonder is whether we couldn't give further protections to the child by certain requirements. Now what I ask is whether it would be possible to have some kind of testing system at the end of a year or 2 years in which we would see whether the money that had been invested in the school district of New York City, or Denver, Colorado, or Jackson, Mississippi or whatever it might be was coming up with a plan and program that made it worthwhile, and whether the child, in fact, was gaining from the investment of these funds.
Keppel: . . . . Taking up your last point, Senator, in the bill on page 11 of S. 870, line 12, you notice that the State educational agency is required to make an annual report, the fundamental reporting parts of the bill. And line 12 says--
Including such reports as the Commissioner may require to evaluate the
effectiveness of payments under the title and of particular programs assisted
under it in improving educational attainment.
I would expect Senator that the States would try to get at fore-and-aft testing to see whether this bill is accomplishing what is is intended to accomplish.I may be a bit of a conservative person here. The tests, IQ tests and other forms of tests which have become so familiar in our society, are still relatively blunt instruments. We know, for example, that the IQ tests correlate, reflect differences in economic and social social class. I would not want to say for a moment that the IQ test kind of thing is the a sharp enough, precise enough measure, but I do think we can expect in the provision I just read to get a report back to the committee after a couple of years as is required here on fore-and-aft studies, which do include whether kids have learned something.
Kennedy: Would you suggest , therefore, that there be some standardized test that could be given in these areas where the money has been invested to determine whether, in fact, the child making the kind of progress we hope?
Keppel: I would like to say, sir, that in two or three years from now we would be ready with such instruments. I would have to say now I would not trust them sufficiently. I don't think the art of testing has reached that degree of confidence that would lean on them. We could get samples. I would like to make an awful lot of tests. The problem is the number of variables involved that affect the child, affect his learning, but I do think we would be able to start down that road as a result of the section I just read.
This part of the testimony then moves into the dilemma of local control of schooling and federal mandates. It is fascinating how Kennedy, Keppel, and the Secretary of HEW debate this issue.
RFK: Would you not agree that one of the really great problems we have, to be blunt about it, is the school boards in some of these communities, in some of the States, are just not going to take the necessary steps to deal with the problem [of disadvantaged students]?
HEW Secretary Celebrezze: That is the price of democracy. If you want to keep your education at a local level without concentrating it on the federal government. But in time Senator I find that the people in the areas themselves make the adjustment. . . . I think that it is one of the things we have to contend with in a democracy unless we want complete conformity throughout the United States.
RFK: I am not suggesting that. It might be the price of democracy, but we don't have to accept it. We can attempt to do better, and I'm not talking about just Title VI or the Southern States where they had a problem with civil rights. I am talking about Northern States and my own state of New York, and I can see going from community to community, I can see tremendous difference in what is going in one community in contrast to another.
All I suggest is that we can do something to make sure that we have the highest standards possible and that the money that we are going to expend, which is to be expended, as I understand, in these areas is not wasted but that it is--we are making progress in each of these communities. Am I wrong, Commissioner, really in my assessment of the fact that there is a tremendous contrast between some of the commissioners of education at the State level and also at the local level as what imaginative and progressive measures and activities they undertake to deal with the problem?
Keppel: Of course you are not wrong, Senator. The United States is intensely human and we do have these variations. There is no doubt about it. I think it is the role of the Federal Government through its research, through proposed supplementary centers, to encourage--in the case of research, to finance--with a view to raising the whole. But certainly it would be deplorable to reduce the level of some of the first rate primary and secondary schools we now have.
You are right. I have spent my whole life at this. I personally think we are going to have to put a lot more energy in it, and one of the major parts of this bill which I think would not ordinarily be noted is this very reporting provision in which I think we can get data and demonstrate differences between geographical sections and to use the local American pride which the Secretary has referred.
RFK: I think that is extremely important. It is not completely developed in the bill and that is why I wanted to have some discussion about it here. I think it is very important when we talk about the educational system in various communities. I think it is very difficult for a person who lives in a community to know whether, in fact, his educational system is what it should be, whether if you compare his community to a neighboring community they are doing everything they should do, whether the people that are operating the educational system in a State or in a local community are as good as they should be. I think it is very difficult for a citizen to know that. So you come in and say, "We have a certain percentage of economically deprived children in a particular district. We are going to put up $2 million there."
Now that $2 million, because of the kind of school board you have there, might be completely wasted while $2 million in some other community might be used to help a child tremendously. If I lived in a community where the $2 million was being wasted, I would like to know something like that. I would like--I wonder if we couldn't have some kind of system of reporting, either through a testing system which could be established which the people at the local community would know periodically as to what progress had been made under the program. I think it would be very helpful to Congress and I think it would be very helpful to people living in the United States, and I think it would be very helpful to people living in the local community.
The 1965 debate ends here, but as a postscript, I found some information on what Kennedy said at hearings in 1966 about the effects of Title I.
I'm sorry to report that I can't find the original testimony from 1966. So here's something almost as good. Milbrey W. McLaughlin wrote her dissertation on Title I, which she revised and published as a book entitled Evaluation and Reform: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965/Title I, 1975, Ballinger Publishing, Cambridge, Mass. This book is nearly impossible to find, so I can't even link to it.But it's got what I want.When we last looked in on RFK, he was demanding that the Office of Education (which was then part of HEW) come up with some way to assess student achievement so legislators, parents, taxpayers could know if the $1 billion in new Title I funding was actually helping students. In testimony before the Senate subcommittee on education, the head of the USOE ducked the question of assessment again and again. Now it's a year later, in 1966, and the head of the USOE is back before the subcommittee as it considers a new round of funding for Title I. Harold Howe, the head of USOE, is being questioned by RFK. This piece comes from McLaughlin's book.Senator Kennedy asked Commissioner Howe: "What have you accomplished with the billion dollars that you got for elementary and secondary education last year?" In reply, Commissioner Howe began listing the number of books that had been purchased, the amount of money that had been expended for teachers, the amount of money that had been used for the purchase of equipment and materials, and so on. When he finished, Senator Kennedy was quite impatient, and asked, "What happened to the children? Do you mean you spent a billion dollars and you don't know whether they can read or not?" Commissioner Howe countered by saying, "You know this program has been operating for less than a year and it is just like planting a tree; you don't plant it one day and then pull it up every week and look at its roots to see if it's growing."
I just found this quote by him in The Elusive Science by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann about the history of education research:"I want to change this bill [ESEA and Title I] because it doesn't have any way of measuring those damned educators....We really ought to have some evaluation in there, and some measurement as to whether any good is happening." (p. 159)
