In December 1987, Secretary of Education William J. Bennett released a high school curriculum. It was not federally mandated, rather, it was a model for schools to consider adopting in whole or in part. “James Madison High School” also included profiles of seven high schools whose curricula Bennett found admirable for their depth and rigor.
Hat tip to Chester E. Finn, Jr., Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, who reminded us of this.
Filed under Curricula
LBJ Signing the ESEA, 1965
President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidential library has holdings relevant to the study of federal education policy history, such as these Douglass Cater oral histories. Cater served as special assistant to the President from 1964 to 1968, and offered comments on the politics of education at the time of enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.
Other oral histories may be found here, and finding aides for Lyndon Johnson’s papers are located here. The photograph above came from the library’s photo archive.
Filed under Research Libraries and Repositories
The U.S. established a Department of Education first in 1867. This original department, however, was not a cabinet level agency, and within a few years was replaced with a bureau and then an office.
On October 17, 1979 President James E. Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act (P.L. 96-88; 93 Stat. 668). It replaced the Office of Education with a department proper, and installed a secretary at its head.
Filed under Laws
Politics is about many things—power, money, authority, values, ideas…
It also is about language. In current school reform debates, the phrase “failing school” and its plural form “failing schools” are used very often.
Below are two Google Ngram charts that depict the rise in the frequency of this term in books appearance between 1900 and 2008. The results are rather eye-popping—use of the terms took off after 1990. (Click on the figures to get a much larger view of them.)
Chart 1. Term: “Failing School”
Filed under Uncategorized
This study of Chapter 1 (Title I) was commissioned by by the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement (formerly the National Institute of Education).
The report was produced by Department of Education staff and researchers at private sector firms, such as Policy Study Associates. Congress mandated this study be done in December 1983.
A big finding of this study was that only a small proportion of students served by Chapter 1, the centerpiece of the Elementary and Secondary Eduction Act of 1965,were achieving at the levels that other American children were.
The full citation is Beatrice F. Birman et al., The Current Operation of the Chapter 1 Program: Final Report from the National Assessment of Chapter 1 (Washington: GPO, 1987).
Filed under Studies
This is a wonderful survey completed by Jesse Knowlton Flanders in 1925.
His research question is simple: What are the 48 states (yes, 48) requiring students to study?
Flanders utilized statutes from each state to derive his findings. Not surprisingly, in a time when the federal government had very little involvement in the schools, each state has its own idiosyncratic curriculum.
Filed under Studies
The Politics of Education Association (PEA) is a group of mostly academics who study education policy in the United States. Unlike this website, PEA’s does not focus solely on the federal government’s role in schooling. PEA’s scholars study education policy and politics at the state and local levels too.
PEA’s membership includes many renown experts, and it publishes newsletter, a year book, and a biannual issue of the Peabody Education Journal.
You can learn more about PEA at http://www.fsu.edu/~pea/
Filed under Organizations
