University Press of Kansas
See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan
Key Metrics
- Gareth Davies
- University Press of Kansas
- Paperback
- 9780700618552
- 9.1 X 6.1 X 0.9 inches
- 1.25 pounds
- Education > Educational Policy & Reform
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
By focusing on institutional changes in government that accompanied the civil rights revolution, Davies shows how initially fragile programs put down roots, built a constituency, and became entrenched. He explains why the federal role in schools continued to expand in the post-LBJ years as the reform impulse became increasingly detached from electoral politics, centering instead on the courts and the federal bureaucracy. Meanwhile, southern resistance to school desegregation had discredited the states rights argument, making it easier for conservatives as well as liberals to seek federal solutions to social problems.
Although LBJ's landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act deferred to local control, the legislation of the Nixon-Ford years issued directives that posed greater challenges to traditional federalism than Johnson's grand ideals. As Davies shows, the new political climate saw the achievement of such breakthroughs as mandated bilingual education, school finance reform, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act--measures that, before the seventies, would have been considered unthinkably intrusive by liberals as well as conservatives. And when Ronald Reagan promised to abolish the Department of Education, conservatives worked with liberals to derail his agenda.
Davies' surprising study shows that the distancing of American conservatism from its anti-statist traditions helped pave the way for today's big government conservatism, which enabled a Republican-dominated Congress to pass No Child Left Behind. By revealing the endurance of Great Society values during a period of Republican ascendance, his book opens a window on our political process and offers new insight into what really makes government grow.
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