The Brown decision of 1954 mandated the pupil's subjectivity as the test of equality, but the court could not implement this mandate in the schools; implementation required legislative and executive action by the states and the national government. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) were the first national efforts to fulfill the Brown mandate. Ostensibly, ESEA was intended to help children attending low income and poor schools, but low income was a proxy for racial designation of Black Americans (and Mexican Americans, a special interest of President Johnson). The administration of President Johnson did not want to use race language in writing or justifying ESEA.*
Amendments to the acts in subsequent years built, piece by piece, the total school program envisioned in 1950 in the Midcentury White House Conference. Programs included assistance to disadvantaged pupils to meet high standards, the Eisenhower Professional Development Program for professional development, education technology, class size reduction, safe and drug free schools, bilingual education, Native American education, charter schools, Head Start, and community learning centers. (The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965; Elementary and Secondary Education.)
ESEA was controversial, because it greatly reduced local and state control over public education. Opposition to the end of racial segregation in education was centered in local control of schools. The act also measured and enforced academic progress with national assessment testing. (See Bev Eakman, "Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching".)
The legislation for ESEA 1965 was conceptualized and outlined by the federal Commissioner of Education, Francis Keppel. Keppel had been the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He represented the educational reform vision of the liberal educational elite associated with Harvard University. In 1974, he became an advisor to Judge Garrity in the integration of Boston's schools by busing.
The sudden and vast expansion of the federal government's role in the nation's public education created an opportunity for the total school program's focus on the student's subjectivity to become the national pedagogy. It is not my purpose to examine, as a research matter, how the focus on subjectivity made its way into school after school; I am not in position to do that. Rather, I wish to point out how the emphasis on subjectivity became the basis for the dominant psychological and pedagogical paradigms of public school teachers with the new federal context. We can easily catch the early progress of this pedagogy by looking at a wildly popular publication, Jonathan Kozol's Death At An Early Age; The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967)**, the subject of our next article in this series.
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* For a general history of education at this time, see Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade; American Education, 1945-1980 (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1983).
** Twentieth Century Classics in Education, Postelate 4 (March 31, 2004) 2.
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