Elementary and Secondary Education Act

thumb|Lyndon B. Johnson at the ESEA signing ceremony, with his childhood schoolteacher Ms. Kate Deadrich Loney

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was passed by the 89th United States Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 11, 1965. Part of Johnson's War on Poverty, the act has been one of the most far-reaching laws affecting education passed by the United States Congress, and was reauthorized by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Johnson proposed a major reform of federal education policy in the aftermath of his landslide victory in the 1964 United States presidential election, and his proposal quickly led to the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The act provides federal funding to primary and secondary education, with funds authorized for professional development, instructional materials, resources to support educational programs, and parental involvement promotion. The act emphasizes equal access to education, aiming to shorten the achievement gaps between students by providing federal funding to support schools with children from impoverished families.

Since 1965, ESEA has been modified and reauthorized by Congress several times. The Bilingual Education Act provides support for bilingual education and educational efforts for Native Americans and other groups. The Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 prohibits discrimination against students and teachers. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) introduced a testing regime designed to promote standards-based education. The Every Student Succeeds Act retained some of the testing requirements established by the NCLB, but shifted accountability provisions to the states.

Historical context

President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose own ticket out of poverty was a public education in Texas, fervently believed that education was a cure for ignorance and poverty. Education funding in the 1960s was especially tight due to the demographic challenges posed by the large Baby Boomer generation, but Congress had repeatedly rejected increased federal financing for public schools. Buoyed by his landslide victory in the 1964 election, Johnson sought to dramatically increase federal funding for education at the start of his second term.

On January 25, 1965, President Johnson called for congressional efforts to improve education opportunities for America's children. Wary of popular fears regarding increased federal involvement in local schools, the Johnson administration advocated giving local districts great leeway to use the new funds, which were to be first distributed as grants to each state. Shortly thereafter, Carl D. Perkins (D-KY), the chair of the General Education Subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor introduced H.R. 2362. With the Johnson administration's support, and after significant wrangling over the structure of the bill's funding formula committee, the full committee voted 23–8 to report it on March 2, 1965. Following a failed attempt to derail the bill by Representative Howard W. Smith (D-VA), the House passed H.R. 2362 on March 26, 1965, in a 263–153 roll-call vote.

As the Senate prepared to consider the education bill, S. 370, Democratic leaders urged their colleagues to pass it without amendment, in hopes of avoiding the bill being returned to the House to endure further reconsideration. S. 370 was assigned to the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, which subsequently reported the bill to the Senate floor with unanimous support. During the Senate debates, several amendments were introduced, though none passed. The Senate passed the bill in a 73–18 vote on April 7, 1965. Also for the first time, private schools (most of them Catholic schools in the inner cities) received services, such as library funding, comprising about 12 percent of the ESEA budget. Though federal funds were involved, they were administered by local officials, and by 1977 it was reported that less than half of the funds were applied toward the education of children under the poverty line. Presidential biographer Robert Dallek further reports that researchers cited by Hugh Davis Graham soon found that poverty had more to do with family background and neighborhood conditions than the quantity of education a child received. Early studies suggested initial improvements for poor children helped by ESEA reading and math programs, but later assessments indicated that benefits faded quickly and left pupils little better off than those not in the schemes.

Sections of the original 1965 Act

Title I – Financial Assistance To Local Educational Agencies For The Education Of Children Of Low-Income Families
Title II – School Library Resources, Textbooks, and other Instructional Materials
Title III – Supplementary Educational Centers and Services
Title IV – Educational Research And Training
Title V – Grants To Strengthen State Departments Of Education
Title VI – General Provisions

New Titles Created by Early Amendments to 1965 Law

thumb|2008 No Child Left Behind [[National Blue Ribbon Schools Program|Blue Ribbon School Logo]]

;1966 amendments (Public Law 89-750)

Title VI – Aid to Handicapped Children (1965 title VI becomes Title VII).

;1967 amendments (Public Law 90-247)

Title VII – Bilingual Education Programs (1966 title VII becomes Title VIII).

Title I

Overview

Title I ("Title One"), which is a provision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed in 1965, is a program created by the U.S. Department of Education to distribute funding to schools and school districts with a high percentage of students from low-income families, with the intention to create programs that will better aid children who have special needs that, without funding, could not be properly supported.

Funding is distributed first to state educational agencies (SEA's) which then allocate funds to local educational agencies (LEA's) which in turn dispense funds to public schools in need. Title I also helps children from families that have migrated to the United States and youth from intervention programs who are neglected or at risk of abuse. The act allocates money for educational purposes for the next five fiscal years until it is reauthorized. In addition, Title I appropriates money to the education system for the prosecution of high retention rates of students and the improvement of schools; these appropriations are carried out for five fiscal years until reauthorization. Funding for the Title I program could be facing substantial cuts as president Donald Trump’s plans take shape.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, to be an eligible Title I school, at least 40% of a school's students must be from low-income families who qualify under the U.S. Census' definition of low-income, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Title I mandates services both to eligible public school students and eligible private school students. The second is a “targeted assistance program” which allows schools to identify students who are failing or at risk of failing. Within this context, Title I was conceived in order to compensate for the considerable educational deprivations associated with child poverty. For the first 15 years, the program was reauthorized every three years with additional emphasis placed on how funds were to be allocated. This reflected the administration's stance that resource control should be in the hands of states and local jurisdictions rather than at a federal level. Program improvements were modifications that would occur when students who received funding were not improving. In this reauthorization, NCLB required increased accountability from its schools both from the teachers and from the students. To determine the percentage of low-income families, school districts may select a poverty measure from among the following data sources: (1) the number of children ages 5–17 in poverty counted in the most recent census; (2) the number of children eligible for free and reduced price lunches under the National School Lunch Program; (3) the number of children in families receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; (4) the number of children eligible to receive Medicaid assistance; or (5) a composite of these data sources. The district must use the same measure to rank all its school attendance areas. The funds are appropriated for the use of improving academic achievement for students in low-income households. Congress originally stipulated that funding be distributed using the Basic Grant formula. Over time, Congress added the other formulas to better target funding to places with high levels of poverty. The Federal Education Budget Project details the requirements for each formula extensively. However, political factors may also shape the formulas as school districts represented by powerful members of Congress receive a disproportionate share of funding.

Basic Grant

The Basic Grant formula provides funding to school districts based on the number of low income children they serve and state education spending.

Title III

Title III of the ESEA originally provided matching grants for supplementary education centers (Political Education, Cross 2004).

Title III was the innovations component of ESEA. It was, for its time, the greatest federal investment in education innovation ever.

Its best innovations, after validation, became part of the National Diffusion Network.

Title V

This section of the original ESEA provided for strengthening state departments of education (Political Education, Cross 2004).

The original Title V was amended to state the purposes of education reform efforts between local and state educational systems. Title V states that the government should endorse and support local education reforms that parallel reforms occurring at the state level. Parts of this section also state that the government should support innovative programs that help to improve an educational system. This includes support programs for libraries, scientific research leading to state and local educational agencies to put promising reforms into place, as well as for programs to improve teacher performance.

Title VII

Added during the 1967 reauthorization of ESEA, Title VII introduced a program for bilingual education. It was championed by Texas Democrat Ralph Yarborough (Political Education, Cross 2004). It was originally created to aid Spanish-speaking students. However, in 1968 it transformed to the all-encompassing Bilingual Education Act (BEA). In its original form, the BEA was not explicit in mandating that all school districts provide bilingual education services—it left much room for interpretation by districts. The ruling in Lau v. Nichols provided some clarity—specific program goals were established, support centers for bilingual education were created, and what a “bilingual education program” should look like was defined. The courts upheld the language of the BEA as it declared a “bilingual education program” as one providing English instruction in unison with the native language. The idea was to push students to high academic achievement via a program encouraging them to learn English while maintaining the native language. "It proposed to cultivate in this child his ancestral pride, to reinforce (not destroy) the language he natively speaks, to cultivate his inherent strengths, to give him the sense of personal identification so essential to social maturation," summarizes Professor Cordasco of Montclair State College.

In addition to programs for bilingual students, Title VII implemented plans to help Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Alaskan natives be provided opportunities for achieving academic equality. This section of the ESEA promotes the federal government working closely with local educational institutions to ensure that Indian, Hawaiian, and Alaskan students are being aided in getting the same educational experiences as all other students. In addition to President Carter's efforts, President Bill Clinton also showed his support through the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994, which dramatically increased funding for bilingual and immigrant education. In 1998, the Linguistic Society of America showed its support for the BEA arguing that bilingual education was a basic human right; it believed that children should be educated in order to maintain their native language and cultural identity while acquiring the English language.

In 2001, Texas authorized and encouraged school districts to adopt dual language immersion programs for elementary-aged students. It stipulated that instruction in each language should be split 50–50 in class. More recently The Civil Rights Project, a research center founded at Harvard University and located at University of California, Los Angeles since 2007, is calling on policymakers to develop a new vision for bilingual education. Gándara and Hopkins gather compelling evidence that shows English-only policies in the states that adopted these restrictions aren't working. The project proposes a new attitude that embraces bilingualism: “It is time that the U.S. join the rest of the developed world in viewing bilingualism as an asset, not a deficit,” argues Gary Orfield, co-director of the project.

The Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2019 extended funding for the Native American Languages Grant Program (established under the Native American Programs Act of 1974) through 2024.

The biggest obstacle to the BEA and expansion of bilingual education programs is the English-only Movement. There is no official language in the U.S., although some states have declared English as their official language. Three states in particular, California, Arizona, and Massachusetts, have declared English as their official language. In 1998, California passed Proposition 227 with the help of sponsor, Ron Unz, essentially ending bilingual education programs in exchange for an English immersion model which values assimilation over multiculturalism. In 2000, Arizona passed the English for Children initiative backed, again, by Ron Unz which mirrored California's Proposition 227 in replacing bilingual education programs with English immersion ones.

Many Americans question whether bilingual education programs or English immersion models are the best route to helping students acquire English. The question of whether public education should encourage the development of the native tongue or completely leave that up to the parent is a difficult one. Some point out that California's Proposition 227 is failing the students for simply failing to address both the linguistic and cultural struggles that students face; in 2004, the test results for California public school students showed the achievement gap for English learners widening and the test scores of English learners to be declining across grade levels. Scholar Stephen Krashen maintains that these three states who have taken the harshest anti-bilingual education policies have seen progress that is modest, at best. In a report to the United States Government, an Arizona study shows that English language learners can take up to 13 years to attain fluency—most school programs only offer 3 years of participation in English-immersion or bilingual programs, putting the effectiveness of these programs into question. In order to ease the worries and qualms that people had in the programs' effectiveness, the Obama Administration had proposed the implementation of an evaluation system states would be required to use in order to judge the progress seen in English language learners in schools. This would potentially restore faith in the bilingual programs and hold schools more accountable to student achievement and progress. The question remains if states are properly equipped across the board to meet such high expectations.

Landmark court cases

1972: Aspira of New York, Inc v. New York Board of Education
Court ruled in favor of Puerto Rican and other Hispanic students whose language and cultural needs weren't being addressed. This triggered an increased development of bilingual programs in New York public schools.
1974: Serna v. Portales
Court ruled in favor of Serna that Portales Municipal Schools must provide a bilingual curriculum to accommodate the non-English speaking students. Texas also commits to employ bilingual personnel in schools.