See Government Grow: Education Polities from Johnson to Reagan.

• Author: McCluskey, Neal
• Position: Book review

See Government Grow: Education Polities from Johnson to Reagan

Gareth Davies

Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2007, 387 pp.

Only a dozen years ago, the Republican Party platform called for abolition of the U.S. Department of Education. Perhaps a holdover from what many thought would be a government-leveling tidal wave when the GOP won control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in 1994, the 1996 platform declared that "the federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula.... That is why we will abolish the Department of Education, end federal meddling in our schools, and promote family choice at all levels of learning."

Only six years after that platform was adopted, passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)--an initiative championed by George W. Bush throughout his presidential campaign and the deepest federal foray ever into American education--proved that the GOP reformist zeal was dead; only 33 House and 3 Senate Republicans voted against the measure. The 1994 Republican revolution had not only fizzled, but the COP had become the standard-bearer for expanding federal power in education.

So what insight does See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan, which covers very little history after the Reagan administration, offer into why we went so quickly from the 1994 revolution to NCLB? It turns out, a lot. In examining Washington's entrenchment in elementary and secondary education from its start in the Johnson administration, acceptance under presidents Nixon and Ford, and survival of the Reagan Revolution--the first revolution that was supposed to doom it--Oxford University historian Gareth Davies explores timeless political realities that make it almost impossible to pull Washington out of the schools.

Before determining how the federal government has stayed in education one needs to know how it got involved in the first place. It's a somewhat remarkable occurrence, actually, since the Constitution gives Washington no explicit power over education, and for much of American history schooling was almost exclusively a local and family affair.

The road to federal involvement was a slow one. For more than a century before passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, power over education had been steadily centralizing, with larger school districts and proliferation of state compulsory attendance laws. The barrier against federal...