Lawrence J. McAndrews, The Era of Education: The Presidents and the Schools, 1965-2001

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Lawrence J. McAndrews, The Era of Education: The Presidents and the Schools, 1965-2001 (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006)

You may order a copy of this book here.

Reviewed by Kevin R. Kosar

When working on my dissertation, on education policy and politics from 1789 through 2002, I was surprised to find so little research on the history of the federal role. I was pleased to find a number of articles and dissertations that examined one or another aspect of this topic; books, though, were few.

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Susan Levine, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program

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Susan Levine, School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton University Press, 2008)

You may order a copy of this book here.

Reviewed by Kevin R. Kosar

Each school day, the National School Lunch Program provides reduced cost or free lunches to about 30 million school children. The program, which has been around since 1946, costs taxpayers over $8 billion per year. In view of its size and activities, it is astonishing that so little has been written about it. Susan Levine has done us a service, then, in producing School Lunch Politics, which describes the politics that produced and shaped the program over the decades.

As told by Levine, the National School Lunch Program is a tale of politics and the suboptimal policy it so frequently produces.

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Impact Aid, 1950

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The Lanham Act (P.L. 849; 54 Stat. 1125) became law on October 14, 1940. The Lanham Act was amended (P.L. 137; 55 Stat. 361) on June 28, 1941, and the words “schools” was added to the definition of the term “public work.”

These wartime measures were replaced by two laws known as Impact Aid, P.L. 81-815; 64 Stat. 967 (September 23, 1950), and P.L. 81-874; 64 Stat. 1100 (September 30, 1950). These laws fortified the federal policy of providing federal aid to schooling in areas affected by federal governmental activities (e.g., defense installations).

Below are copies of the Lanham Act (1940), the revised Lanham Act (1941), and the two Impact Aid acts (1950).

Additional Impact Aid resources can be found here.

Lanham Act (1940)

lanham-act-1940Download

Lanham Act Revised/Lanham Act Revised (1941)

lanham-act-revised-1941-1Download

Impact Aid I and II (1950)

impact-aid-1950-1Download

The Improving America’s School’s Act of 1994

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On October 20, 1994, the Improving America’s Schools Act (P.L. 103-382; 108 Stat. 3518) became law.

It significantly revised the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.

It was the last major alteration of the law before the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

You can dowload the full PDF of the law at https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/6/text.

Books on the Department of Education

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Beryl A. Radin and Willis D. Hawley, Politics of Federal Reorganization: Creating the U.S. Department of Education (New York: Pergamon Books Inc., 1988).

Robert V. Heffernan, Cabinetmakers: Story of the Three-Year Battle to Establish the U.S. Department of Education (Iuniverse, 2001).