Full citation: Ward W. Keesecker, Digest of Legislation Providing Federal Subsidies for Education, United States Department of the Interior, Bulletin No. 8, Government Printing Office, 1930.
Fletcher Harper Swift, Federal Aid to Public Schools, 1922
This study was commissioned by the Bureau of Education for the sake of informing the Secretary of the Interior and Congress about history of federal support for schooling. It was published shortly after the enactment of various vociational aid bills and agricultural extension policies when Congress was considering general aid to elementary and secondary schools. The Smith-Towner bill failed passage in 1918, and was followed by the Smith-Towner bill, which would have established a grants-in-aid program for schools.
So, Congress was at a decision point: should it edge the federal government further into school funding and policy, or should it hold the line?
Congress chose the latter course, and mostly held that line until 1958 and the enactment of the National Defense Education Act.
Professor Swift, by the way, published a number of studies of education history and finance. He died in 1947.
Constitutionality of Federal Aid to Education in Its Various Aspects, 1961
The U.S. Senate requested a memorandum from Abraham Ribicoff, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. They asked his department to address the propriety of federal funds flowing to religious schools.
Remarkably, early in this document Secretary Ribicoff declares that the debate over the propriety of federal aid to schools was over.
“The power of the Congress to enact S. 121 [an educartion bill] rests on its constitutional authority to appropriate funds to provdie for the general welfare. The scope of that congressional power has been so broadly defined by decision of the Supreme Court… there is no need to review the controversy which for a century and a half surrounded the Federal power of expenditure” (p. 3).
That the U.S. Constitution makes no mention in Article 1 Section 8 of a congressional authority to support schooling is no matter.
The memoradnum goes on to say that federal funds for private schools was permissible, so llong as they benefited the child and provided only “incidental benefits to church schools” (p. 6).
Suffice to say, not everyone in Congress agreed with the propriety of federal grants-in-aid to schooling (public or private), and those battles have continued to this day, albeit with fewer combatants.
Full citation: U.S. Congress, Senate, Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Subcommittee on Education, Constitutionality Federal Aid to Education in Its Various Aspects, 87th Congress, 1st session, document no. 29, May 1, 1961, U.S. Government Printing Office.
The Child Labor Bulletin on Federal Aid to Education, May 1918
This publication begins with a stunning declaration: “The people are no longer content to have our federal Government confine its activities within the bounds of what are generally understood to be purely national affairs.”
Edward N. Clopper, who made that declaration, was the assistant secretary of the National Child Labor Committee of New York (NCLC), an activist group. Thus, Clopper’s statement is a classical rhetorical switcheroo: an elite attributes his preferred position to the multitude, then assserts that he is simply giving voice to them.
There is no evidence that Americans in 1918 craved federal intervention in schooling, despite the enactment of the Smith-Hughes Act (high school vocational education act) the previous year. Federal policymaking was mostly confined to federal objectives se out in the U.S. Constitution, such as defense, trade, and mail delivery.
What is undeniable is that Clopper and the NCLC were in the progressive vanguard. They, along with groups such as the Committee on National Aid to Education (which John Dewey led), were pushing for Congress to fund aid to elementary education. And in this bulletin, the NCLC includeddraft legislation to cretae a U.S. Department of Education.
That effort for K-12 federal aid made little progress until the 1930s, albeit the measures were temporary and expired before the conclusion of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Congress did not enact lasting elementary school aid until the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. And the effort to create a cabinet-level education agency would not bear fruit until 1979.
The University of Pennsylvania’s library’s website has links to online copies of The Child Labor Bulletin, and its successor publication, The American Child.
40 Years After a Nation at Risk
April 2023 marks the 40th anniversary of the release of the report, A Nation at Risk. It was a big deal, as I have written here, and by declaring a antional education emergency stoked increased federal involvement in schools. This ws ironic, seeing as Reagan campaigned to “dismantle” the Department of Education, which had been created by congressional Democrats and President Jimmy Carter just a couple years earlier.
Five years ago, The74.com released this video, which includes interviews with folks who helped write the report.
And, for good measure, here’s a video released by the Fordham Foundation 10 years ago (30 years after the publication of A Nation at Risk).
Federal Education Policy History 