$45 Billion Later : U.S. School Aid: Looking for Results

Twenty years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson sat in front of a one-room schoolhouse in his hometown in Texas and signed into law the nation’s first major program of federal aid to education.

The $1.3-billion-a-year infusion of federal money into the nation’s poorest schools “means more to the future of our nation . . . than any law I have signed or will ever sign,” Johnson said as his first teacher sat by his side.

“As the son of a tenant farmer, I know education is the only valid passport from poverty,” Johnson, then at the peak of his popularity and bursting with optimism for his “Great Society” program, added.

Effects Debated

But $45 billion later, education researchers are still debating whether the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has made any difference for the generations of poor children who have come and gone since LBJ signed the legislation in 1965.

Thanks to the federal money, which is authorized under Title I of the act, about 5 million children a year get extra tutoring in the basics.

“In the early 1970s, all the research showed the program was lousy,” said Michael Kirst, an education professor at Stanford University.

But he and other program supporters now point to recent studies showing that pupils in poor areas are doing better in reading and arithmetic as evidence that the money is having some effect.

“Now we’re debating the size of the gains” among primary students, Kirst said.

“All the talk back then about closing the gap between rich and poor was pretty naive,” said Kirst, who admitted to indulging in such discussions as a federal education official in the mid-1960s.

No Miracles Promised

“You’re not going to take kids from Harlem and turn them into kids from Scarsdale,” he added. “That’s just unrealistic. But we stuck with the program, and I think the signals are very positive now.”

However, Marshall Smith, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and a former education official in the Jimmy Carter Administration, has come to the opposite conclusion.

“If you look at junior highs, the gains (that were evident in the primary grades) have disappeared,” Smith said. “So where’s the impact? The inner-city junior highs are an educational wasteland--horrendous attendance rates and abysmal achievement levels.”

More than half of the entering 10th-graders in the inner-city high schools in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York leave before graduation, according to recent reports. Their teachers usually note that the dropouts were hopelessly behind in their class work.

“After two decades of federal intervention,” Smith concluded in a recent article in the Harvard Educational Review, “Title I (of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) stands primarily as a symbol of national concern for the poor rather than as a viable response to their needs.”

There is no question, however, that federal aid to education has changed the schools.

In practically every inner-city elementary school throughout the nation, classroom aides--paid out of federal funds--are working alongside the regular teachers. Typically, the schools also hire remedial teachers in reading and math who work with small groups of children outside their regular class.

The money is distributed to schools that have a high percentage of poverty-level students. The schools then identify those students who are in need of extra instruction.

In its first years, the new federal aid law helped pay for library books, nurses, parent advisers in the schools and even visits to the dentist. Since 1978, however, Congress has insisted that the vast share of the funds be spent on instruction.

Remedial Teachers

The funds also pay for remedial teachers, employed by the public schools, to work in private and parochial schools that have a high percentage of poor children. It was this key compromise between the public and parochial schools that permitted Johnson to quickly pass the measure that had become stalled in the previous Administration of John F. Kennedy.

There were other education laws to follow in 1965: the Head Start program, which paid for pre-school for impoverished children, and the Higher Education Act designed to give poor students a chance for a college education.

But as Johnson put it during the Texas signing ceremony, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was “the most sweeping education bill ever to come before Congress.” Now a $3.6-billion-a-year program, it has proven to be the largest educational experiment ever undertaken.

Why then hasn’t it produced more positive results?

Backers of the program say the aides and tutors are always working with the children having most trouble in the basics, helping them to catch up rather than letting them flounder in the regular class.

“That’s one reason the evaluations don’t look good,” said Jack Jennings, education counsel for the House Education and Labor Committee. “You’re always focusing on the kids doing the worst. The ones that improve get promoted out.”

Just as hospitals spend the most, and get the lowest cure rates, among the seriously ill patients, Jennings said, the federal education aid allows the schools to spend more on the most seriously disadvantaged students.

Lack of Money Told

Despite the large appropriation, “this is not a massive, intensive program,” Jennings added. “We don’t have enough money to follow the kids up into high school.”

In 1980 the Carter Administration, distressed by extremely high rates of unemployed youths in the big cities, urged Congress to enact a $2-billion Youth Education and Employment Act that would have paid for more remedial education in high schools.

Federal officials who had studied youth unemployment said they were convinced that many inner-city teen-agers could not get jobs because they lacked even minimal skills in reading, computing and writing.

“The literacy gap we identified is absolutely staggering,” said Carter adviser Stuart Eizenstat in 1980 in explaining why that Administration wanted to devote more money to basic education.

But some education researchers said this conclusion called into question the existing federal education efforts. After all, the unemployed teen-agers of 1980 were born about the time the big federal education laws were enacted and probably got extra tutoring.

Smith, an assistant commissioner of education in the Carter Administration, said he believes the federal education aid may have unwittingly created a program that segregates the lowest achieving children.

“We mainstream handicapped kids because we think they will benefit from being in a regular classroom, yet we pull out the Title I kids and teach them separately,” he said in an interview.

Since 1965, federal regulators have tried to ensure that the Title I money would “supplement” the education of poor children and would not “supplant” money spent by states and localities for public schooling. To satisfy the federal auditors, most school districts hire remedial teachers to instruct the slow learners outside of the regular classes.

Regular Class Advances

While the low achievers are being tutored in the basics, the regular class continues with more advanced reading and mathematics or moves on to other subjects such as history or science.

“Thus, it is not clear that Title I students enjoyed a net gain in total instruction,” wrote Launor Carter, who directed a $20-million evaluation of the program at the System Development Corp. in Santa Monica.

Schools get about $500 extra for each child in the program--money that pays the higher cost of teaching in small groups. But typically, the teachers who work in the program are less experienced than the regular classroom teachers, and many of the aides do not have college educations.

The Santa Monica group’s evaluation, paid for by the U.S. Department of Education, collected test data on 120,000 students between 1977 and 1982.

Students who benefited from the extra tutoring learned “at a somewhat faster rate than a comparison group of needy students” in grades one, two and three, according to the final report. “At the same time, the amounts of improvement are not great enough to narrow the achievement gap between the Title I students and the regular students. In fact, the gap is becoming larger.”

The study found that extra tutoring appeared to make little difference in reading for children in grades four to six, although it did help improve their test scores in math at all primary grades.

However, “By the time students reach junior high school, there was no evidence of sustained or delayed effects of Title I,” according to the evaluation report.

Congressional Supporters

Nevertheless, the program’s staunchest supporters--the leaders of both the House and Senate education committees--have continued to be heartened by the scattered evidence showing that poor and minority students are faring better today.

Between 1970 and 1980, the gap between the bottom quarter of school achievers and the top quarter narrowed significantly in reading, according to the federally financed National Assessment of Educational Progress. Students at the lowest levels made big gains, especially in the early grades, while the students at the top dropped back, especially in high schools.

The College Board also reported that the average score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test for black students rose from 686 in 1976 to 715 in 1984. The national average fell, however, since scores for white students declined from 944 in 1976 to 932 in 1984.

But the rate of improvement has been so slow as to convince many education leaders that the federal aid program needs to be altered.

“It has not lived up to its potential. When you spend that kind of money, we should have more to show for it,” said California Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig.

Congressional leaders have shunned a real debate on the true effectiveness of the federal program, but there have been plenty of suggestions for changes.

At one extreme, some education researchers say the program should be terminated.

“I think a basic, solid education in a regular classroom works best,” said Prof. Herbert Walberg of the University of Illinois, who published a scathing review of the Title I program last fall. “When you look at the complicated regulations, the disruptions of the classroom, the stereotyping of students, I think the program is doing more harm than good,” he said.

On the other side, groups like the Children’s Defense Fund say the program should be expanded to serve all low-achieving students. Nationwide, only about half of the eligible students are enrolled in special tutoring, and few get any help once they leave sixth grade.

Reduction Bid Fails

In 1981, under President Reagan’s budget reduction act, Title I was renamed “Chapter I,” but Reagan failed in his bid to cut its financing by 25%. In fact, in the last four years the program budget has inched up from $3.2 billion to $3.6 billion in 1985. But the budget growth has not kept up with inflation, supporters maintain.

From its beginning, Title I wavered between a poverty program and an education program, and its financing formula is a combination of both, said Jennings, the House committee counsel.

Critics, however, say the money is spread too thin to have much effect. About 14,000 of the nation’s 16,000 school districts get some of the aid. In the Los Angeles school district, 210 of the 410 elementary schools operate a remedial tutoring program financed through federal aid.

Some school officials and researchers say the government should spend more money on fewer schools.

Honig would like to focus the money on the most troubled schools and allow school officials to spend it on all the children there, rather than pulling out some for separate instruction.

‘If we could work on changing a whole school, I think we could show some real results,” Honig said.

The Reagan Administration is pushing a more radical revision--giving the money directly to poor parents through educational “vouchers.”

The Administration plan, which has yet to find a congressional sponsor, would give parents the same amount of money--about $500 a year--to spend for their children’s education, either for special tutoring or for private schooling.

“We believe that parents should make the choices about their child’s education. We want to give poor and minority parents the same kind of choice that more affluent parents have,” said Anne Graham, assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education.

One person who is not offering any grand suggestions is Launor Carter, the Los Angeles researcher who retired after completing work on the massive five-year evaluation of the Title I program.

The data produced by his study permits different interpretations, he said, and he is not about to offer his own all-encompassing conclusion.

But he does have a word of caution: “Before we launch another major national program and spend all that money,” he said, “we ought to do some research to see if it works. We can’t afford to base our decision again just on faith or on somebody’s hunch about what will work.”