Jonathan Zimmerman: Schools desperately need traditional federal aid
[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University.]
Let’s suppose your neighborhood public school is falling down. Should the federal government help repair or replace it?
No, say many Republicans in Congress. The House approved $20 billion for school construction last week, as part of President Obama’s stimulus plan. On Tuesday, under pressure from GOP critics, the Senate removed these funds from its own version of the bill. Now the House and Senate have to hammer out a compromise, which Democrats want to ready for Obama’s signature by Monday.
According to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the chief architects of the Senate stimulus bill, Republicans think school construction is a “state and local role” rather than a “federal role.”
They’re wrong. During our last great economic crisis, in the 1930s, the federal government spent heavily on school construction. Indeed, Franklin D. Roosevelt made school repair and renovation a central priority of his own recovery plan. And we could all stand to learn from it.
Roosevelt’s main focus was rural schools, where the Great Depression took an especially harsh toll. Over 100,000 one-room schoolhouses still dotted the American landscape in the 1930s; many lacked heat, electricity or running water. By comparison, columnist Eunice Barnard wrote in 1934, city and suburban schools often seemed like mansions of luxury.
“Some of our children are paupers and some are millionaires in educational opportunity,” Barnard observed. “An American public school at the moment may connote anything from an unheated, dilapidated one-room shack to a 200-room palace whose frescoed walls, swimming pool, and air-conditioned interior a Roman emperor might envy.”
So Roosevelt authorized the Public Works Administration — one of the original “alphabet agencies” in his New Deal — to provide grants for school construction. By 1942, the PWA would assist in building or improving nearly 7,000 schools. It was joined by the Works Project Administration, which built 5,900 school buildings and enlarged or improved 33,000.
All told, the federal government spent over $1 billion on school construction between 1933 and 1942. So when present-day Republicans say that school building has always been the exclusive province of states and localities, they’re simply misinformed.
Federal aid to school construction would dry up in the 1950s, foundering upon the nation’s oldest dilemma: race. Southern congressmen blocked four different school-construction bills because the measures required states receiving federal money to desegregate their schools. Even John F. Kennedy, who campaigned for federal aid to school construction in 1960, failed to get his bill through Congress the following year.
By 1999, a U.S. Department of Education study found that 75 percent of American schools were in “disrepair” — and that it would take $127 billion to get them out of it. Especially in America’s inner cities, the old palaces of learning stood as sad monuments to poverty, blight and inequality.
But the Bush administration restricted federal aid to schools that were already receiving significant federal assistance. So the vast majority of schools got nothing, at least not for construction or repair.
Ironically, these same years witnessed massive and unprecedented federal incursions into teaching, curriculum and other school policies.
Under No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature educational reform, the federal government requires states to penalize or even to close schools that fail to show progress on annual student achievement tests. But federal aid to school construction? Too intrusive, GOP critics say.
That’s absurd. And it reverses Franklin Roosevelt, who recognized school construction as a perfect venue for federal intervention. In a nation founded on the ideal of human equality, no child should be left behind in a decrepit, dilapidated school. Shame on all of us, if we let that happen.
Read entire article at Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Let’s suppose your neighborhood public school is falling down. Should the federal government help repair or replace it?
No, say many Republicans in Congress. The House approved $20 billion for school construction last week, as part of President Obama’s stimulus plan. On Tuesday, under pressure from GOP critics, the Senate removed these funds from its own version of the bill. Now the House and Senate have to hammer out a compromise, which Democrats want to ready for Obama’s signature by Monday.
According to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the chief architects of the Senate stimulus bill, Republicans think school construction is a “state and local role” rather than a “federal role.”
They’re wrong. During our last great economic crisis, in the 1930s, the federal government spent heavily on school construction. Indeed, Franklin D. Roosevelt made school repair and renovation a central priority of his own recovery plan. And we could all stand to learn from it.
Roosevelt’s main focus was rural schools, where the Great Depression took an especially harsh toll. Over 100,000 one-room schoolhouses still dotted the American landscape in the 1930s; many lacked heat, electricity or running water. By comparison, columnist Eunice Barnard wrote in 1934, city and suburban schools often seemed like mansions of luxury.
“Some of our children are paupers and some are millionaires in educational opportunity,” Barnard observed. “An American public school at the moment may connote anything from an unheated, dilapidated one-room shack to a 200-room palace whose frescoed walls, swimming pool, and air-conditioned interior a Roman emperor might envy.”
So Roosevelt authorized the Public Works Administration — one of the original “alphabet agencies” in his New Deal — to provide grants for school construction. By 1942, the PWA would assist in building or improving nearly 7,000 schools. It was joined by the Works Project Administration, which built 5,900 school buildings and enlarged or improved 33,000.
All told, the federal government spent over $1 billion on school construction between 1933 and 1942. So when present-day Republicans say that school building has always been the exclusive province of states and localities, they’re simply misinformed.
Federal aid to school construction would dry up in the 1950s, foundering upon the nation’s oldest dilemma: race. Southern congressmen blocked four different school-construction bills because the measures required states receiving federal money to desegregate their schools. Even John F. Kennedy, who campaigned for federal aid to school construction in 1960, failed to get his bill through Congress the following year.
By 1999, a U.S. Department of Education study found that 75 percent of American schools were in “disrepair” — and that it would take $127 billion to get them out of it. Especially in America’s inner cities, the old palaces of learning stood as sad monuments to poverty, blight and inequality.
But the Bush administration restricted federal aid to schools that were already receiving significant federal assistance. So the vast majority of schools got nothing, at least not for construction or repair.
Ironically, these same years witnessed massive and unprecedented federal incursions into teaching, curriculum and other school policies.
Under No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature educational reform, the federal government requires states to penalize or even to close schools that fail to show progress on annual student achievement tests. But federal aid to school construction? Too intrusive, GOP critics say.
That’s absurd. And it reverses Franklin Roosevelt, who recognized school construction as a perfect venue for federal intervention. In a nation founded on the ideal of human equality, no child should be left behind in a decrepit, dilapidated school. Shame on all of us, if we let that happen.