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| Sign for "Camp Roosevelt" - the first New Deal CCC project base Image courtesy of Public Works Administration Wikipedia Article |
Yesterday, 27th May 2017, would have been John
F. Kennedy’s 100th birthday. He, the 35th President of
the United States, in the popular liberal mind, seems utterly at odds with the
current and 45th President, Donald Trump, which is why comments I
read in The
Guardian yesterday, for the admittedly right-wing historian Niall
“Imperialism was a good thing” Ferguson didn’t ring quite true to me on first
glance. Professor Ferguson remarks on JFK were thus: “I think the Kennedy myth
will live on and, the longer it lives, the further it will be removed from
historical reality… It’s a chronicle of malfeasance and yet the man is
remembered as a hero,” he said. “Maybe there’s hope for Donald Trump yet.”
His reasoning was that with influential social thinkers
like Arthur Schlesinger exalted and
eulogised the Kennedy’s presidency with the idea of what-could-have-been
Camelot idyll and the glamour associated with figures like Jackie O. This
papered over “his razor-thin margin of victory, possibly won with some mafia
help, the crazy philandering that even jeopardised national security when it
turned that out he and a mobster were sharing a girlfriend with the KGB… [and]
bugging Martin Luther King through brother Bobby.” He finishes calling the
dealing of the Kennedy White House as “extraordinarily scuzzy”. With such a
list of indictments, even a dyed in the wool liberal like myself starts asking
questions.
This led me to think how or what of FDR’s legacy is
enshrined in his New Deal and response to Pearl Harbour historicism that too
ignores perhaps some of the man’s failings as a President. I’m not trying to
tar his name or diminish the honour of being a Roosevelt scholar but more want
to understand the man, quoting another controversial statesman, “warts and all”
– particularly around 5-18 education, referred to as K-12 in the US. So, I began to dig…
Education in the US, curiously for a Brit and advocate of
a National Education Service to mirror our NHS, sits and is funded locally
rather than nationally due to the 10th Amendment of the Constitution: “The
powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited
by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Public education was not mentioned as one of those federal powers, and so
historically has been delegated to the local and state governments. This hasn’t
stopped governments spending federally on education (to me, like healthcare, a
core function of state – again at odds with the current President) but did for
FDR. As spoken about in a
previous blog, FDR’s tenure as POTUS was during the U.S.’s worst economic
crisis – the Great Depression following the Wall Street Crash in 1929. In this
period, approximately 80,000 public school teachers were left unemployed, teachers' salaries were cut and 145,700 pupils across America had their schools closed with many more receiving reduced or limited schooling. Resentment to teachers’ continued employment by those left jobless by the crash too created a febrile
atmosphere for educators.
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| First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt giving milk to poor children in Vassar, New York - 1933 Image courtesy of Getty |
Despite these challenges to the national education system,
little is ever mentions about education in FDR retrospectives save for the New
Deal youth programmes the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) – offering work to
unemployed, unmarried men aged 18–25 from relief families - and the National
Youth Administration (NYA) – a plank of the WPA providing work and education
for Americans between the ages of 16 and 25. I had always assumed the New Deal
offered federal funds into schools at a time when federal government became
increasingly involved in the lives of its citizens in terms of housing, food,
transportation, and employment but it did not increase its involvement in
schools education at all. By 1934 the number of teachers, supervisors, and
principals in education had fallen to the level of 1927; the cost per child
enrolled declined to the level of 1922; the average salaries of teachers,
principals, and supervisors dropped to the level of 1921; and the total capital
outlay for schools was back to the level of 1913. Over just 5 years, two decades of educational advances disappeared, seemingly overnight. On a side note, when the CCC — which was essentially a youth employment program — began operations in 1933, its leaders soon discovered that there was a critical need not only for technical training, but also basic literacy instruction. Each camp then set up classrooms where CCC employees could voluntarily take remedial classes. As the program progressed, more advanced instruction was offered in such subjects as mathematics and history, which gave more jobs to teachers, along with more basic technical and vocational training.
As hard times arrived, people outside education naturally
enough wanted to save money by trimming education down to its sparest
functions. Many schools were closed. Georgia shut down 1,318 schools, leaving
170,790 children without instruction. Other districts reduced their hours of
operation. In Dayton, Ohio, schools were open only three days a week. The
majority of schools cut recently introduced programs such as art, music, manual
arts, home economics, physical education, and health. Vocational education, the
foremost educational innovation of the 1920s, was virtually eliminated. In New
York State, 97 of 110 school districts with populations higher than five
thousand had no vocational education. Resources were squeezed - one fifth-grade
class in Waukegan, Illinois, was forced to share a single textbook, from which
the teacher read aloud. Many schools increased the teacher/student ratio of
their classes as an economy measure. Enrolment in high schools also increased,
as students who might have taken jobs if they were available stayed in school
for want of work. Between 1930 to 1940 the number of public-high-school
students increased from 4.4 million to 6.5 million, further straining the
resources of financially strapped schools.
This under-pressure funding did have to come from
somewhere – most of which ended up being directly from the states, rather than
federally. This was not without its issues. The decline in property values and
general prosperity often dried up sources of school funding at the local level.
Increasingly states assumed the responsibility of paying for schools,
standardising both financial practices and curriculum. Many states began providing
"foundation grants"—a "floor" of guaranteed funding for
every district in a state, however localities remained free to spend more or
less on their own schools; this state funding was designed to ensure that a
minimal amount of instruction was financed.
Alongside the increase in funding pressure on the states,
the inequality in funding of school districts remained a severe problem that
was related to the relative wealth or poverty of the individual
states. South Carolina, one of the poorest states in the nation, for example,
could not raise the funds necessary to finance schools on the level of a wealthy state such as Delaware. In response to the crisis, the Roosevelt Administration provided immediate relief in the form of a $20 million federal appropriation that was used to help shore up those schools and districts most in danger of collapse. Other recommendations were put to FDR: the National Survey of School Finance
recommended that the national government provide foundation grants of $15 per
pupil per year to the states, as the states had to their local school
districts. This never came to pass. Similarly, in 1936 Mississippi senator
Patrick Harrison proposed a federal grant of $100 million to the states, but
the bill was defeated.
In 1938 the Roosevelt administration did create an
education advisory committee, led by Floyd Reeves of the University of Chicago,
to make further recommendations concerning educational equality. The commission
recommended sweeping changes in educational financing, with the bulk of funding
coming from Washington. The recommendation was killed in Congress. Many
lawmakers believed increased control of education from Washington would violate
the long tradition of local control of schools. Southerners feared the federal
government would desegregate the schools, and budget balancers on Capitol Hill
and at the White House were afraid the program would plunge the government into
receivership.
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| Children receiving a free school lunch as part of WPA funded project Image courtesy of the Great Depression Project. |
In the putting together of the last six paragraphs the rosy glow of my New Deal idealism has been slightly burnished. The were some successes: public works relief built new schools (as did the later Lanham Act) and gave children a hot school lunch (as a getting people into work as cooks and servers, rather than a education-public health initiative). However, it now feels that FDR’s heralded accomplishment of investing in jobs, infrastructure and skills training seems to have come at the expense of investment centrally in a contracting and collapsing education system, filled with systemic failings and institutionalised inequality. Whilst the New Deal did deliver jobs – unemployment fell from 14 million in 1933 to under 8 million by 1937 – was this sustainable, especially with a workforce being developed with less schooling than the one before it and when the time came for less investment from central government? In 1938 unemployment actually increased again to more than 10 million, after Roosevelt (who had lost his working majority in Congress) reduced government spending. It wasn’t until the Second World War that America’s economy really surged with 17 million new civilian jobs created, industrial productivity increased by 96% and corporate profits after tax doubled. This, coupled with the social ideology of fighting the war, as a fight against foreign aggression and tyranny, galvanised society into wanting, and the increase in tax dollars allowing for, increased spending on a state level. Whilst the New Deal was “direct, vigorous” action on unemployment, it was neglect of the education system, which suffered under this abandonment.
To return to Kennedy, it wasn’t until his successor Lyndon B. Johnson passing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that the federal government created a lasting program to fund education for 5-18 year olds federally. Channelling FDR, Johnson said: “Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty”. President Trump is now cutting the Education Department’s funding by $9 billion, or 13% of the budget approved by Congress last month – much of this part of the LBJ money. He wants to cut state grants for career and technical education (CTE), for example, by $166 million, and nearly halve funding for the roughly $1 billion federal work-study program. With these sounding like the remit of the CCC and NYA, does America need a New Deal on education – and one far more wide reaching in this area than the one in the ‘30s. As this article shows, and with more cuts ahead, it could be vital.