Victoria Young: The Education Lessons JFK Left Behind

by Victoria Young

President Kennedy affirmed that our country “requires a citizenry that understands our ideas and difficulties. It needs experienced manpower and brainpower to match the electrical power of totalitarian discipline. It calls for a scientific hard work which demonstrates the superiority of freedom. And it demands an electorate in every state with sufficiently broad horizons and ample maturity of judgment to guidebook this nation safely via no matter what lies ahead.”

— Final Specific Message to the Congress on Schooling, January 29, 1963

Is what this nation requires right now from public training any various than what JFK had envisioned?

Kennedy’s initial appeal to Congress on behalf of public colleges in 1961 was for support of his “twin goals”: “a new common of excellence in schooling and the availability of this kind of excellence to all who are inclined and ready to pursue it.”

Victoria M. Youthful

By April 11, 1965, in excess of two years following JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, his “twin goals” became the aim of nationwide training policy when President Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA),

An Act

“To strengthen and enhance educational quality and educational options in the Nation’s elementary and secondary colleges.” 

Nowadays we struggle under the excess weight of the federal accountability law, No Kid Left Behind, with its goal — to “close the achievement gap by way of accountability, flexibility, and choice” — set the federal mandate for high-stakes yearly standardized exams.Costly and with detrimental consequences particularly for the college students the law intended to support, this country should reconsider what it wants to achieve.

Kennedy emphasized the need to deal with “depressed areas” and “slum neighborhoods” the place children are known to have: bad diet programs, unaddressed speech, dental and visual problems, and the place older students are in need to have of occupation advice and appropriate recreational actions.

The 1st titles of ESEA addressed Kennedy’s issues for a spectrum of down sides:

Title I – Training of Young children of Minimal Cash flow Households to give economic assistance to assistance educationally-deprived young children.

Title II – College Library Sources, Textbooks, and Other Instructional Resources to supply for access to educational components for all students in the State.

Title III – Supplementary Educational Centers and Companies, offered to the entire local community, to provide companies not at the moment presented but deemed essential to educational improvement.

Kennedy stressedthat as opposed to in the well being and agricultural fields where they “have established the really worth of systematic research and advancement,” the training profession “lags behind in making use of the benefits of study.”

To treatment the difficulty

Title IV – Educational Investigation and Coaching Cooperative Analysis Act to provide investigation, coaching, and dissemination of info aimed at enhancing the quality of teaching.

With variability of the states acknowledged, ESEA’s final title clarified the intent of federal training law.

Title V – State Departments of Training aimed to stimulate and aid in strengthening the leadership sources of State educational companies.

In each unique message to Congress on education JFK expounded even more and even more on the correct federal function. He declared, “Let us put to rest the unfounded fears that ‘Federal funds means Federal management.’” And he held up the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Morrill Act of 1862 that established the Land-Grant School system, and the Nationwide Defense Schooling Act of 1958 as examples exactly where “the Congress has repeatedly acknowledged its duty to strengthen our educational program without weakening local duty.”

And the 35 webpage bill was completed with a statement limiting the boundaries of federal energy:

Federal Manage of Schooling Prohibited

Nothing contained in this Act shall be construed to authorize any department, company, officer, or worker of the United States to exercise any course, supervision, or handle more than the curriculum, system of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution or school technique, or above the variety of library resources, textbooks, or other print or published instructional supplies by any educational institution or school system.”

With the passage of ESEA, the main suggestions that Kennedy and his advisers believed would strengthen and increase public schools had been preserved, temporarily.

Right now both our federal boundaries and guiding rules are unclear. Today, we are taking aim at teachers but with accountability schemes rather than the large-high quality planning and the continuing schooling that most people feel is needed. So 50years after the death of President Kennedy, let us recall how he wished to realize success.

Acknowledging that the good quality of the college students depends on “both the quality and the relative quantity of teachers and services,” he emphasized class size, teachers’ salaries, and satisfactory classrooms as frequent troubles particularly in require of assistance in states with constrained financial resources.

Focusing on teachers, JFK felt “our instant concern must be to afford them each and every feasible possibility to boost their skilled capabilities and their command of the subjects they teach.” He believed “teachers would revenue from a complete yr of full-time review in their topic-matter fields. Really couple of can afford to do so.” The funding then proposed was to “begin to make such opportunities obtainable to the elementary and secondary college teachers of this nation and thereby accord to this occupation the support, prestige and recognition it deserves.”

And quoting Thomas Jefferson, “Allow us maintain our eye steadily on the entire method,” Kennedy asked that his ultimate schooling proposal “be considered as a whole, as a combination of elements created to fix issues that have no single remedy.”

The nations’ objectives were to be met “on the basis of three fundamental guidelines:

A. An appraisal of the entire selection of educational problems…

B. A selective application of Federal aid – aimed at strengthening, not weakening, the independence of existing college programs and aimed at meeting our most urgent education difficulties and objectives… and

C. Much more powerful implementation of present laws…”

To honor constrained federal involvement in education, the “appraisal” is a necessary 1st step since federal “participation should be selective, stimulative and, where feasible, transitional” and “the proper Federal function is to determine national schooling ambitions and to aid regional, state and private authorities create the required roads to reach these objectives.”

These days, we will only be able to finish building the essential roads by 1st getting rid of the road blocks. We must place an end to the Bush-era, check-based, federally-mandated accountability law. We know No Little one Left Behind did not reside up to its title but the title is a worthy endpoint.

With our distribution of high quality schooling unequal, why do we fail to concentrate on issues the place they exist? With the availability of assets and supports limited in financially depressed places, why do we invest on unnecessary tests even though ignoring the true wants of children? When we know how to boost teacher good quality, why do we not do it?

Did we get our eyes off the target? Or do we struggle to realize success due to the fact the target was modified?

Bettering schools calls for we understand the difficulties, comprehend the ideas, and set the appropriate targets. That is the lesson left behind.

Nowadays, because an inept and dysfunctional congress has failed to act on No Kid Left Behind (ESEA), we have the opportunity to demand that President Kennedy’s twin ambitions be put back into the prolonged-overdue renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Schooling Act.

There is nothing stopping us from taking this little, but essential, step back.

Victoria M. Younger is a extended-time advocate for excellence in education, a training veterinarian, and mom of two university graduates from Idaho’s land-grant university. She is the writer of The Critical Voice of the Men and women, Past and Current: Education’s Missing Ingredient.

Victoria Young: The Education Lessons JFK Left Behind