Politics and Funding During the Nixon-Carter Years

Questions about Great Society Programs.

The decade began with some serious questioning of the unprecedented spending on education that had characterized the 1960s. President Richard Nixon's 1970 message on education reform signaled the beginning of a shift away from former president Lyndon Johnson's faith in education as a cornerstone of a Great Society. Nixon criticized some of Johnson's most highly touted compensatory education programs such as Head Start and Upward Bound. These programs, conceived to help impoverished students catch up with their middle-class peers, had made impressive gains, but testing showed those gains did not always last. President Nixon pleaded for further research into what really might work to help pull poor children up out of poverty. "We must stop congratulating ourselves for spending nearly as much money on education as does the rest of the world combined—$65 billion per year—when we are not...

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