Chapter 2: Partisanship and Ideology in the ESEA Reauthorization in the 106th and 107th Congresses: Foundations for the New Political Landscape of Federal Education Policy

Abstract

Jn January 1995, a coalition of House freshman members from the newly elected Republican majority called for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education. One of the leaders of the coalition, Representative Joe Scarborough (R-FL), said in May of 1995: great federal experiment in education is over. It is failed. It is time to move on (cited in Jennings, 1998, p. 156). On May 18, the House of Representatives passed a budget blueprint for the next 7 years that would cut education programs, including Head Start and Safe and Drug Free Schools, by $40 billion. The House also turned the federal school lunch program over to the states via block grants and set funding $10 billion below the projected growth in demand. Majority Leader Newt Gingrich (R-GA) invoked the building of the opportunity society as justification for cutting social programs for children and families. In the summer of 1995, the House of Representatives voted to eliminate funding for President Bill Clinton's Goals 2000 legislation and to cut funding for Title I, the major federal compensatory education program, by 17%. During the ensuing 6 years, many observers believed that the federal role in education was in decline. The Clinton administration's enforcement of compliance with the 1994 Improving America's Schools Act (IASA) was weak, and almost all of Clinton's new education proposals, from national testing to class-size reduction, were fought by the Republican House and Senate. In 1996, Republican presidential nominee Robert Dole's major proposals were teaching moral values in schools and a multibillion-dollar school voucher plan (elimination of the U.S. Department of Education was a plank in the GOP platform) (Jennings, 1998, p. 172). Six years later, in January 2002, Republican President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. The most conservative congressional Republicans, who opposed the bill's extensive new testing mandates and absence of school voucher provisions, were largely left out in the cold as the president won a major domestic political victory. In fact, House Education and Workforce Committee chairman