See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan. By Gareth Davies. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xii, 387 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1532-2.)

Abstract

In See Government Grow, Gareth Davies explores how liberals and conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s came to embrace conceptions of federal responsibility in education that would have seemed unacceptably intrusive had they been proposed at the height of the Great Society. He seeks to challenge the perception that the decades since the end of the 1960s have been marked solely by a “sustained and largely successful conservative reaction against liberalism” (p. 4). Davies begins with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (esea) and the Lyndon B. Johnson administration's efforts to enforce Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But the heart of his book focuses on the Richard M. Nixon-Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan presidencies. During those years, Republican opposition to federal aid dwindled in Congress, southern school desegregation was completed, and federal civil rights protections were extended to the education of language minorities and handicapped children, the Department of Education was established, and Democrats and Republicans united to defeat Reagan's proposal to transform esea into a block grant. Indeed, Davies concludes that, notwithstanding the rhetoric of antistatism that dominated the discourse of American politics in the 1970s and early 1980s, the prospect of shrinking federal involvement in education was actually more remote after the Nixon-Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidencies than it had been before.