Page 169 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Political Organizations
making land grants for universities and some public schools and provid-
ingsupplementalgrantstoschoolsforoperatingcosts. 104 TheElementary
and Secondary Education Act of 1964, along with its amendments and
reauthorizations, was the backbone of new federal education legislation.
Its emphasis on assisting low-achieving children, supporting bilingual
education, and funding educational technology is a reflection of its ori-
gins in the civil rights and social movements of the early 1960s.
It is revealing that at the federal level, the courts have been as im-
portant as Congress in establishing education policy, through decisions
dealing with desegregation, school prayer, and equal access. The fact
that the arguably most popular and successful federal education pro-
gram, Head Start, is operated through the Department of Health and
Human Services rather than the Education Department, is symbolic of
the character of federal policy. Although the 1980s and 1990s witnessed
a national dialogue about education and calls for national education
standards under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, for the
most part the federal government’s role in education is still channeled
throughequalityandsocialwelfareissues.Asanefforttosubsidizeeduca-
tionaltechnologyfordisadvantagedschoolsandothersthroughtheFCC,
E-Rate is generally consistent with this orientation in national education
policy.
Another feature of E-Rate is also typical of education policy making
in the United States: fragmentation among constituency groups and be-
tween constituency group leaders and members. Several major groups
involve themselves in education policy making, most visibly the NEA
and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), but also the Parent
Teachers Association (PTA), League of Women Voters, the NAACP, and
others. In part because of the structure of education policy making,
many organizations – especially the teachers’ unions – sometimes oper-
ate as federations of state groups rather than unitary national organiza-
tions. The largest of the NEA’s state organizations, the California Teach-
ers Association (CTA), does not even directly bear the national group’s
name. On some issues, NEA and CTA operate quasiindependently; on
others they act as a single organization. This makes educational orga-
nizations particularly effective at influencing state policies, but some-
what less so at coordinating policy advocacy across states. It also situates
the unions to be particularly effective in electoral politics because they

104
Sidney W. Tiedt, The Role of the Federal Government in Education (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1966).
152