Debate Flares Up: Was the first federal education law a civil rights statute?
Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a Washington think tank that promotes free markets and limited government, says: No, it wasn’t. On Monday, Kosar wrote a column for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (also a right-leaning think tank) disagreeing with King’s description of the ESEA as a civil-rights law. Calling King’s version of events “bogus history,” Kosar wrote, “ESEA was not a civil-rights law. It was an anti-poverty policy, a key part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”
As evidence, Kosar notes that the original ESEA of 1965 was a conditional-aid grant focused on the disadvantages faced by low-income children. States and local school districts were free to accept or reject the money. Redistribution, and not race, was the driving force behind the law, he says. He goes on to write:
Nowhere does the statute use the words “civil rights,” nor does it speak of equalizing spending or creating an individual entitlement to, well, anything. This stands in sharp contrast to the real civil-rights legislation of the 1960s, which explicitly conferred a legally enforceable right or privilege to persons. Title I of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on “Voting Rights,” for example, sets forth prohibitions to protect individuals’ right to vote.
Noting that it distributes money to poor, non-poor, white and non-white children, “ESEA was an anti-poverty, redistributive policy then and it is now,” Kosar wrote.
But Kosar’s argument did not sit well with, among others, Matt Lehrich, the communications director at the U.S. Department of Education.
