Robert A. Taft: “The Sound Basis for Federal Aid to Education”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Throughout his first term in the Senate, Taft was a consistent critic of the welfare state created by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In his view, allowing government bureaucrats in Washington to control such basic aspects of life as employment, housing, health care, and education was the antithesis of the individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But Taft's service on a subcommittee of the Senate Labor and Education Committee in 1945 seemed to moderate his views on the role of government. The subcommittee, focused on wartime health and education, investigated why 40 percent of the nation's draft-age men had been ruled unfit for military service because of physical or mental deficiencies. It concluded that the Selective Service System shortfall was largely attributable to widespread variations in state expenditures on education and health care. These findings seemed to persuade Taft that in the modern era the federal government did bear some responsibility for individual welfare, and throughout the late 1940s he offered a series of bills along with New Deal Democrats to provide states with limited federal funds for education and housing.

In his speech to the American Association of School Administrators in Atlantic City, New Jersey, of March 1947, Taft explains why, despite his long-standing opposition to a federal role in education, he is cosponsoring a bill in the Senate (S 472) that provides states with limited federal tax dollars for their public school systems. He argues that in the United States an educated citizenry is essential to maintaining individual liberty and equal justice under law: “We cannot preserve the Republic at all unless the people are taught to read and to think so that they may understand its basic principles themselves and the application of such principles to current problems.” Throughout its history, the U.S. government allowed states great freedom to structure their school systems as they saw fit. While this freedom produced wide variations from state to state, overall Taft believed that such localized self-reliance strengthened the Republic. But he acknowledges here that because the wealth of states varies, local control of education also produces wide differences in the amounts of public money spent on education, and “the result is that children in some districts receive a poor education or no education at all.” Thus, in these circumstances, he concludes that the federal government has an obligation to ensure that all citizens, regardless of their state, receive a minimum amount of effective schooling. He declares, “It is the concern of the entire nation to see that the principles of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution are translated into reality.”

In the bill he co-sponsored, Taft took great pains to ensure that federal aid to education would not result in federal domination of education. The bill stipulated that states and local communities would continue to have sole authority to manage their schools and that any federal monies had to supplement, not supplant, efforts made by local authorities to provide for the education of their children. The bill required a state to spend at least 2.2 percent of its annual tax revenues on education in order to be eligible for federal funds. But federal aid would be provided to a state only if one-half of its annual expenditures on education failed to provide at least $40 for each child in public schools. Thus, federal funds would be extended only to poor states that were making good faith efforts but, because of the circumstances of their economies, had insufficient revenues to provide quality education to their children. Although his sponsorship of federal aid for education and housing surprised political friends and foes alike, Taft insisted that it was wholly consistent with his long-held political philosophy. His goals remained the same: preserving individual liberty, individual initiative, and equal opportunity. The only modification he had made was in the means used to attain his ends. In this manner, then, Taft struck a balance between the needs of the modern industrial state and his traditional conservative principles. Federal aid to education, he argues, is “a tremendous step forward in assuring to America the means of striving forward constantly toward the ultimate ideal of complete equality and complete liberty.”