Aims and origins

The ethics protocol for phase one of the Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education project1, launched in September 1997, began with the following statement:

• • the motives, sources of ideas, successes and failures of innovators in a range of subjects in a variety of institutions, and implications for staff satisfaction and rewards;

• • the characteristics of innovations generated by individuals, institutions, internally and externally available funding, external scrutiny, national policies and programmes, international models and research;

• • the factors (inter-personal, institutional and structural) which do or do not stimulate and support innovation;

• • the contribution of new developments in communication and information technologies to innovations in teaching and learning;

• • innovation as creation, adaptation, transfer, development, dissemination;

• • the contexts of innovation, including those of finance and institutional scale and structure.

This first phase of the project was thus focused mainly on ‘the experiences of innovators’ with respect to a wide range of innovations, and was carried out largely by means of an interview survey.

Evaluation had made a grand entry into the vocabulary of social science and social action. An evaluation movement, especially in education, had been created, though it became most visible with the publication in 1966 of the Coleman report on Equality of Educational Opportunity, a report on segregation and education that had been commissioned by Congress under the Civil Rights Act. The Coleman report was the outcome of a major national survey, and it brought large-scale research into the service of policy-related evaluation. Between 1964 and 1966, however, the programmes we have been considering developed their own evaluation momentums of different kinds. Consideration of judgments that were emerging with regard to the educational war on poverty is a question of reviewing not just formal evaluations but also opinion more widely. It means considering the components and vocabularies of programmes and processes, the theories and ideologies they represented, the nature of the applause and the critiques becoming as important as the programmes themselves. Within their brief to report on the lack of educational opportunities ‘ by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin’, the Coleman team underlined the process of which it formed one part:

It is with this ‘effort to understand’ the processes affecting not only minority children but also the ‘ children of the poor’ as addressed by Title I and other measures, that we are concerned in this chapter.

Poverty and its related concerns and concepts leaped to the centre of the stage in American politics and educational and social policy in 1964–5, but the complex groundwork had been determined particularly in the previous decade. The key strands in the developments of the mid-1960s are visible in the late 1950s in terms of migration, slums and cities; civil rights and issues of race and desegregation; the interest of psychologists in early childhood and the effects of environment; the manpower concerns of cold war, Korean war and space race. By the early 1960s all of these were converging into a set of policy definitions given impetus and focus by the ‘discovery of poverty’. It was around the concept of poverty and associated social and educational phenomena that the new configuration of analyses and purposes took shape.

Poverty was not new to America, nor was the search for educational and other social remedies. American discomfort became acute in the 1960s, however, given new awareness of the nature and extent of its own strata of poverty and world preoccupation with poverty and hunger. What Americans learned most clearly at this point was that post-war hopes that their own poor and ‘pockets of poverty’ would diminish and disappear through sustained affluence had proved to be unfulfilled by the early 1960s. The British were to find similarly in the late 1950s that their post-war welfare state had also failed to eliminate poverty.

Post-war America held strongly to the view that the economic base of continuing prosperity was unassailable.

President Johnson is reported to have described the educational programme of his War on Poverty, at a planning meeting, in the following terms:

Accurate or not, the reported comment encapsulates the mood that Johnson inherited and to which he gave his authority. In his Message on Poverty to Congress on 16 March 1964 he announced the goal. There were immense opportunities, there was unfinished work to be accomplished: ‘To finish that work I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory’ (A: Ferman, 1965, 426). In his Message on Education to Congress the following year, Johnson announced the forthcoming education bill as having ‘a national goal of full educational opportunity’, targeted particularly at the children of low-income families: ‘poverty has many roots but the taproot is ignorance’. He told America again in January 1965: ‘we must start where men who would improve their society have always known they must begin-with an educational system restudied, reinforced, and revitalized’ (A: US Congress, House, Committee on Education and Labor, 1965, 2-10). The aims and means for conducting the war were quickly adopted and made explicit by Johnson and his administration. His Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, summarized the theme in 1964, with metaphors and concepts embodying assumptions that now had common currency in policy-making circles:

The important aspects of the Plowden committee for us are the emphases we have seen emerging in the last chapter – contact with American ideas and practice in the war on poverty, and the elaboration of a strategy to combat the effects of poverty on education, not, as in the earlier concern with secondary education, to combat the injustices of social class with structural change. This approach to family and environmental poverty, ‘area’ solutions, preschool provision and the schools was to be carried into a variety of arenas not only as a direct result of the Plowden report, but also through the diverse agendas of debate and action it established. It would no longer be possible – as had been the case – for textbooks of the sociology of education to omit primary education, and discussion of educational priority areas in the report was to take educational research, policy and controversy in new directions.

The preoccupations of Working Party 2 and their drafting intentions became less sharp and explicit in the final report, though the basic intentions and proposals remained intact. Criticism of the report was to include a failure to take sufficient account of sociological factors, including particularly social class (B: Bernstein and Davies, 1969), and the over-reliance of the report and its commissioned research on the concept of ‘parental attitude’. What has not been fully understood, however, is that the working party and committee deliberately chose poverty and related concepts as a more immediate and policy-productive context for the discussion of primary schools in deprived areas.

Poverty was ‘rediscovered’ and became a serious issue in public debate and policy in Britain in the late 1950s and in the United States in the early 1960s. In both countries after the Second World War there was a popular and strongly held view, by governments as well as by political and social scientists, that poverty had either disappeared or had survived in ‘pockets’ or in highly specific cases which would be eliminated either by an expansive, affluent society or, in the British case, by careful ‘welfare state’ planning. In the late 1950s, British social administration researchers, largely associated with Richard Titmuss, began to thrust their rediscovery of poverty into public consciousness, as did a number of American writers in the period of the Kennedy administration in 1961–3 on the basis of investigations mainly of Appalachia and the urban ghettos. Taking different forms and with different emphases, there was also mounting concern with the concept of inequality, related in the United States primarily to race and civil rights, and in Britain to social class, the latter increasingly centred from the 1950s on divisions and inequalities in secondary education.

Varying amounts of attention and different solutions were applied to poverty and inequality in the two countries, but both concepts reentered public debate as signals that the optimistic economic and social forecasts of the late 1940s and 1950s had not yet been fulfilled. The criteria by which poverty had been measured, and had been assumed to have been severely diminished, began to be challenged.

In many respects Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was the climacteric. John W. Gardner's Task Force on Education, which reported in November 1964, was one of the agents which was pulling the threads together, weighing the precise role and potential of education in achieving the Johnson programme. Its summary begins: ‘This is a fateful moment in the history of American education… To imagine that we can build the Great Society in a few years would be a mistake… education will be at the heart of the Great Society’. There were long processes at work, and Sputnik did not deserve the credit ‘for sounding the alarm… Sputnik was no more responsible for the general ferment that ensued than for the sunshine of 1957 – Sputnik was just there when it happened’ (A: LBJ Lib, WHCF Box 37, pp i, A-II-1). Francis Keppel was fond of describing Khrushchev as America's ‘best education Commissioner’, the space panic as the trigger for the educational developments which followed. Whatever weight is given to that event it is a combination of processes that accounts for the 1965 concentration of the educational attack on poverty. As one analysis of the politics of this educational ‘victory’ concluded: ‘the final passage of the school-aid bill cannot be explained by a single major change at the exclusion of others… victory must be viewed in the context of several inextricably interrelated factors’ (A: Meranto, 1967, 131).

After hearings in sub-committees of the House and Senate, the bill was enacted with extraordinary rapidity in April 1965 clearing the Senate on 9 April by 73 votes to 18.

Following the Plowden report the British government made its shortterm allocation for building purposes in priority areas, cautiously invited local authorities to recommend schools where teachers would be eligible for a special payment in recognition of exceptional difficulty and, under the Urban Programme introduced in 1968, included expenditure on education, notably nursery education. The concept of educational priority areas was widely accepted by the local authorities, and commitments to identifying and supporting schools were strong in many parts of the country. Situated amongst these developments was a national EPA ‘programme’ under which five ‘projects’ were located in England and Scotland, financed jointly by the Department of Education and Science and the Social Science Research Council. The programme was negotiated primarily by Michael Young, who had been on the Plowden Committee and was chairman of the SSRC, A.H. Halsey, Director of the Department of Social and Administrative Studies at the University of Oxford, and the Secretary of State for Education and Science, Anthony Crosland, to whom Halsey was at the time a part-time adviser. The EPA projects grew directly from Plowden, against an American background.

‘We all began with a Plowden orientation’, wrote Halsey in one place. The aims of the projects – to raise the educational performance of the children, to improve teacher morale, to increase the involvement of parents in their children's education, and to strengthen the role of schools in their communities – were, he wrote elsewhere, ‘ directly derived from Plowden’ (B: Halsey, in Morrison et al., 1974, ix; Halsey, 1972a, 57).

Primary education was effectively rediscovered in Britain in 1967. The American education programmes of the 1960s began to be discovered in Britain in 1967–9. In the latter case there was a time lag of almost a decade, but the concept of ‘time lag’ explains nothing. Some ideas travel fast. The educational content of the war on poverty, and of its antecedents might have been expected to do so. In the next chapter we shall focus on the Plowden committee, including its attitudes, vocal and non-vocal, to the American experience it investigated. Here we shall bypass Plowden and look at how the British saw the American developments in the period from 1964 to the early 1970s. 1964 is important in this context as the point at which American anti-poverty policies and programmes began to have weak echoes in British publications. The British press and specialist educational publications were virtually silent on the formative years of the Ford Foundation's and other initiatives of the early 1960s. Not until 1967 and after did the work of the Foundation, Martin Deutsch, Susan Gray, Frank Riessman or Head Start, for example, receive public mention. From 1964 to 1967 there was a trickle of public comment on the American policies, though mainly on the war on poverty in general, not on education specifically. Only from 1971 did the education policies and projects seriously become public property in Britain. The analysis has to be of silences as well as sounds.

It is important first to recognize the ‘private’ networks in which information did circulate – though probably even here to a severely restricted extent.