Title VII, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Key Historical Marker

Background

At the time the U.S. Congress took up the Title VII amendment to the ESEA, only a few projects in bilingual education existed around the country. Arguably, widespread experience with the concept of bilingual education was not what motivated the Congress to action. The concept had yet to prove itself on a large scale, and other factors were at play. First, state administrators of the major funding source for poor children, Title I of ESEA, were often inattentive to the language barrier between schools and ethnic minority children. Title I, a formula-driven source of federal funds, tended to focus on the needs of African American children in urban areas and poor White students in small towns and rural Appalachia. Latino and other language minority children did not receive much attention, even though the primary requirement of poverty was often met by those children and the schools they attended.

An important factor that may have contributed to the passage of Title VII as a focused discretionary program was the beginning of political activism by Latinos in California, Florida, New York, and Texas. “Viva Kennedy” clubs had delivered large numbers of votes for the Democratic Party in 1960. President Johnson had a strong base of support among Mexican Americans in Texas, and his party was losing support due to the mishandling of the war in Vietnam. It was time to return to “the base” of the party. Lyndon Johnson had befriended many political leaders in South Texas for years. His closeness to Mexican American voters was a factor that had led to his election to the U.S. Senate in 1948. Johnson had won the Democratic primary, in which vote fraud in a Mexican American town gave him an 87-vote margin over his opponent. “Box 13,” as the scandal came to be known, had allowed Johnson to move from the House of Representatives into the U.S. Senate. Overall, support for the Title VII bill was good, and the sponsoring senators had strong support in their respective states. In short, passage of the bill was not difficult because there was no organized opposition. There is no evidence that the bill was an attempt to repay political favors by one party or the other. But the bill's bipartisan sponsorship was an indication that the bill was meant to appeal to the growing minority constituency in the three states with the largest numbers of Latino voters.

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