Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)

The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was created in 1964 to carry out the mandate of the Economic Opportunity Act. The OEO sponsored many of the most important social, economic, and educational initiatives to come out of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty. The OEO coordinated the Job Corps, Neighborhood Youth Corps, and other vocational training and study programs, as well as a “domestic Peace Corps” named Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and the community action program (CAP) that led to the early-childhood Head Start program. Arising out of an optimistic view of government's power to effect social change through education and access to opportunity, the War on Poverty, and the OEO in particular, represented a high water mark for the involvement of social and educational theorists in determining the social policy of the American government.

When President Johnson, a Democrat, created the OEO, he retained control of it by keeping it under the Executive Office of the President where he felt that it could avoid becoming part of the Washington bureaucracy. The first director of the OEO, Sargent Shriver, drafted much of the Economic Opportunity Act and had helped create the Peace Corps. Prior to entering the Kennedy administration, Shriver had worked with urban Catholic schools in Chicago and had served as president of the Chicago Board of Education. Shriver saw to it that OEO programs were designed to maximize local community control, and reflected the influence of the late President Kennedy's Mobilization for Youth Program, which organized and coordinated educational and community efforts aimed at lowering juvenile delinquency.

Unlike welfare programs, the philosophy behind the OEO programs was to provide the poor with opportunities for advancement through education and training. The Job Corps, for example, was an attempt to provide urban and rural poor young adults, many of whom were high school dropouts, with vocational and technical education that would prepare them for quality jobs. “At-risk” youth from social environments where drug use and crime were rampant became the target for this “second chance” vocational education program. Job Corps was patterned on the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of the 1930s, and Job Corps candidates were also often relocated from their hometowns to other cities to receive their training.

Unlike the CCC, the Job Corps relied on the private, for-profit sector to serve as partners in the training and employment effort. Large corporations like Xerox, Westinghouse, and Litton Industries were deeply involved with many Job Corps centers. Long before the notion of “privatization” of federal programs became popular, the Job Corps served as a government conduit to private businesses interested not only in government contracts but in participating in this great social experiment.

Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) was a program that appealed to the altruism of many [Page 674]individual Americans who wished to serve disadvantaged populations. Like the Peace Corps, VISTA relied on individuals who agreed to leave their homes to volunteer among the poor for set periods of time. Qualified volunteers worked directly with neighborhood and community organizations to combat malnutrition, inadequate housing, poor education, and other conditions associated with poverty. Active in cities, VISTA also served the rural poor in Appalachia and migrant farm workers in Florida, California, Texas, and other agricultural states.

...