Responses
1982 ◽
Vol 52
(4)
◽
pp. 460-471
◽
I have learned two things from these interesting papers. One is that the federal role in education keeps changing. The federal government has different objectives at different times, and that is understandable because society changes. The needs of the 1780s,when the Northwest Ordinance was adopted, were not those of the 1890s; I would even argue that the needs of the 1960s and 1970s are not those of the 1980s. The second thing I have learned from these papers, especially from Henry Levin's analysis of federal aid, is that even when we know to what objective we wish to address the federal role, we are not likely to get there, at least not directly. We may get there, but by an extremely complicated route.