UC Berkeley

Despite the transnational turn in American history, relatively little research in U.S. education history steps beyond the traditional nation-based framework. This dissertation examines the War on Poverty's unprecedented focus on racial inequities and education-based policies within a global context. Employing an array of primary sources, the dissertation demonstrates how global political economic forces shaped 1960s policymaker and activist concerns from which these novel and historically contingent policies developed. To illuminate these processes, the dissertation analyses three seminal reforms in which questions of education, racial equality, and the welfare state intersected: the Job Corps, Head Start, and bilingual education.

The first two chapters illustrate how global economic shifts translated into competing explanations for why poor blacks struggled to secure work and rear children respectively. In doing so, both chapters demonstrate how policymakers offered education-based anti-poverty reforms as genuine concessions while simultaneously rechanneling black activists' concerns from economic reforms toward cultural, educational ones. The Job Corps as a means of addressing a "culture of poverty" that placed exceptional obstacles on young black men entering the job market and mainstream America. Head Start as a notion of the inadequacy of family services coupled with growing family dysfunction symbolized by the matriarchal black family.

The last chapter illuminates how bilingual education similarly resulted from concerns over global economic shifts shaping vying claims of Latino cultural citizenship versus cultural deficit. Likewise, while both policymakers and activists sought to promote a coherent Latino ethnic community as a means to assist poor Latinos, the focus on bilingual education ultimately benefited policymakers over activists. Each of these three reforms provides a complementary lens to understand how global developments intersected with national contestations over race, class, gender, and culture. Combined, the cases demonstrate how 1960s education-based reforms served both as arenas of ideological contestation resulting from global instabilities and as state instruments that produced institutional and behavioral changes with significant material effects.

The dissertation offers two key contributions. First, the dissertation integrates federal educational policy history as part of the broader history of the American welfare state. Second, the dissertation positions postwar education and welfare state reforms within global economic and political developments largely unnoted in U.S. education history. Understanding the layered history of these political, economic, and ideological shifts is significant because, despite the retrenchment of the traditional liberal welfare state, the relation of racial disparities to poverty and the state reliance on education-based reforms to address both concerns continues to drive U.S. public and policymaker debates.