The education policy legacy for which President Jimmy Carter, who died yesterday at age 100, is best known is almost certainly the creation of the federal Department of Education. Congress created that department in 1979 after a push by Carter to fulfill a campaign promise to the National Education Association, which had helped to get him elected.
Less well known, but more intriguing, is that Carter got elected in 1976 on a platform calling for education “freedom” and “choosing,” including support for federal aid to private education. Like so much else about the Carter administration, it began with great promise but ended in disappointment.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote that education plank of the 1976 Democratic Party platform, tells the story in his 1980 book Counting Our Blessings. The platform expressed a “commitment to the support of a constitutionally acceptable method of providing tax aid for the education of all pupils in nonsegregated schools in order to insure parental freedom in choosing the best education for their children.”
During the closing stretch of the 1976 campaign, Carter sent Catholic school administrators a letter stressing this commitment. “Throughout our nation’s history, Catholic educational institutions have played a significant and positive role in the education of our children. . . . Indeed in many areas of the country parochial schools provide the best education available,” said Carter, as quoted by Moynihan. “Therefore, I am committed to finding constitutionally acceptable methods of providing aid to parents whose children attend parochial schools.”
By Moynihan’s account, Carter’s’ education commissioner, Ernest L. Boyer, gave a speech saying that “private education is absolutely crucial to the vitality of this nation,” and that “public policy should strengthen rather than diminish these essential institutions.”
In January 1978, the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Taxation and Debt Management Generally held three days of hearings on the proposal. The transcripts of the hearings, which are published and available, stand today as a useful guide to the arguments for and against taxpayer aid to private school parents.
With federal, state, and local budgets under pressure from a combination of inflation and slow growth (sound familiar?), the potential cost savings of private education were a key part of the Carter-era argument.
Moynihan noted that the private schools were accomplishing more with less money. “I sometimes wonder if it isn’t the sheer efficiency of nongovernment education that makes it so threatening to government,” the senator from New York said, noting that New York Catholic schools were spending $462 a student while New York City public schools were spending $2,600. “These schools do as well or better at half the cost or less.”
A Republican from Pennsylvania, Senator Richard Schweiker, concurred: “[I]t is cheaper to educate children in nonpublic schools.”
Racial and economic equity (sound familiar?) was another aspect of the debate. The director of educational affairs at the Congress of Racial Equality, Victor Solomon, testified: “The rich and the upper middle class in American have always been able to vote with their feet, so to speak, on education. If they don’t like the public schools, they send their children to private schools and pay the tuition. It is time to give poor and minorities the chance to vote with their feet, the chance to use private education.”
Yet at the key moment, Carter collapsed on the issue. His secretary of health, education, and welfare, Joseph A. Califano Jr., sent a statement complaining, “tax credits are expensive. Tax credits could make other education funds more scarce.” The acting assistant secretary of Treasury for tax policy, Donald Lubick, testified in opposition to the plan. Moynihan rebuked him: “Now, sir, the president has committed himself to this.”
It was a campaign commitment that the administration abandoned. In April 1978, Carter himself publicly rejected the Moynihan legislation as too costly. “All of the proposals that I have seen in the Congress so far are both costly and unconstitutional, particularly as they apply to elementary and secondary schools,” Carter said then. “I don’t favor tuition tax credits under any circumstance, even if it was at a very slight level, because this would inevitably rapidly grow with each succeeding budget and the first thing that you know, tuition tax credits would be the major Federal expenditure for all education in the United States. . . . I think the whole concept is fallacious and I don’t like it.”
The episode discloses some of the challenges of promoting private school choice from Washington. Private school choice programs do generate savings when parents move from public schools to cheaper private alternatives, as long as the subsidy they receive is less than the level of per pupil spending. But it is the states that reap savings, while the costs of the subsidy accrue to the federal budget.
At the hearing, Moynihan was quite hard on the junior functionaries Carter sent to represent the administration on Capitol Hill. “Are you trying to get him to lose the election?” the senator thundered at one point, prophetically. “Because I will go up and down the state of New York and say that the administration broke its word. I am tired of people lying to us on this subject.”
Moynihan asked the assistant secretary for legislation in Carter’s department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Dick Warden, to give Carter a message: “The votes in the Democratic Party have come from Catholics of whom the elites very much disapprove. . . . Here is our President in those last gasping days for votes, committing himself, he made a pledge, like we all made pledges, and once again the elites of the Democratic Party are opposing the proposals.”
Ronald Reagan carried New York while defeating Carter in the 1980 presidential election. No doubt the Catholic vote was a contributing factor.
Carter’s decision to keep the campaign promise to the teachers union while breaking the campaign promise to the Catholic school administrators set a policy pattern that has lasted for decades among Democrats. (Though President Biden, a Catholic-school graduate who backed tuition tax credits as a senator in 1978, advanced and in 2021 briefly achieved a generally applicable expanded child tax credit untethered to tuition-paying. And the model of providing tax credits for private school tuition has also gained traction at the state level—especially once states realized that they could provide tax credits not only to parents, but also to businesses making contributions to scholarship funds. Twenty-one states now have such tax-credit scholarship programs.) If the pattern is to be broken, it will take a politician more in Moynihan’s mold than in Carter’s. Taxpayers and parents are waiting.
Ira Stoll is former managing editor of Education Next.
