The Blair Education Bill: A Lost Opportunity in American Public Education

Abstract

Through the 1880s, Senator Henry Blair (R-NH) spearheaded an effort to erode local control of education by turning Congress into a source of funds and oversight for state-level primary and secondary schools. The Blair Bill won support from an interregional, interracial, bipartisan coalition. It passed in the Senate on three separate occasions, was endorsed by presidents, and was a frequent topic of discussion among party elites. Yet in 1890 the bill failed for the last time, and local control would go largely unchanged until the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In this article we explore the decade-long battle surrounding Blair's proposal. Our analysis focuses on this lost opportunity as a way of highlighting the coalitional and institutional dynamics that work to prevent reform in an otherwise favorable environment. In this way, we contribute to a large literature on the uneven course of American state development.

The South in American Political Development

“…Southern representatives might have interpreted the stakes in terms of white supremacy, though they must also have disagreed; but nonsoutherners converged on similar positions regardless of the region's racial order. Competing groups of southernerswhite and Black-united in support of late-nineteenth-century education proposals ( Jenkins & Peck 2021a, Rose 2022, as did other groupings of Black and white southerners in support of populism (Ali 2013); they also united to oppose them. In each case, the competing projects were both regional and national in scope.…”