Educators Honor 'Doc' Howe's Contributions

By Erik W. Robelen

Hanover, N.H.

Just months after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, it fell on the shoulders of the newly appointed U.S. commissioner of education to implement the law that ushered in an unprecedented federal role in schools.

"I had the job of setting up a system for doing something nobody had ever done before," Harold "Doc" Howe II recalled last week: sending federal money to the then nearly 27,000 U.S. school districts, "whose addresses we didn't even know." In contrast to the limited federal support previously available for precollegiate education, the ESEA would provide aid to virtually all districts. "ESEA is the foundation of a major move of the federal government into education," Mr. Howe said.

The former federal official said his ESEA efforts were further complicated by the recent passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required, among other provisions, that districts receiving federal funds demonstrate that they were not discriminating on the basis of race. "In effect, we took on the job of desegregating the Southern schools so that we could give them Title...