A Moment with Dr. Moore

August 20, 2024
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A Chance to Make Changes

Working as a teacher led President Lyndon Baines Johnson to fight for civil rights, and he recalled his time in the classroom as he urged Congress to enact the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “My first job after college,” he said, “was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. Few of the people there could speak English, and I couldn’t speak Spanish. My students were poor, and they often came to class without breakfast and hungry. And they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them, but they knew it was so because I saw it in their eyes.”

Johnson’s longing to help those students haunted him, as he would later reveal. “I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that it might help them against the hardships that lay ahead. And somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the face of a young child,”—an image that remained in his mind decades later when he became our nation’s leader. “I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students, and people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance. And I’ll let you in on a secret: I mean to use it.”

Johnson’s sense of resolve played a strong role in the passage of the 1965 act, which guaranteed that the right to vote would not be denied because of race. And it was part of Johnson’s Great Society program to empower people of color, cut poverty rates, attack disease and remove urban blight. But you couldn’t make society great if you didn’t give all young folk a quality education, as Johnson believed. “Education will not cure all of the problems of society, but without it no cure for any problem is possible,” he said.

So, we need to move “toward full educational opportunity,” as he declared in a special message to Congress on January 12, 1965. “We must demand that our schools increase not only the quantity but the quality of America’s education. For we recognize that nuclear-age problems cannot be solved with horse-and-buggy learning. The three Rs of our school system must be supported by the three Ts—teachers who are superior, techniques of instruction that are modern, and thinking about education which places it first in all our plans and hopes”—the same standards that education leaders and child advocates are reaching toward today.

And Johnson’s agenda for education came up against much of the same roadblocks that education leaders now face as they strive to provide equity in early learning nationwide. “In many places, classrooms are overcrowded, and curricula are outdated,” Johnson said as he looked at the state of preschools in his day. “Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid, and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So, we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty,” he urged the nation in 1963.

Two years later, this conviction led Johnson to launch Head Start, a program that I attended as a child from a low-income home and later worked in as a teacher early in my career. By then, Head Start had long grown from an eight-week demonstration project designed to break the poverty cycle into a full-year program that served millions of children from marginalized communities nationwide. And the expansion of the program led to the CDA®, a new credential to train teachers so they would have the skills to give the nation’s children a head start. The goal of Head Start was to help all children be school ready, but Johnson understood that he couldn’t stop there. He also had to consider the quality of learning as children advanced to higher grades.

Johnson was determined to help all children reach their full promise because he believed “the basis of our whole future as a nation and a civilized society depends on our ability to give every child all the education that he can take.” And his administration acted on these words by passing over 60 education bills, more education legislation than any White House administration before. And Johnson showed the personal meaning of this record by coming back to his first school to sign one of his major education bills.

On April 11, 1965, Johnson sat at a picnic table outside the Junction School, a one-room building in rural Texas, where he had grown up. His first teacher, Miss Katie Deadrich, was by his side as he signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which gave extensive federal funding to the nation’s schools for the first time. And being there with Deadrich brought Johnson back to his first experience of education. “I felt a very strong desire to go back to the beginnings of my own education,” Johnson said as he signed the bill, “to be reminded and to remind others of that magic time when the world of learning began to open before our eyes.”

Thoughts of the past also flooded his mind when he went to Texas State University, his alma mater, to sign the Higher Education Act of 1965. The act opened the doors of college to millions of students through scholarships and loans, including young people like those that Johnson still clearly recalled from his days teaching in Cotulla.

“I shall never forget the faces of the boys and girls in that little Mexican-American school, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor. And I think then that I made up my mind that this nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.” And that door begins to open with quality early learning that helps children escape poverty and reach their promise, as Johnson firmly believed.

I’m proof he was right since my time as a Head Start student launched me on a path to higher learning and leadership at the Council, where I support teachers in earning their CDAs. In this role, I face some of the same issues that have dogged our field since Johnson’s days. We still don’t have enough qualified teachers. And we still don’t give these valued professionals the pay they deserve. As a result, many children still don’t have a place to sit in a preschool or a skilled teacher to learn from. And now that I’m Council CEO, I want to do all I can to provide all young learners with qualified teachers, like those who gave me a head start toward success. It never occurred to me in those early years that I would have this chance to make positive changes—and I mean to use it.

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