“The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.” Lyndon B. Johnson introduced his vision of a Great Society at a graduation commencement speech at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964. In the next year, Johnson would use his ambition of a Great Society to build the most important development in public policy in the post-World War II era. The Great Society operated with the objective of guaranteeing American equal opportunity. Despite some of the failures of the policies included in Johnson’s Great Society, the formulation of this depth of social policy was unprecedented, and changed the expectations …show more content…
As Patterson discusses, the systematic educational reforms that Johnson put into place were multi-faceted. They included a mix of solutions to racial, religious, and regional issues in schools. As a member of an impoverished farming family in his childhood, Johnson drew on his own past to create policy that increased the access and funding that under-privileged children had to education. One of the most important and influential notions of the education reforms from the Great Society blueprint has to do with the bi-partisanship that Johnson was able to develop. Johnson’s bill included the addition of federal funding to 90% of school districts in the United States. In doing this, Johnson not only included the schools in low-economic zones, but also in the majority of the country’s schools. Because of this inclusivity, the bill passed both the house and the senate with ease. It was politically attractive to both conservatives and liberals, as well as to the American people. The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act allowed the Great Society plan to commit the federal government to local school district aid for the first time in history. Prior to the enactment of this policy, the federal government was very uninvolved in the American Education