The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 22 (2011)

Poverty, Education, and National Policyin the “Affluent Society”:
A Comparison of the United States
and Japan in the 1960s

Ichiro KURAISHI*INTRODUCTION
The year 1965 is significant for both American and Japanese education,
especially for those who are concerned with the interrelation between education, discrimination, and poverty. In the United States, under President
Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society policies, Congress
passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA 1965)
for federal aid to education for disadvantaged children, especially black children. Exactly in the same year the Japanese government published a truly
epoch-making report based on the intense debates at the Special Council for
Integration of Buraku People (Japan’s outcaste),1 which later lead to the Law
on Special Measures for “Dowa Projects of 1969. In this essay I compare theUnites States’ Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Japan’s Law on
Special Measures for Dowa Projects.
In both cases the national government, after a long period of hesitation,
decided to take action to resolve the extremely difficult social problem ofpoverty and discrimination against their minority people. However, the historical context for racial minorities in the United States, especially that of
Copyright © 2011 Ichiro Kuraishi. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be
distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission fromthe author.
*Associate Professor, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

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African American (blacks), differs considerably from that of Buraku people
in Japan. There is no doubt that discrimination against black people has its
roots in the history of slavery, but it should not be ignored that in the postbellum period the status of black people was not improved because of theactions of the white majority, and progress was made very slowly. It was not
until the 1960s that the civil rights of black people were practically secured.
In contrast, Buraku discrimination in Japan has its historical roots in the feudal system of the medieval period. Unlike discrimination against black people, Buraku discrimination is not based on racial or ethnic difference but exclusion within the same “ethnic” group based on superstitious concepts suchas that of “impurity.” In 1871 the Meiji government officially declared theabolition of feudalism and the emancipation of Buraku people. Discrimination against Buraku people, however, still continued widely in many aspectsof everyday life, though in terms of political rights Buraku people were indistinguishable from non-Buraku people. As a result, Buraku people generally remained in an economically disadvantaged status. Occupation and reform by the U.S. Army after World War II did little to help improve theireconomic and social status; however, the postwar democracy greatly helped
the growth of the Buraku liberation movement. By the 1960s, the Japanese
government could not ignore the power and demands of the Buraku Liberation League (Buraku Kaiho Domei), the most powerful organization in the
movement.
Looking at the legislation in these two cases, we can discern some slightdifferences. While the Elementary and Secondary Education Act sought toimprove the social conditions of not only blacks but all Americans in poverty, the Law on Special Measures for Dowa Projects limited its target to the
Buraku people. Importantly, we can find in both cases, however, a similartransformation of recognition on the part of the national government. In thistransformation, a historically deeply rooted and extremely difficult problem
of discrimination was translated, in the new context of an affluent society
and great economic growth, into the paradox of poverty in the affluent society.2 For the resolution of this paradox, education was underscored in bothcases. As we trace in detail in the next section, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 appears in such a context and addresses the issueof education directly. In contrast, the Dowa Strategy Commission Report of1965 and the Law on Special Measures for Dowa Projects of 1969 seem tobe not about education at first glance. However, large sections of the report
were, in fact, dedicated to the issue of education, and the law of 1969 mandated that the government provide financial support for “Dowa education,”

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education for the liberation of Buraku people and the abolition of discrimination against them. It is important that without affluence and economic
growth in both countries in the 1960s, and the concurrent recognition by therespective national governments, neither could have taken this new step toward the rectification of deep-rooted discrimination. The approaches taken
in resolving the problem of poverty, and the assumed role of education,
however, differed between the United States and Japan. This difference may
be related, as discussed later, to the interrelationship of welfare and education.
There have been many studies about both of these cases, although thoseby English-speaking scholars on the Dowa Projects or Buraku discrimination are much fewer in number than Japanese scholars’ studies on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act or the War on Poverty.3 In the case ofcomparative studies, however, the matter is more complex. First, of the writings on minority education and welfare policy in the United States, few discuss the Japanese Buraku problem or Dowa education in a comparative way,either in English or Japanese, with the exceptions of those by John U. Ogbu
and Michael W. Apple.4 Second, although writings on Japanese minority education and welfare policy often take the form of comparative studies with
Western countries in general, and the Unites States in particular, most scholars hesitate to draw an analogy between Buraku people and racial or ethnic
minorities in Western countries.5 Furthermore, as Keita Takayama, a criticalanalyst of education, argues, such comparative studies are often dominatedby Anglo-American scholarship and cannot avoid committing to an “Orientalist” framework.6 I steadfastly believe, however, that the attempt at undertaking an acrobatic feat in finding a parallel between the United States andJapan in the 1960s can open a path for overcoming such Orientalism.
I. THE WAR ON POVERTY AND THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF THE ELEMENTARYAND SECONDARY EDUCATION ACT OF 1965
Here I will briefly consider the history of the American War on Poverty inthe 1960s. The goal is to understand how education was incorporated andassigned its meaning within this attempt to tackle poverty, by focusing on
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Before deliberately
considering the act, it is best to begin by describing its background. Threepoints need to be discussed: the “rediscovery of poverty,” debates on a “culture of poverty,” and the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency
and Youth Crime (PCJD). This background context will clearly illuminate

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the underlying contradictions of ESEA 1965.
A. The Rediscovery of Poverty: BackgroundIn retrospect, it can be said that the 1960s was the period of the “rediscovery” of poverty. By the late 1950s the assumption that the United States wasan affluent society was believed to be beyond doubt. Challenging this was
the claim that poverty existed not only in areas far outside the country’s borders but within American society itself. As a result, writers such as Michael
Harrington, author of The Other America (1962), were faced with his readers’ embarrassment that reflected the optimism of middle-class Americans.
In his influential book, Harrington used the term “new poor” to distinguish the poverty he and his contemporaries in 1960s observed from thepoverty that had been widespread in the “older ethnic slum” in the earlier
part of the twentieth century. In his view, people in such slums not only had
had a vital community life but also aspirations for a better life. Most modernslums, however, were populated by the “dregs,” who could not get out of
their position, and by ill-prepared migrants for urban life from the South,
many of whom suffered from the burden of racial discrimination.7
Another aspect of Harrington’s “new” poverty lay in his emphasis on the
breakup of the family that was quite frequent in black slum communities.
He worried especially about the growing tendency of young adults to engage
in “serial monogamy” and the increase of illegitimacy in the slum. Other
writers of Harrington’s era, in line with his “pathological” argument about
the black family, drew attention to the increase in the number of femaleheaded households in black slum communities, and attempted to relate suchtendencies to the frequency of delinquency.8
Such “pathological” views of the cultural traits of the black family as seen
by Harrington and his colleagues, however, were dismissed in the researchand debates that followed afterward. The later findings were that social
problems such as illegitimacy and family breakup correlated best with lowincome households; all the other presumed causes of social ills were relatively insignificant compared to racial and economic problems.9 Harrington’s point on the “new” poverty was, however, correct in that incomparison to previous times, a higher percentages of the poor in the 1960s
were sick, disabled, old, nonwhite, poorly educated, or members of femaleheaded families.10
The crucial assumption underlying Harrington’s book, as pointed out byJames Patterson, a leading American historian, was that “poverty was bothanomalous and immoral in such an affluent society; indeed it was funda-

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mentally un-American.”11 Key words such as “anomalous” and “un-American” may help us understand Harrington’s recognition of the predicament of
racial minorities, especially black people. Here, the historically deep-rooted
problem of racial discrimination was transformed, in the new context of anotherwise affluent society with great economic growth, into the paradox ofpoverty in that wealthy society. It is well known that Harrington’s bookgreatly influenced the leaders of the federal government in the 1960s.12 This
recognition correlates with the drawing up of the ESEA 1965 just a few
years later.
B.

Culture of Poverty: Background
Although Harrington’s claim of “rediscovering” poverty attracted muchattention, his suggestion that the disorganizing characteristics of black families, such as high rates of illegitimacy and female-headed households, wasthe cause of their poverty and dependency on welfare was widely challenged
by scholars and critics. They criticized Harrington by arguing that the “cultural” traits of the poor are the result, not the cause, of their severe economic
conditions and that community life in the slum is far better organized than isgenerally imagined.13
Nevertheless, the very question whether the cultural traditions of particular groups, blacks for instances, explain their low-incomes was eagerly explored during this period. According to Patterson, scholars used the term
“culture of poverty” in this context mainly to distinguish “something” fromthe lower-class that had positive ethnic or regional characteristics.14 This
long-running inquiry into “culture” indicates that there was a desire to find apathological cause of poverty. I refer to three passages from Harrington’sbook:
Poverty in the United States is a culture, an institution, a way of life. . . . There is,in short, a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a world view of thepoor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that isradically different from the one that dominates the society.
The most important analytic point to have emerged in this description of the other
America is the fact that poverty in America forms a culture, a way of life andfeeling, that makes it a whole.
There is, in a sense, a personality of poverty, a type of human being produced by
the grinding, wearing life of the slums. The other Americas feel differently than
the rest of the nation. They tend to be hopeless and passive, yet prone to bursts ofviolence; they are lonely and isolated, yet often rigid and hostile. To be poor is

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not simply to be deprived of the material things of this world. It is to enter a fatal,
futile universe, an America within an America, a twisted spirit.15

It is worth noting that Harrington’s argument on “culture of poverty” isheavily influenced by Oscar Lewis, a leading anthropologist and the authorof The Children of Sanchez and La Vida.16 First, both scholars agree that theculture of poverty produces psychological consequences such as “presentmindedness” and an inability to “defer gratification.” Second, they both emphasize the familial and intergenerational level of the culture of poverty.17
Harrington claimed that “there is a very real possibility that many, evenmost, of the children of the poor will become the fathers and mothers of thepoor.”18
Harrington and Lewis were criticized by many scholars for their misusesof the concept of “culture,” for example, where culture is described by Harrington and Lewis as an independent variable that can be isolated from thesocioeconomic setting. Other researchers contested on empirical grounds ofHarrington’s assertion that poverty is long term and intergenerational.19
Despite such academic vulnerabilities, the claim by Harrington and hiscolleagues that there existed a “culture of poverty” successfully attracted theAmerican public’s attention to this problem, resulting in active public measures against poverty by the federal government. In fact, Harrington’s argument reemerged in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s approachas a cause of deficiency, whereby disadvantaged students suffering from a“culture of poverty” could only succeed if they were taught middle-classvalues.20 Although it’s worth noting that an approach that focuses on deficiency does not show us the complete picture of the act, it should also be
noted that the popular theory of a culture of poverty does loom in the background of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
C. The President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime:
Background
Most scholars agree that the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime, established in 1961 under the Kennedy administration, had a great influence on the educational legislation in the 1960s, especially the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.21 In fighting
delinquency, the committee emphasized structural defects in the social system as the most important factor. That is, “any attempt to prevent delinquency implied changing the social system to make institutions more responsive to the poor and perhaps challenging the power structure itself.”22 In

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the end, the committee took the view that “the answers to lower-class delinquency and poverty lay in a massive reform of institutional practices inschools, social-welfare agencies, and employment services.”23
In particular, David Hackett, the leading member of the Committee, “hadalways seen change within the schools as a vital part of any effort to deal
with delinquency,” and “he perceived his delinquency program as a model
for an antipoverty effort.”24 Hackett, who later became an important memberof President Lyndon Johnson’s task force planning team for the War on Poverty, pursued a theoretical line that sought to combine the topics of poverty
and education, and this subsequently became significant for the Elementaryand Secondary Education Act. This combination, however, was also rooted
deeply in American history. As Michael B. Katz points out, in the nineteenth
century “crime and poverty, in discussion of the time, did not constitute two
distinct problems.”25
Another influence on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act thatcame from the Committee was the emphasis on community action. Herecommunity action refers to the active participation of community residents
in the formulation and administration of their own programs. A book that
influenced the members of the committee, Cloward and Ohlin’s Delinquency
and Opportunity,26 pointed to “the need for a redistribution of power downward and outward to communities of the poor” to prevent delinquency.27 The
aim of recognizing both the importance of opportunity and of community
action resulted in the government requiring “the establishment of local agencies to receive and spend federal funds” that “bypassed local political structures, empowered new groups, and challenged existing institutions.”28 Katz
argues that the promotion of community action as “orthogonal, if not contradictory, to” the principle of equalizing opportunity, with its focus on the individual and its avoidance of redistribution of wealthy and power.29
D.

Contradictions in the Underlying Assumptions of the Act
President Johnson inherited the War on Poverty policies from Kennedy.
He was successful in having the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) pass
Congress and established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which
was to run the poverty program. The basic policy on poverty of the Office of
Economic Opportunity was, as Hugh Davis Graham has argued, giving a“hand up, not a handout,” that is, rejecting an income-transfer strategy in favor of a service strategy that placed a premium on job training and education.30 It was generally consistent, Graham argued, with the antipoverty
strategy as a whole. He pointed out that the greatest principle was “equal op-

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portunity” and asserted that it “stressed improved and expanded services,
especially those related to education and job-preparation.”31 From this it iseasy for us to understand why Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Societyemphasized the role of education to such a high degree. Julie Roy Jeffrey
also argued that “the support of federal aid to education as a crucial elementin the attack on poverty rested on the belief that schools were effective
agents of upward mobility in American life.”32 President Johnson and administration planners appealed to the American people’s “traditional and tenacious belief in the power of education,” the belief that public schools
could “cure a variety of social ills without revolutionizing existing politicaland economic arrangements.”33
However, Patterson makes a notable comment on this point. He contends
that the programs of the Office of Economic Opportunity depended at firston the structuralist insight that economic growth, however beneficial, could
not pull all people out of poverty, and that the government was therefore required to transfer payments of the rich to the poor. In fact the Economic Report of the President in 1964 stated, “In the future, economic growth alone
will provide relatively fewer handicaps that deny the poor fair access to the
expanding incomes of a growing economy.”34 The targeted group mentioned
here overlaps with what Harrington referred to as the “new poor”: the unfortunates left out of economic growth. Patrick J. McGuinn points out that
“ESEA was intended to be primarily a redistributive bill.”35 Nevertheless,the policies Johnson’s administration later adopted stressed, as seen above,
the need to enhance opportunity, rather than give handouts to the poor who
had been left outside the labor market. According to Patterson, “The mostfundamental faith of many of the planners was in opening up ‘opportunity,’a goal that again emphasized helping the poor help themselves and offering
services, not cash, much like the manpower training programs and the publicwelfare amendments. It aimed to get the poverty out of the people—and afterward the people out of poverty.”36
This contradiction in the underlying assumptions of ESEA 1965 deeply
influenced its characteristics, resulting in vagueness in the language of thelegislation, as will be discussed later. Refusal of income redistribution in favor of policies that focus on the individual with an emphasis on educationand job training is contrary to the idea of structuralism shared by the earlier
influential figures of antipoverty programs and their designers such as John
Kenneth Galbraith and Gunnar Myrdal. The implications of the concept“culture” are also at issue. Culture is principally a phenomenon of the collective level, but in the context of the War on Poverty it was generally used

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to mean the traditional and conventional American view that the problem ofpoverty is the problem of the individual and a problem of immorality. It was,more or less, rhetoric to avoid “revolutionizing existing political and economic arrangements.” Nevertheless, the odd combination of individualistic“opportunity” and the emphasis on community action and the “redistributionof power” should also be highlighted. This is an extremely important point
because in the history of the relationship between the power structure andAmerican education, the intervention of the federal government was for along time strongly resisted and inhibited.
II.

ESTABLISHMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE ELEMENTARY AND
SECONDARY EDUCATION ACT OF 1965

With the implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
of 1965, for the first time in the history of the United States a massive infusion of federal funds went into schools attended by poor children. The bill
was signed by President Johnson on April 11, 1965, and was landmark legislation for federal educational policy for the poor and minority people in the
United States. First I will describe how the act was put together and approved by Congress. Then I address the implementation phase of the act.
This will show the contradictions involved in the act. Finally, I discuss thepossibilities and limits of the act as a strategy of the antipoverty program.
A.

Preparation for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
In spite of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Francis Keppel, thecommissioner of the Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), deemed it inadequate. The Economic Opportunity Act was “not a vigorous attack on either the educational deficiencies
due to poverty or the weakness of the public school system.”37 HEW and
Keppel began to seek a chance to establish a new bill for educational aid.
It is well known, however, that “the old issues of religion, federal control,and money” had prevented bills granting federal aid to education from passing in Congress.38 Indeed, the Kennedy administration had failed to passsuch a bill in 1961 and 1963. Kennedy sent a bill to Congress that would
have provided general aid for teachers’ salaries and construction, appealing
to the fundamental importance of education for economic growth. Kennedy’s attempt, though, was in vain. This is why Keppel, just after being appointed as commissioner to the Office of Education, began direct communication with Catholic interest groups. Despite planners in the Office of134

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Education who were “still attracted to the department’s traditional type ofschool bill offering public schools general aid for construction and teacher
salaries,”39 Keppel also began to seek a new rationale. His answer was the“poverty approach,” namely, that inadequate education and poverty are interrelated.
As pointed out, the War on Poverty and the Great Society favored a service strategy over cash distributions. Furthermore, Harrington’s assumptionthat poverty is an “anomalous” phenomenon in an affluent society was awidespread view of the times. Such a climate influenced the national government’s perspective so that the historically deeply rooted problem of racial
discrimination came to be seen as a paradox of poverty in an affluent society.
The “poverty approach” also led to a breakthrough in difficulties in regard
to distribution of funds. According to Jeffrey, “One favored method of computing school aid was based on the number of children in school. But if only
public school children were counted, Catholics objected; if all children inschool were counted, public school interest groups objected.”40 Good ruralurban funds distribution was also necessary. Eventually, the planners found asolution by substituting “all of these controversial, complicated things for
two thousand . . . dollars.” That is to say, “the final formula distributed funds
to states based on the total number of children from families with an annual
income under $2,000 and on the state’s average per pupil expenditure.”41
In 1964, a year before the establishment of the ESEA 1965, President
Johnson organized his legislative task force on education, whose chairman
was John W. Gardner, and whose executive secretary was William B. Cannon, with members including Francis Keppel, Richard Goodwin, David
Riesman, Ralph W. Tyler, and Jerrold R. Zacharias.
In early November 1964 a secret report by the task force was delivered to
the White House, with a total of eighteen recommendations. In the report“the first priority was the antipoverty emphasis on equal educational opportunity or ‘access’ for children of disadvantaged background.”42 It “went onrecord as favoring general federal aid, especially for school construction; but
it noted that if such aid (with an equalization formula favoring poorer areas)
was politically infeasible, then it favored exploring other avenues of channeling federal funds into disadvantaged areas.”43 Eventually, “the other avenue” was selected: “a program of categorical aid for the children of the poorin the slums and depressed areas, one that would reach children in both public and private schools,”44 which is the prefiguring of Title I of ESEA 1965.

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B. The Passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
1964 was an election year. When President Johnson’s campaign got underway, he made the passage of an education bill a major issue. Soon after his
great victory in November, Johnson told the Office of Education to begin
drawing up the legislation in detail. Meanwhile, Keppel was negotiatingwith the two major interest groups over how to resolve the religious issues:
the National Education Association (NEA), with its insistence on excluding
parochial schools from federal aid, and the National Catholic Welfare Conference, with its equal insistence that they be included. As the fruit of Keppel’s effort, on December 16, 1964, the NEA announced that aid for parochial students would be acceptable.45
The bill was sent to Congress in early January 1965. It established two
goals: “to strengthen and improve educational quality and educational opportunities” in the nation’s schools. Title I, focusing on the children of poverty, recognized their “special educational needs . . . and the impact thatconcentrations of low income families have on the ability of local educational agencies to support adequate educational programs.” It was “the policy of the United States to provide financial assistance . . . to local educational agencies serving areas with concentrations of children from low
income families.” Title I was the heart of the bill because most of the money
was concentrated in it, and it was related to the goal of improving educational opportunities, while the other four titles related to the goal of improving educational quality. In Title II grants were established to provide librarybooks and other materials for the use of private and public school children.
Title III set up supplementary education centers to furnish educational programs and services unavailable in local schools, to conduct experimental
programs, and to serve as models for regular schools. Title IV sought to support regional centers of research. And Title V gave funds to state education
departments to be used for the purpose of making them stronger, more efficient, and responsive.46
The House Subcommittee on Education and Labor began its hearings on
the January 22, 1965. In the hearings the secretary of HEW, Anthony J. Celebrezze, emphasized that the goals of ESEA were “to break the cycle ofpoverty and to pull the poor into the economic mainstream.” “The educational problem,” he suggested, “was largely one of inadequate financing forschools in poverty districts, and the solution was, of course, federal aid.”47
Some fundamental questions were asked that revealed the uncertainty of anumber of assumptions in regard to ideas of education, but these never resulted in amendments to the bill. Charles Goodell, a Republican from New

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ICHIRO KURAISHIYork, pointed out that a good deal of educational research indicated that achild’s early years were the most fruitful for educational intervention andasked why the bill focused on children between five and seventeen. John
Brademas, a Democrat from Indiana, wondered whether there would beenough trained teachers to implement the program. In addition, he asked“how Congress could be sure that spending money would really improve thequality of education” and “how much was really known about educational
programs for the poor.” Receiving ambiguous answers, he proposed that“the money should be concentrated not on Title I but on research.”48 Senator
Robert Kennedy warned that money without knowledge was useless: “Unless there is a meaningful program developed at the local level, which is really tested and checked by you, I don’t think this program is going to be effective.”49 Roger Freeman, an authority on school financing, suggested: “Noevidence is being advanced for such charges except that there is a correlation between low family income, low educational achievements, and unemployment. That correlation does not itself prove what the cause of the trouble is, where it all starts, and how it can be corrected.” Indeed, the definitionof the key concept “educational deprivation” was not well considered, andKeppel’s answer was confused. While he mentioned that an educationallydeprived child was not necessarily poor, in the hearings he resorted to studies correlating low income with low achievement.50 Senator Peter Dominick,a Republican from Colorado, saw the commitment of the bill to overcoming
cultural deprivation as incomplete and suggested that all five titles, not justthe one, focus on this problem.51 Finally, after the entire legislative process,the bill passed the House on March 29 and the Senate on April 9, 1965. In
signing it, President Johnson commented: “No law I have signed or will eversign means more to the future of America.”
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 is made up of Titles I, II, III, IV, and V.52 The most important for discussing our theme is Title I, “Financial Assistance to Local Educational Agencies for the Educationof Children of Low-Income Families,” very often coupled with the wellknown concept of “compensatory education.” This bill enabled funding of
more than one billion dollars “to provide financial assistance to local educational agencies serving areas with concentrations of children from low-income families to expand and improve their educational programs by various
means . . . which contribute particularly to meeting the special educational
needs of educationally deprived children.”
Title I aid was calculated by multiplying 50 percent of the state’s average
per pupil expenditures for the school year 1963–64 by the total number ofPOVERTY, EDUCATION, AND NATIONAL POLICY IN THE “AFFLUENT SOCIETY”

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five-to-seventeen-year-old children in the local school district who werefrom either families with an annual income below $2,000 or those fromfamilies with higher incomes resulting from Aid to Families with DependentChildren relief payments. This sum was then divided by two. Naturally, inorder to receive federal aid, local school districts had to submit plans for improving and expanding their educational programs for disadvantaged children. Questions were raised during the hearings in the House in regard to
this calculation formula for funds distribution. Jeffrey wrote: “Since the allotment a state would receive was based not only on the numbers of deprived children but also on the average amount that state spent on each pupil’s education, rich states would get more money than poor states with anequal number of poor children.”53 Some doubted whether it was a fair way
to distribute funds meant for helping poor and deprived children.
C.

Implementation and Evaluation of the Act
Patrick J. McGuinn sums up the generally agreed difficulties the implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act confronted infive points:
First, the legislation itself . . . incorporated multiple goals and methods, some ofwhich were incompatible with one another. Second, the Act gave federal administrators few tools to force compliance with federal directives and goals in the useof funds. Third, even if such tools had been available, the agency charged with
implementing the Act—the U.S. Office of Education—was for several years after
its passage disinclined or unable to make use of such compliance tools. Fourth,
lingering opposition to federal control of education ensured that attempts to rigorously administer ESEA would generate a strong political backlash. Fifth, thepolitics and implementation of the Act were greatly complicated by the additionof new purposed and programs and increasingly contentious racial politics in theyears following 1965.54

Relating to McGuinn’s first point, the act’s originally distinct goal to improve academic achievement in order to break the poverty cycle graduallybecame diffused and vague during the designing of the funds allocation formula. As mentioned above, the federal funds each local school district could
receive were calculated based on the number of children both from families
earning less than $2,000 and from families on welfare. A district needed aminimum number of one hundred poor children or 3 percent of the total
number of children to qualify for aid.55 As Jeffrey pointed out, because a district needed so few poor children to qualify for funds, most would receive it:

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ICHIRO KURAISHI“On the county level 95% of the country’s counties would be eligible for Title I money.” This meant that the aid was tied extremely close to the generalaid for helping a wide range of children, rather than the “categorical aid”
concentrated on the disadvantaged. A witness pointed out in the 1966 House
hearings that; “It seems inconceivable . . . that many (90–95%) districts areseriously affected by poverty.” In fact poor children were clustered in a few
areas.56
Relating to the McGuinn’s second, third, and fourth points, Grahampointed out that “the upshot of all this is that when Title I was implemented,
it produced not a Title I program, but something more like 30,000 separate
and different Title I programs.”57 Indeed, it was widely observed that federal
funds were being diverted by state and local education authorities to purposes for which they were not intended. Milbrey McLaughlin, a leading
scholar of education, also suggested that “in a federal system of government,
and especially in education, the balance of power resides at the bottom, withspecial interest groups. Accordingly, the implementation of federal initiatives relies in large measure on the incentives and preferences of local authorities; there is little effective muscle at the top.”58 As bitter experience
had intensified the distrust of federal government by state and local education authorities, the regulative and supervising functions of federal aid significantly began to increase in the early 1970s.
Finally, relating to the McGuinn’s fifth point, although Title I was coupledwith Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and expected to encourage desegregation of schools in the South, this did not occur in practice. In the 1967 Senate subcommittee, a case was reported in which the “southern districts used
the funds to strengthen segregation. . . . In Lincoln County, Georgia, for instance, Negro schools began to serve pupils free lunches when freedom of
choice was initiated. Title I funds paid for the lunches, which served as abribe for students to stay put.”59D.

Coda
As many sources pointed out, Title I funds could not reach all the needy
poor children, but quite a large amount did in fact reach their intended recipients. In comparison to the Japanese Buraku issues, however, it seems
odd that in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act only “the poor”
were focused on, rather than “racial minorities” or, more explicitly,“blacks.” Here we can discern an implicit but firm dominance of economic
thinking over anything else in the act. More accurately, in a bill granting
federal aid for education, the economic logic that the bill would provide a

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chance to break the poverty cycle was found as the best and only highway toreach the goal of getting it through Congress. In this context, the cornerstoneof education was seen to be economic. From a wider viewpoint, however,education was thoroughly contradictory to the logic of economics. It is not
surprising that during the legislative process many critics pointed out thelack of a theoretical foundation for education in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
The prominence of the economic logic and the subservience of education
to it can best be understood in the context of the transformation of the understanding of the racial discrimination problem. In this, the historically
deep-rooted problem of racial discrimination was reevaluated in the newcontext of an “affluent” society with great economic growth as a paradox ofpoverty. This opened a way for a highly optimistic solution strategy: that ofabsorbing those in poverty into the mainstream economy by the power of
economic growth. Following Harrington, we can name this agenda as “theother version of Americanization.”
III. THE JAPANESE COUNTERPART: THE DOWA PROJECT
The remainder of this article will be devoted to the case in Japan, especially the Dowa Strategy Commission Report of 1965 and the Law on Special Measures for Dowa Projects of 1969. Before we do so, however, it isnecessary to note that, strictly speaking, the Dowa Strategy Commission Report of 1965 is not necessarily a legislative counterpart to the Elementaryand Secondary Education Act of 1965. The report was only the forerunner ofthe Law on Special Measures for Dowa Projects in 1969. However, the textof the commission’s report is more useful than the law itself for clarifying
the way in which education and the poverty problem were combined inminds of those who concerned the policy making of Dowa Projects. Furthermore, we cannot miss the importance of the synchronicity of the year 1965.
First, I focus on the Dowa Strategy Commission’s report.
A.

Background of the Report, 1958–64
For an overview of the history leading up to the Dowa Strategy Commission Report of 1965, it is helpful to begin with the late 1950s when there
was a grassroots struggle for “free compulsory education” led by the Buraku
Liberation League. This slogan may sound odd, because many people thinkthat the Constitution of the State of Japan had already secured free compulsory education for all. The claims of the Buraku Liberation League and Bur-

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aku people, however, remind us of that the legislative word “free” here only
refers to tuition costs and that in reality education does cost families money
in Japan, which is especially hard on poor families. In August 1959, theleague’s Osaka Prefecture branch demanded that local authorities provide:・Firm policies for the problem of nonenrollment and nonattendance・Free school lunches
・Free provision of textbooks and school supplies
・Government aid for school trips
・Installation of swimming pools60

The statement said that “there are many children [from Buraku communities] who becomes reluctant to attend school because of the teacher’s pressure they face every day for the payment of school lunches or other school
expenses such as costs for school trips.”61 Despite the demands by the Buraku Liberation League activists and Buraku people there was often reluctance on the part of local governments for making improvements, and thosedisappointing experiences prompted them to then demand the establishmentof a national government comprehensive policy for the Dowa problem.
An episode in the early 1960s of the struggle for and the eventual realization of the free nationwide provision of textbooks is an important event in
the development of the Buraku people’s struggle. The demand for free textbooks had already arisen in the late 1950s in many Buraku communities in
Osaka, Kyoto, and other prefectures. The significant struggle, however,arose in the Nagahama Buraku community in Kochi Prefecture, and thiseventually led to the national government changing its policy.62
Nagahama was largely a poor fisherman’s community located near thesouth coast of Kochi city, the capital city of the prefecture. Most children attended Nagahama elementary school and Nankai junior high school. In February 1961, the parents of Nagahama gathered, aligned with and supportedby the Buraku Liberation League and other democratic groups, to demand
free provision of textbooks. They complained about the status quo, in whichmost of the students with the exception of those on welfare had to purchasetheir textbooks, was unconstitutional according to Article 26 of Japan’s constitution. Their tactics were unique in that they not only petitioned local government but also expanded their wings to include all parents and students intheir boycott. Many parents and students who could have afforded the textbooks joined the boycott, and the teachers of Nagahama elementary school
and Nankai junior high school also cooperated with them by running their

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141

classes without textbooks. The boycott continued for more than a week, andthen the local authorities of Kochi city gave in and decided free provision.
Finally Kochi city government complained to the national government about
their plight. This episode caused the national government to make available
free textbooks throughout Japan starting in 1965. Additionally, this event
remained as a constant reminder to the government of the formidable powerof grassroots organization by the Buraku community.63
B.

Outline of the Dowa Strategy Commission Report of 1965
As a result of the Buraku Liberation League’s demands for action fromthe national government, in 1961 the Liberal Democratic Party (hereafter
LDP) government decided to organize the Dowa Policy Council of theprime minister’s cabinet to conduct several social surveys “to provide an accurate picture of the Burakumin [Buraku people] situation.”64 After heateddiscussions that lasted three years and eight months, the council published a
final report in August 1965 that recommended “massive governmental aid toremove the negative environment and life conditions as well as to improvethe educational and vocational situation among Burakumin.”65
According to the Introduction portion of the Dowa Strategy Commission’s report:
The Dowa problem means the issue of human equality and freedom within theprinciple of human universality, and therefore relates directly to the issue of fundamental human rights as guaranteed under the terms of the constitution. It follows, therefore, that the commission is not prepared to allow the problems facing
Dowa residents to remain unsolved, and while finding an immediate solution to
Dowa problems is the government’s responsibility, at the same time, we haveworked extremely hard at finding ways and means of raising people’s awarenessthat this is also a problem the general population must confront.66

The recognition of poverty in the Dowa Strategy Commission Report of1965 is well described by the theory of the “discrimination cycle.” On the
one hand, it reported, there is psychological discrimination, which is locatedlatently in people’s conception or awareness, expressed in their language
and actions. This includes prejudice or misunderstanding toward Buraku
people. On the other hand, de facto discrimination includes miserable conditions in housing, less-privileged occupational status, low income, low educational achievement, a high proportion of dependent families, and the like.
It is argued that de facto discrimination is caused by psychological discrimination, and then the former is strengthened by de facto discrimination, re-142

ICHIRO KURAISHI

sulting in a “discrimination cycle.”67 This cycle is equated with the “cycle ofpoverty” because in the concept of de facto discrimination poverty is mostsalient. The most important strategy for breaking the cycle, the report contended, was to secure complete equality of opportunity in employment andeducation for Buraku people, and to promote upward mobility by incorporating the excessive labor forces piled in the Buraku community into the
productive processes of modern industry.68 It is worth noting that, in theview of the report, the premodern status of industry and low productive
economy in the Buraku area were hindrance to Japanese economic growthand progress.69 The main agenda was therefore the modernization of Buraku
socioeconomic structures.
It is easy for us to discern here what we may call the transformation ofrecognition. Buraku discrimination, a genuinely historically deep-rooted
problem in Japan, was completely translated into the “anomalous” situationof poverty in an “affluent” society. The need for improvement in education
was, of course, also emphasized in the Dowa Strategy Commission Reportof 1965, especially with a focus on low achievement and the low proportionof those reaching higher-level education.70 This was a necessary part ofmodernizing the Buraku community. However, education of society as awhole was more seriously taken up as a way to reduce prejudice against
Buraku people. Namely, in the report, a smaller emphasis was placed on educating Buraku people toward attaining upward mobility than educating
non-Buraku people to correctly understand the past and present of the Buraku people. The report points out the role of education and schools in endeavoring to find the right solution when cases of discrimination occur.71
Finally, we should not overlook one of the most important recommendations of the report: the creation of “special measures” legislation. Underpressure from the Buraku Liberation League to comply with this recommendation, in 1969 the Diet passed the Law on Special Measures for Dowa Projects to implement “a type of affirmative action to gain redress for four centuries of social discrimination against the Burakumin. . . . Between 1969 and1994 the central and local governments contributed a total of 12,000 billion
yen (about 120 billion dollars) to improve Buraku areas throughout Japan.”72
As a result of the law, schools that children from Buraku communities attended were benefited with additional resources and staff, and scholarships
and supplementary payments of school fees were provided. As a result, thediscrepancy between Buraku people and non-Buraku people in educational
attainment, occupational status, and income decreased, although Buraku
people still lag behind the national average.73

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C.

143

Comparison with the Case of the United States
In comparison with the War on Poverty and the Great Society, Dowa Projects in Japan differs in that in the former education is more loosely linked to
antipoverty strategy and as a means to promoting upward mobility. Dowa
Projects emphasized more directly the importance of improving economic
life through fuller employment. Education was kept relatively separate from
economic problems and was more related to such cultural-political issues as
reducing prejudice toward Buraku people at first and then for establishing afirm Burakumin identity among students in the later periods. In stark contrast, in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, education was firmly
incorporated into the logic of an antipoverty strategy. Education was seen as
the answer to breaking the cycle of poverty. In addition, however, as manystudies reveal, members of Johnson’s administration were concerned that theact had been much more about legislating federal aid to education than helping poor and disadvantaged children. In the case of the American educationact, the truth may be that the linkage with the poverty problem was chosen
by the educationalists as the best way to secure passage of a bill for federal
aid.
These differences can best be understood in the distinct political context
of Japan in the early 1960s. In the late 1950s, the LDP government rapidly
enacted major welfare measures under the outstanding leadership of Prime
Minister Nobusuke Kishi. These included the New National Health Law of
1958; the National Pension Law of 1959; the Welfare Pensions for the Aged,
Mothers and Children; and the Disabled Person Law of 1959. (Nationwide
health insurance was finally implemented in 1961.)74 Thus, the conservative
government, faced with the shock of the Security Treaty crisis in 1960 andunder threat of revolution, borrowed the policies of the Socialists Party,
which had placed considerable emphasis on welfare reform.75 Interestingly,
Kishi declared the Japanese version of a “war on poverty” when he stated
his policy at his inauguration to be removing “three evils”: corruption, poverty, and violence. Considering that the Buraku Liberation League was oneof the most powerful allies of the Socialists Party, the decision by Kishi’s
cabinet to organize the Dowa Policy Council of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet could also be understood as policy borrowing from the Left. On March
11, 1958, Prime Minister Kishi, attending the Diet’s Committee on Socialand Labor Policy, answered the questions of Socialist representative Kazuo
Yagi and pledged to implement a comprehensive Dowa policy. The question
and answer was as follows:

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ICHIRO KURAISHI

Yagi: I am very happy to hear the declaration of the prime minister. Well, there
are a few remaining questions. I will ask one question. The solution of the Buraku problem usually tends to be equated with the improvement of the environment as in constructing new public baths or building a new community hall or
repairing bad housing or repairing unpaved roads. Those are very important tasks
and should be rapidly implemented. Next to this seems to be the problem of
Dowa education. All of these things are important so that the government shouldtake them seriously. But first of all is to provide a foundation for living, and thepolicy should be directed to this goal. Ultimately, to secure full employment is
the supreme agenda. . . . Please let me know your ideas about it.
Kishi: I agree with Mr. Yagi’s point that it is necessary for all sections of the government to cooperate together when we seek the ultimate solution.76

As the citation above indicates, the emphasis on welfare in the policy of Kishi’s cabinet dramatically influenced the direction of the Dowa Strategy
Commission’s report, resulting in minimal importance given to educationand job training as a way to improve the social conditions of poor people.
Thus, education found its best location in the Japanese context not in thesphere of economics but in that of cultural politics. More than eleven years
had passed between the time of Kishi’s declaration and the passage of the
Law on Special Measures for Dowa Projects. This occurred under the cabinet of Eisaku Sato, who is the younger brother of Nobusuke Kishi.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that in 1960’s Japan the progressive educational groups such as the Japan Teachers Union, another powerful ally of
the Socialist Party, were heavily critical of the overly industry-oriented andmeritocratic educational policies of the national government. In criticizing
the ideas of Japanese progressive educators in the 1960s, Takehiko Kariya, aleading educational sociologist in Japan, argues:
There has been a long-term desire in Japan to avoid seeing relationship between
students’ achievement or ability and their socioeconomic status. . . . Due to thisstrong aversion to seeing differences, educators and education administrators
avoided possible connections between inequality and socioeconomic backgrounds.77

The Buraku Liberation League was firmly affiliated with the Japan Teachers
Union since the late 1950s. This is why the creators of the educational vision of the Buraku Liberation League, most of which was reflected in the
Dowa Strategy Commission’s report, were reluctant to incorporate education into the logics of economics. Rather, education was treated as a relatively autonomous area that mainly affected human awareness and cultural-

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145

political matters. From this we can see that the strategy of the Japan
Teachers Union and other leftist groups to separate education from the economy influenced the Dowa policies established in 1965.
Additionally, it is important to point out that the Dowa Strategy Commission Report of 1965 took a view different from the “culturally deprived”
view of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. While the Dowa
Strategy Commission highlighted the low achievement of Buraku children
and the low educational level of their parents, it also emphasized that mostof the parents were highly concerned about the education of their children
and appreciated the great legacy of the Buraku Liberation Movement since
1920s, driven by Buraku people, few of whom had achieved higher education.78
CONCLUSION
As a conclusion of this article, I want to begin by calling attention to thegreat economic growth and widespread affluence in society that provided
fertile conditions for the “discovery” of the disadvantaged both in the UnitedStates and Japan. We see this when recalling that Harrington, in his The
Other America, assumed that poverty was both anomalous and immoral insuch an affluent society and that it was fundamentally un-American. Such aview was also shared by the warriors of the War on Poverty in the federal
government. Paradoxically, this affluence allowed society to take seriously
the matter of poverty. This paradox resulted in reform that took a remedial,rather than revolutionary, approach to poverty. Although quite a few of those
who were concerned with issues in the United States national government
had a structuralist view, they did not take an approach that would result in
the rebuilding of the whole socioeconomic structure, instead emphasizing
education and job training as the tools for achieving upward mobility. Likewise, the driving force of the Dowa Projects in Japan was the view that the
Buraku discrimination and the accompanying poverty in Buraku communities was such an unwelcome relic of the feudal past that must be removed assoon as possible from a modernizing nation. This was therefore not a radical
reform of the social structure but a supplementary remedy for modernization. The importance of such transformations of recognition taken by thenational government has been repeatedly highlighted in this article.
It is worth reemphasizing, however, that without the transformation ofrecognition mentioned above, the governments of both Japan and the UnitedStates could never have pushed ahead to improve the historically deep-

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ICHIRO KURAISHI

rooted problem of minority discrimination. In other words, the great economic growth and widespread affluence of the 1960s enabled those from diverse social backgrounds and political standpoints to join the process ofimproving the conditions of victims of discrimination. In the United States
the problem was translated into the issue of distribution of federal funds toschool districts. In contrast, in Japan the problem was translated into a modernist crusade against the vestiges of feudalism.
However, the significance of education in the Dowa Projects in Japan was
more ambiguous than in the War on Poverty in the United States. In the late
1950s and early 1960s the conservative LDP government, especially Nobusuke Kishi’s cabinet, borrowed the welfare policies of the Socialist Party forstrategic reasons, and this dramatically accelerated the progress in Dowa
policies. The understanding of education as a way to improve the social condition of the Buraku people by providing a chance for upward mobility became marginal and gave way to welfare under the policy-borrowing regime.
As a result, education found its position not in an economic sphere but in thecultural-political sphere.
The Dowa Projects and the War on Poverty, not only shared a similar social context of great economic growth and the pressure of radical social
movements in 1960s, but they were greatly transformed at the opening of
the twenty-first century. The Dowa Projects, after several reauthorizations of
the Law on Special Measures, was finally dissolved in 2002. Since then,
Dowa policies have been placed in the framework of general policies. Dowa
education was not the exception in the transformation of policies at thistime; the name “Dowa education” was officially replaced by the name “Human rights education.” Financial support for Dowa education from the national government could no longer be depended on as much as in the previous thirty years. In the atmosphere of neoliberalism and neoconservatism inJapan, policies like the Dowa Projects were severely challenged.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the United States also
went through a great transformation. As is well known, the War on Poverty
was dramatically transformed into the “war on welfare” in the 1980s and1990s.79 The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, after several stagesof reauthorization, also metamorphosed into the “No Child Left Behind” law
under the George W. Bush administration; this forces all public schools to
implement high-stakes testing and demands that schools be accountable forachievement.80
In spite of such backlashes in both the United States and Japan, poverty
has recently returned as a new political issue. In 2009 both nations under-

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147

went regime change, and the newly established governments, the Obamaadministration in the United States and the Democratic Party of Japan’s
cabinet, are now taking seriously the issue of poverty and the theme of equity. Although socioeconomic conditions are not similar to those of the great
economic growth era, it is now the time to reevaluate the great legacy of
1960s antipoverty and antidiscrimination projects undertaken by the governments of these two nations.
NOTES
1The Buraku problem concerns a castelike minority group unique to Japanese society.
Buraku people are those “whose ancestors were relegated to an outcaste status in the premodern era. Having no distinguishing physical or cultural traits, [they] are distinguished by theiraddresses in communities called Buraku . . . which were segregated in the premodern era, orby their ancestral background.” Yoshiro Nabeshima, “Invisible Racism in Japan: Impact on
Academic Achievement of Minority Children,” in Challenges to Japanese Education: Economics, Reform, and Human Rights, edited by J. Gordon, H. Fujita, T. Kariya, and G. LeTendre. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010), 109.
2
James T. Patterson argues that in the early 1960s American society was “in the midst of
the most sustained period of economic well-being in national history.” Patterson, America’s
Struggle against Poverty in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000),
108.
3
The classic American scholarship on the Buraku problem is George De Vos and Akira
Wagatsuma, Japan’s Invisible Race: Caste in Culture and Personality (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1966). More recently, see Alastair McLauchlan, Prejudice and Discrimination in Japan: The Buraku Issue. (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003); June Gordon,
Japan’s Outcaste Youth: Education for Liberation. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008). For thehistory of the civil rights movement, see, for example, Robert P. Green, Jr. and Harold E.
Cheatham, eds., The American Civil Rights Movement: A Documentary History (Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 2009); William T. Marti, The Civil Rights Movement:
Struggle and Resistance, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); James T.
Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See Sections I and II of this article for other major
works on these topics.
4
John U. Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural
Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1978); Margaret Gibson and John U. Ogbu, eds.,
Minority Status and Schooling: A Comparative Study of Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities (New York: Garland, 1991); Michael W. Apple, Akio Nagao, and Hiroshi Ikeda, eds.
Gakkoubunkaeno Chosen: Hihanteki Kyoikukenkyuno Saizensen. [Rethinking school culture:
Frontiers in critical educational studies] (Tokyo: Toshindo, 1993).
5
Japanese scholars interested in the education of “foreign children,” such as Korean residents in Japan and the “newcomers” (laborers from South America who are second- or thirdgeneration Japanese immigrants to South America, rapidly increasing after 1990), very often
refer to innovative education in the United States or Europe such as multicultural educationor bilingual education. See Tomoko Nakajima, ed., Tabunka Kyoiku: Tayouseinotameno
Kyoikugaku [Multicultural education: A pedagogy for diversity] (Tokyo: Akashishoten,1998); Haruo Ota, Nyukamanokodomoto Nihonnogakkou [Children of newcomers and Japanese schools] (Tokyo: Kokusaishoin, 2000).

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ICHIRO KURAISHI

6
Keita Takayama, “Progressive Struggle and Critical Education Scholarship in Japan,” in
The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education, ed. Michael W. Apple, Wayne
Au, and Luis Gandin (New York: Routledge, 2009).
7
Patterson, America’s Struggle, 99.
8
Ibid., 99–100.
9Ibid., 102.
10
Ibid., 121.
11
Ibid., 111.
12
It is questionable whether Kennedy himself read Harrington’s book, but a book review of
it had great impact on him. Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 82. The same point is made in
Takenori Inoki, Sengosekaikeizaishi [A history of the world economy in the postwar period](Tokyo: Chuokoronsha, 2009), 123.
13
Patterson, America’s Struggle, 117–21.
14
Ibid., 112.
15
Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States. (1962; New York: Penguin
Books, 1971), 17–18, 168, 129.
16
Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York:
Random House, 1961); Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty, San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1966).
17
Patterson, America’s Struggle, 116.
18
Harrington, The Other America, xxiii.
19
Patterson, America’s Struggle, 118.
20
Patrick J. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education
Policy, 1965–2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 35.
21
See Julie Roy Jeffrey, Education for Children of the Poor: A Study of the Origins and
Implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1978); Katz, Undeserving Poor; and Patterson, America’s Struggle.
22
Jeffrey, Education for Children of the Poor, 34.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid., 35.
25
Michael B. Katz, Reconstructing American Education (Boston: Harvard University Press,
1987), 17.
26
Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd E. Ohlin, Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs (New York: Free Press, 1960).
27
Katz, Undeserving Poor, 97.
28
Ibid., 95.
29
Ibid.
30
Hugh Davis Graham, The Uncertain Triumph: Federal Education Policy in the Kennedy
and Johnson Years (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 53.
31
Katz, Undeserving Poor, 95.
32
Jeffrey, Education for Children of the Poor, xii.
33
Ibid., 4.
34
Patterson, America’s Struggle, 110.
35
McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 31.
36
Patterson, America’s Struggle, 131.
37
Jeffrey, Education for Children of the Poor, 59.
38
Ibid., 67.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 69–70.

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41

149

Ibid., 70.
Graham, Uncertain Triumph, 66.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid., 73.
45
Jeffrey, Education for Children of the Poor, 72–74.
46
Ibid., 76, 77.
47
Ibid., 80.
48
Ibid., 82, 83.
49
Ibid., 85.
50
Ibid., 85, 86.
51
Ibid., 89.
52
Description of this and the next few paragraphs mainly depends on Philip Meranto, The
Politics of Federal Aid to Education in 1965: A Study in Political Innovations (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1967), 4, 137–39.
53
Jeffrey, Education for Children of the Poor, 87.
54
McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 34–35.
55
Jeffrey, Education for Children of the Poor, 101.
56
Ibid., 102.
57
Graham, Uncertain Triumph, 204.
58
Milbrey McLaughlin, Evaluation and Reform: The Elementary and Secondary Education
Act of 1965, Title I (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Company, 1975), 119.
59
Jeffrey, Education for Children of the Poor, 110.
60
Zenkoku Kaihokyoiku Kenkyukai, Burakukaihoundouto Kyoikuno Hatten [The evolutionof the Buraku Liberation Movement and education], vol. 10 of Burakukaihokyoiku Shiryoshusei [Historical Archives of Education for Buraku Liberation in Japan] (Tokyo: Meiji Toshoshuppan, 1980), 186.
61
Zenkoku Kaihokyoiku Kenkyukai, Burakukaihoundouto Kyoikuno Hatten, 185.
62
Kochi Prefecture is located in the southern part of Shikoku Island, far from Tokyo. Regarding the unique events of this prefecture in which teachers confronted the nonattendance
problem, see Ichiro Kuraishi, Hosetsuto Haijono Kyoikugaku. [Inclusion and exclusion ofminorities in postwar Japanese education] (Tokyo: Seikatsushoin, 2009); Ichiro Kuraishi,“Not Merely Improving School Attendance but Also What?: “Fukushi Kyoin” (Social Work
Teacher), Visiting Teacher and the Attempts to Enlarge the Social Functions of Public
Schools,” Tokyo Gaikokugo Daigaku Ronshu 80 (2010): 49–67.
63
Zenkoku Kaihokyoiku Kenkyukai, Burakukaihoundouto Kyoikuno Hatten, 206–16.
64
Gordon, Japan’s Outcaste Youth, 23.
65
Ibid., 23.
66
Zenkoku Kaihokyoiku Kenkyukai, Kaihokyoikuno Seiritsuto Tenkai [The birth and development of the Education for Buraku Liberation], vol. 11 of Burakukaihokyoiku Shiryoshusei[Historical Archives of Education for Buraku Liberation in Japan] (Tokyo: Meiji Toshoshuppan, 1980), 283; See also appendix 3 of Suehiro Kitaguchi, An Introduction to the Buraku Issue: Questions and Answers, translated and with an introduction by Alastair McLauchlan(Richmond, UK: Japan Library, 1999).
67
Zenkoku Kaihokyoiku Kenkyukai, Kaihokyoikuno Seiritsuto Tenkai, 285–86.
68
Ibid., 286.
69
Sukero Morooka, Sengo Burakukaiho Ronsoshi [History of arguments on Buraku Liberation in postwar Japan] (Tokyo: Tsuge Shobo, 1982), 3: 350–51.
70
Zenkoku Kaihokyoiku Kenkyukai, Kaihokyoikuno Seiritsuto Tenkai, 293.
71
Ibid., 306.
72
Gordon, Japan’s Outcaste Youth, 23–24. The Special Measure Law mainly encouraged
42

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local governments to operate Dowa projects by subsidizing two-thirds of their budgets. See
Yoshiro Nabeshima, “Invisible Racism in Japan: Impact on Academic Achievement of Minority Children,” in Challenges to Japanese Education, 112.
73
Gordon, Japan’s Outcaste Youth, 24.
74
Kent E. Calder, Crisis and Compensation: Public Policy and Political Stability in Japan,
1949–1986. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 366.
75
Ibid., 366.
76
http://kokkai.ndl.go.jp/ (accessed December 28, 2010).
77
Takehiko Kariya, “The End of Egalitarian Education in Japan?” in Challenges to Japanese Education, 56.
78
Zenkoku Kaihokyoiku Kenkyukai, Kaihokyoikuno Seiritsuto Tenkai, 296–304.
79
Katz, Undeserving Poor, 185–235.
80
McGuinn, No Child Left Behind, 165–95.