The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was passed by the 89th United States Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 11, 1965.

The act emphasizes equal access to education, aiming to shorten the achievement gaps between students by providing federal funding to support schools with children from impoverished families.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) introduced a testing regime designed to promote standards-based education.

The Every Student Succeeds Act retained some of the testing requirements established by the NCLB, but shifted accountability provisions to the states.

[2][page range too broad] Education funding in the 1960s was especially tight due to the demographic challenges posed by the large Baby Boomer generation, but Congress had repeatedly rejected increased federal financing for public schools.

[3] Buoyed by his landslide victory in the 1964 election, Johnson sought to dramatically increase federal funding for education at the start of his second term.

[4] On January 25, 1965, President Johnson called for congressional efforts to improve education opportunities for America's children.

Presidential biographer Robert Dallek further reports that researchers cited by Hugh Davis Graham soon found that poverty had more to do with family background and neighborhood conditions than the quantity of education a child received.

Early studies suggested initial improvements for poor children helped by ESEA reading and math programs, but later assessments indicated that benefits faded quickly and left pupils little better off than those not in the schemes.

[11] Title I also helps children from families that have migrated to the United States and youth from intervention programs who are neglected or at risk of abuse.

Each educational institution requesting these grants must submit an application that describes how these funds will be used in restructuring their school for academic improvement.

[11] In its original conception, Title I under the ESEA, was designed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to close the skill gap in reading, writing and mathematics between children from low-income households who attend urban or rural school systems and children from the middle-class who attend suburban school systems.

[12] Numerous studies have been conducted since the original authorization of the ESEA in 1965 that have shown that there is an inverse relationship between student achievement and school poverty.

[18] Regulations also included added attention to uniformity in regards to how resources were distributed to Title I and non-Title I schools as well as the role of parents in the revisions of the program.

[18] Pull-out programs were adopted by Title I schools in order to comply with the financial stipulations that were made in the initial reauthorizations.

[18] By 1978, in response to the extensive criticism of pull-outs on the grounds that they were asynchronous with the instruction occurring in classrooms, another option for providing assistance to students was introduced, the school wide approach.

During the Reagan Administration, Congress passed the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act (ECIA) in 1981 to reduce federal regulations of Title I.

[18] The additions that were made through this legislation called for synchrony between Chapter I and classroom instruction, it raised the achievement standard for low-income students by emphasizing advanced skills instead of basic ones and increased parental involvement.

The IASA attempted to coordinate federal resources and policies with the pre-existing efforts at the state and local levels in order to improve instruction for all students.

[21] Yearly standardized tests were mandated in order to measure how schools were performing against the achievement bars set by Title I.

Thus, various public money, including Title I funds, are being investigated for possible use to provide cellular Internet access for students to receive remediation or other instructional content from home.

[22] NCLB also requires that for funding to be received, all districts and schools must meet adequate yearly progress goals for their student populations and specific demographic subgroups.

[23] Its main intention is to reward schools that expend more state resources on public education and distribute funding in an equitable manner.

The idea was to push students to high academic achievement via a program encouraging them to learn English while maintaining the native language.

[13] In late 1967, Congress gave $7.5 million to school districts, scholars, and private research groups who proposed the best programs for improving bilingual education.

It is worth noting that Title VII was replaced in a reauthorization of the ESEA, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, becoming Title III “Language Instruction for Limited English Proficient and Immigrant Students.” The most recent reauthorization of the ESEA was through the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, which renamed Title III to “Language Instruction for English Learners and Immigrant Students.” In 1980, President Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education which allowed for the Bilingual Education campaign to expand bilingual education programs.

[33] In 2001 Texas authorized and encouraged school districts to adopt dual language immersion programs for elementary-aged students.

[34] More recently The Civil Rights Project, a research center founded at Harvard University and located at UCLA since 2007 is calling on policymakers to develop a new vision for bilingual education.

Gándara and Hopkins gather compelling evidence that shows English-only policies in the states that adopted these restrictions aren’t working[35] The project proposes a new attitude that embraces bilingualism: “It is time that the U.S. join the rest of the developed world in viewing bilingualism as an asset, not a deficit,” argues Gary Orfield, co-director of the project.

In 1998, California passed Proposition 227 with the help of sponsor, Ron Unz, essentially ending bilingual education programs in exchange for an English immersion model which values assimilation over multiculturalism.