ABSTRACT
Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980 rallied economic, cultural, and religious conservatives to the agenda of the Great Communicator, as he became known. In many ways, there was more continuity than discontinuity in federal educational policy between 1980 and 2000, though there were some differences in the agendas of the three presidents, Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, and Bill Clinton. Reagan quickly moved to cut taxes, thereby in his view releasing American capital from the government that had fettered it and prevented economic development. The National Commission on Excellence in Education was headed by David Gardner, who had been President of the University of Utah when Bell was that state's commissioner of higher education. Fiscal Equalization Reforms Although federal and state reform efforts of the 1980s generally represented a retreat from the equality movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in at least one area events of the 1980s built on earlier precedents.
