Johnson's Achievements

• Head Start


  Designed to enable poor preschool children to catch up with other children before beginning school
• Head Start

  • Nearly 1 million disadvantaged children enrolled in the programme during Johnson's presidency
• Upward Bound


  Linked higher-education institutions to poorer students with college potential
• Upward Bound


  • Around 50,000 disadvantaged students participated in the programme each year of Johnson's presidency
• Other anti-poverty measures

  • Extension of Kennedy's food-stamp programme through the Food Stamp Act 1964
  • 35 cent rise in the minimum wage
• Johnson boasted that the % of Americans in poverty was falling (it fell from 17% in 1965 to 11% in 1972) and that federal expenditure on the poor had increased from $13 billion in 1963 to $20 billion in 1966
• Johnson failed to eradicate poverty, for example, one third of non-white families still lived below the poverty line with unemployment and infant mortality rate nearly twice those of whites