The compensatory education Plan of the United States came into being under the impetus of the civil rights movement in 1950s and 1960s. After World War II, African-Americans, under the leadership of Reverend Martin Luther King, began a large-scale movement against apartheid and discrimination and for democratic rights. Through hard work, this movement has achieved remarkable results. In education, the far-reaching influence of this movement is to make the federal government more deeply aware of the unequal status of disadvantaged and poor children and minority children in education. They found that poverty is cyclical. Children from poor families have poor living environment and few opportunities to go to school, which leads to less employment opportunities in the future and can only engage in some lower-level jobs with low social recognition and low salary. In this way, one generation is poor, one generation is poor, and so on. Therefore, the American government put forward the slogan of "fighting poverty", trying to get these families out of the vicious circle of intergenerational poverty through early compensatory education for their children.
At first, compensatory education was only to solve the education problems of poor children and minority children. The famous ones are 1956' s higher vision plan, 1965' s spiritual enlightenment plan and a series of compensation plans for black children. Later, some scholars pointed out that the disadvantage is not only reflected in the economy, but also in the cultural and physical disability. The federal government has successively formulated compensatory education plans, such as bilingual education plan and compensation plan for disabled children, so that all children can enjoy equal educational opportunities.