Abolish the Department of Education

In the early 1970s, the National Education Association transformed from a professional association to a labor union and offered its endorsement to a presidential candidate who would support a stand-alone education department. Democrat Jimmy Carter made the promise and was elected in 1976.

The idea was controversial, including on the left. Joseph Califano, Carter’s secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), objected to taking education programs from under the broader welfare roof and saw a standalone department as a threat to higher education’s independence. Albert Shanker—the president of the other major teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers—opposed a department as likely ineffectual and a threat to state and local K‑12 control.

In 1979, the department squeaked by: 20–19 in the House Rules Committee and 210–206 in the full House. In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran for president pledging to kill it, but there was little congressional Republican desire to fight again.

The department became the K‑12 controller that Shanker feared, peaking with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) from 2002 to 2015. Though the Constitution gives the federal government no authority to govern education, NCLB required states to have uniform math and reading standards and make “adequate yearly progress” to full proficiency by 2014. In 2010, the department brought the country to the brink of a national curriculum, coercing states to adopt the Common Core standards and associated tests. Only when teachers unions opposed tying test scores to teacher evaluations did left and right converge against federal overreach. NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which removed the adequate yearly progress mandate that was the linchpin of federal control, as well as several other prescriptive parts of NCLB.

With around 4,100 employees, the Education Department is the smallest Cabinet department. The federal government also furnishes a relatively tiny amount of K‑12 funding, averaging only about 8.5 percent of public school revenues for the last five decades. But the feds need relatively little money to exert power. A state might spend $20 billion, but if headlines say it risks even a few million dollars by bucking federal rules, that looks big. So even though the ESSA is a release from NCLB, Washington retains the ability to take greater control.

The achievement impact of federal dollars is hard to isolate, but during the NCLB era, National Assessment of Educational Progress math and reading scores generally rose, though they mainly stagnated for the oldest children. NCLB’s obsessive focus on those subjects might have helped spur some improvements.

But education is about more than standardized tests, or reading and math, and NCLB crowded out many subjects and instructional approaches. It also likely kneecapped the standards-based reform movement that bore it. The movement originated in the states, and it might have been more sustainable had “laboratories of democracy” been able to adjust to their own needs and cultures.

Eliminating the Department of Education would only soften these problems.

The threat of micromanagement would diminish were education in a broader department, like a new HEW (similar to the 2018 Trump administration proposal to combine the Education and Labor Departments). That secretary would have more to do than pull K‑12 strings, and the head of a mere office would command less public attention. But Washington would retain dangerous spending leverage, and the Constitution would still be violated.

So yes, end the Department of Education. But don’t just merge it with other departments. End all its unconstitutional programs.