History Lesson: The Department of Education and Federal Power in American Schools

Why do we have a federal Department of Education? For most of American history, we didn’t. In 1867, Ohio Rep. (and future president) James Garfield proposed and won a Department of Education as part of Reconstruction, the federal project to rebuild the South in the wake of the Civil War. That broad effort included aid to schools for newly emancipated African Americans, which provoked fear and rage among many white people; just 10 percent of enslaved Black people could read, and education could enhance Black economic and political power. The first Department of Education lasted just a year before Congress demoted it to the Office of Education, which collected statistics about American schools but lacked any other executive function.

For the next century, the federal government played a negligible role in American public schooling. The big game changer was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared that state-sponsored school segregation was unconstitutional. Southern states vowed “massive resistance” to Brown and dragged their heels on integrating schools until the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which provided assistance to poor school districts for books, equipment, and more. That also gave the federal government new leverage over schools, which faced the loss of these funds if they failed to comply with desegregation orders. In 1964, just two percent of Black children in the South attended majority-white schools. Six years later, in 1970, one-third of them did.

ESEA also triggered an avalanche of other federal educational programs, including aid for children with disabilities and second-language English learners. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed into law a new Department of Education to centralize and oversee these efforts. It passed over the objections of Republicans like Ronald Reagan, who argued that public schooling should be a state and local concern. Upon his election to the White House the following year, Reagan pledged to eliminate the department. But his wishes were undermined by his own secretary of education, Terrel Howard Bell, whose much-discussed 1983 report on mediocrity in public education (A Nation at Risk) made removing the department politically untenable.

Two decades later, the same party that had demanded the elimination of the Department of Education sparked the greatest boost of federal authority over schools in American history. Republican President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (2001–2002), which required all school districts to test students, report the results based on race, and ensure that all students were “proficient.” President Barack Obama ramped up federal power still further with his Race to the Top initiative, offering grants to states that removed caps on charter schools, paid teachers based on student test scores, and adopted higher academic standards like Common Core. And the winners of this grant competition were selected by—you guessed it—the U.S. Department of Education.

No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top sparked a bipartisan backlash: Democrats didn’t like their emphasis on standardized tests, and Republicans objected to their enhancement of federal power. That led Obama to sign the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015), which barred the federal government from influencing curriculum or teacher evaluation. States still have to test their students and report the results, but they can devise their own goals and accountability systems. And the Department of Education continued to administer other federal programs, including the most expensive one of all: student loans to attend colleges and universities.

We are now witnessing the demise of the department, along with the bipartisan consensus that sustained it. Although President Donald Trump stopped short of eliminating the Department of Education, which would require an act of Congress, he fired most of its employees and distributed its functions to other parts of the government. Treasury will administer student loans, Health and Human Services will oversee special education, and so on. The stated rationale for this move was the same one that Reagan articulated four decades ago: education should be governed by states and localities, not by Washington. But at the same time, Trump has attempted an unprecedented centralization of federal power in K–12 schooling via executive orders requiring “patriotic” instruction, barring “divisive” messages about race, and so on. Ditto for higher education. Earlier this fall, Trump promised nine universities—including Penn—federal funding advantages if they barred the use of race and sex in hiring and admissions, froze tuition charges, and limited enrollment of international students (Seven of the nine, including Penn, have so far rejected the deal.)

It’s far too early to know how these new orders will affect the day-to-day conduct of our institutions. But here’s what we do know: no matter what happens to the Department of Education, schools and universities will remain a focus of federal concern. Like it or not, Washington is deeply enmeshed in our educational lives. The only question is what kinds of authority it will exert, and what the rest of us will do in response.

This story originally appeared in the fall/winter issue of Penn GSE Magazine.