Moving beyond the U.S. Department of Education
Below is the text of a lecture I delivered lecture delivered at Thales College in Wake Forest, North Carolina in March at the “Liberty & Literacy Forum,” a conference on educational freedom. I cover a lot of ground when it comes to federal involvement in education and focus on the historical, philosophical, and constitutional arguments against. My main point really emphasizes that scaling back education at the federal level should ultimately prompt us to rediscover the true purpose of education and that it’s something we are equipped to handle at a much more localized level.
The ideal education system should prepare students with the knowledge, skills, and moral character needed to thrive in a free, self-governing society. As the American conservative scholar Richard Weaver noted, “A liberal education specifically prepares for the achievement of freedom.” And as Jefferson wrote, “the people are safe depositories of their own liberty, and … are not safe unless enlightened…”
Yet, despite the dedication of many great teachers and some administrators, our current bureaucratic educational system remains grossly detached from this truth.
The first significant expansion of federal power in education came in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik, spurring efforts to improve math and science and expand access to college loans. However, the most dramatic growth in federal spending and oversight occurred during the War on Poverty and Great Society, initially aimed at promoting equality and preventing discrimination. Over time, these efforts have evolved into a rigid and bureaucratic system that stifles localized innovation and control.
One of the most contentious examples of this increasing federal oversight in education has been Title IX guidance and regulations. Title IX was passed by Congress in 1972 as part of the Education Amendments, wherein Title IX stipulates that discrimination on the basis of sex is prohibited in educational programs or entities accepting federal dollars.
Over time, however, its interpretation has expanded far beyond its intent from the early 70s, especially under recent presidential administrations, to encompass gender identity rather than just biological sex. This shift has sparked controversy, not only in K-12 education but higher education, where debates over transgender students’ participation in sports, access to bathrooms, and policing politically correct “newspeak” pronoun usage have become focal points of legal and cultural battles.
These changes are enacted not through Congress or the peoples’ representatives’ but through directives and “dear colleague” letters sent to institutions by OCR offering “guidance” and language that purports to threaten the loss of federal funding. Title IX is often believed in the wider culture to be primarily about sports, but it more often deals with issues of sexual harassment as costs have soared for hearings and investigations and staffing Title IX coordinators at many institutions as agency guidance letters have pushed terms like “preponderance of the evidence,” meaning more likely than not (50+1) as a burden of proof for harassment or assault, raising legitimate questions about due process.
But many of us have seen Title IX play out nationally in recent years through figures like the pushback from former collegian swimmer Riley Gaines and even more specifically in hyper-charged environments with plenty of media focus at the K-12 level in northern Virginia. In late 2023, in a Loudon County school a male dressed in female clothing sexually assaulted a female student in the bathroom. This student was removed from that school and placed in another school and then engaged in another assault in a restroom and administrators, and the school board, played a substantial role in covering up the attack – thus violating Title IX policies in favor of ideology.
The reinterpretation of Title IX was launched during the Obama administration, which issued guidance asserting that discrimination based on gender identity fell under the statute’s protections. The Trump administration later rescinded this guidance, emphasizing a return closer to the law’s original intent, but the Biden administration reinstated and further expanded the interpretation to explicitly include transgender students. This change has led to legal challenges and significant backlash from many parents, educators, and policymakers concerned about issues such as fairness in girls’ sports, transparency for parents in schools, and compelled speech. One example of the latter: a school district in Virginia recently paying out a $575,000 settlement to a Christian French teacher terminated for improper pronoun use. Alliance Defending Freedom secured the legal win.
I highlight Title IX because through federal directives the law was able to morph into the perfect example of legislation passed by Congress being completely inverted from its intent to something entirely different.
Other prime examples of federal overreach include standardized testing and top-down educational mandates that have further eroded the ability for teachers to teach in the classroom – notably through further laws in the last two decades such as “No Child Left Behind” and its replacement the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA) enacted in 2015. The initiatives mandated testing to meet federal benchmarks, thus the rampant criticism of teaching to the test that strains more holistic learning for students with added focus on math and reading at the expense of many other subjects and disciplines.
Common Core, primarily a state led initiative during the Obama administration encouraged adoption of further one-size-fits all education standards through federal funding incentives like the Race to the Top grant program.
As Erik A. Hanushek brings up in a recent paper for the Hoover Institution Press “The question that we need to ask about federal intervention is whether the structure has worked in the sense of delivering educational outcomes that meet societal needs.”
Hanushek highlights some significant and pretty well-known facts for those in the education space:
- US students are being outperformed in math by students in Span, Italy, and 32 other countries. He notes that this is highly detrimental to our labor force and economic growth does not bode well for the nation’s future.
- Real pupil spending has risen continuously for over 100 years and funding for students in 2019 is four times greater than 1960 in inflation adjusted dollars.
- There is no relationship to discern that the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) scores are improving with increased funding.
As Jay Green points out in his book “Education Myths”: “If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved.” As Betsy DeVos noted in a recent op-ed calling for abolishing the Department of Education, “7 out of 10 fourth graders do not read at grade level and six in 10 fourth graders are behind in math, while the gaps between the lowest and highest performing students are the widest, they have ever been.”
When it comes to federal overreach, another area of concern is school discipline policies under the guise of “dear colleague letters” in K-12 education to try and create parity in racial discipline. Looking at past racial discipline suspension or expulsion rates, federal administrators at the Office of Civil Rights within the Dept. of Ed. came up with the brilliant idea to aim towards numerical equity. In what appears to signal looking the other way, then-Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a DOJ release:
“Discrimination in school discipline can have devastating long-term consequences on students and their future opportunities.”
Tacked onto that is the implied threat that federal funding could be in jeopardy through civil rights violations if schools didn’t take action to address racial disparity in school discipline, with no mention about whether cultural implications, fatherlessness, or other components seemed to be contributing factors to behavior.
But the cost can be immense to districts and schools and students as Robert Podiscio of the American Enterprise Institute points out in a recent op-ed in March:
- Teachers got implicit bias training costing $2,000 to $10,000 per session, with no guarantee that it works; facilitators were hired or redirected, and new data systems tracked every classroom time-out by race.
- A conservative estimate of the cost of compliance would be $100 million to $200 million over several years, mostly in urban school districts desperate to avoid a civil rights investigation.
- But misspent dollars aren’t even the worst of it: As student suspensions dropped to appease federal monitors, teachers complained that relaxed student discipline was creating classroom chaos. Compliance trumped learning, which ground to a halt.
- These letters don’t show up in the Education Department budget, but they’re fiscal vampires, draining local resources under threat of enforcement, and diverting staff time and attention from schools’ primary business of teaching and learning.[1]
Thankfully, the states, acting as laboratories of democracy are becoming more proactive in pushing back against a stale and broken educational system that has stunted academic and moral growth.
There are now 11 to 14 states (depending on how you define it) that make choice universal for K-12 students. In late 2024, NC legislators overrode the veto of then Gov. Roy Cooper to clear the 55,000 waitlist for the Opportunity Scholarship.
But while policies that implement and aim for universal vouchers are needed, particularly in our increasingly pluralistic society — school choice is no magic bullet. I believe this is an important truth too often missed by those engaged in public policy. Narrow focus on policy wins can overshadow the more fundamental question: What is the true purpose of education? This is a question that is not only elusive to but especially of little interest to many educational administrative bureaucrats focused primarily on systems and propping up government and unions.
While policies that implement and aim for universal vouchers are needed, particularly in our increasingly pluralistic society — school choice is no magic bullet.
Likewise, if state education departments merely take funds through block grants, they run the risk of making the same mistakes via bureaucratic inefficiencies and ineffectual top-down mandates just like the federal government. Some of you have already seen news headlines where state education departments are looking to poach laid off or terminated federal workers to staff their own bureaucratic agencies, elevating the risk that entrenched bureaucratic thinking might be emboldened at the state level.
Many state education departments blindly follow federal guidance and strings because they have not deeply thought-out what kind of alternatives to offer students. After all, efforts to centralize education was started in the first place because of some failure at the state level.
Local and not just state control is a huge component of our federalist system, too. Furthermore, it’s a much-needed reminder that self-government means more of the hard decisions about education and many of the controversies surrounding it should be done with our neighbors that we live in community with. It pushes us to ask the enduring question of our republic: What is our capacity for self-government?
The Roman Catholic teaching of subsidiarity offers some wisdom here, which “reminds us that larger institutions in society (such as the state or federal government) should not overwhelm or interfere with smaller or local institutions (such as the family, local schools, or the Church community).”
Returning to the true purpose of learning – hopefully interest continues to grow on that fundamental topic and question. While school choice certainly helps us to better understand and pontificate that question, it’s always vital that we ask at the deeper level. It’s clear that increasing state and local control of education is likely to be more responsive and reactive to the desires of parents and implementing the desires of like-minded communities. Again, the explosion of school choice policies in the states is the starkest example of this truth.
I am reminded of the words of Russell Kirk in the essay “The Conservative Purpose of a Liberal Education:”
“The primary purpose of a liberal education, then, is the cultivation of the person’s own intellect and imagination, for the person’s own sake. It ought not to be forgotten, in this mass age when the state aspires to be all in all, that genuine education is something higher than an instrument of public policy. True education is meant to develop the individual human being, the person, rather than to serve the state.”
It’s essential to note that beyond the centralization of education policy that has weakened outcomes, it also has weakened the moral and civic formation of local communities, and pitted neighbors against each other along more nationalized issues with coercement over funding at the forefront.
As a parent, the moment for me and my wife exiting a good public school for our kids was primarily about the soul. The main reason boiled down to one simple truth: How can we talk about the transcendent and Trinitarian God at home and church and accept it being completely ignored in a primary learning environment?
I’m also reminded of the words of the late great Admiral James Bond Stockdale in his brilliant book, “Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot:” “The challenge of education is not to prepare people for success but to prepare them for failure.”
It’s counterintuitive thinking compared to our more contemporary models but reminds us of a much deeper moral formation and a strong inner life to face hardship and challenges. In fact, Stockdale credited the stoics with saving his life as a prisoner of war for over seven years in the “Hanoi Hilton” while facing torture and horrific conditions in North Vietnam. It was not his war college education or even Naval Academy education that prepared him for the dark night of the soul, but his knowledge of the stoics. Before he was shot down, Stockdale had studied Epictetus intently who wrote, “A podium and a prison is each a place, one high and the other low, but in either place your freedom of choice can be maintained if you so wish,” reinforcing that in the bleakest conditions, freedom lies in an inner control and the ability to choose one’s response to circumstances, not merely external conditions.
Forty-five years after its creation, the U.S. Department of Education has never justified its existence. Systems driven by mandates will forever prioritize itself and some form of idealized technical proficiency over the cultivation of virtues such as responsibility and obligations and knowledge of truth.
More traditionally, education has been a means of transmitting cultural values and preparing individuals for self-governance, a role best fulfilled at the local level where families, schools, and community institutions work together to shape curriculum and strive for a learning environment that is rooted in something beyond a society in disarray and jerked around by ideological fads.
If we are serious about restoring both educational effectiveness and moral character, we must return authority to the communities most invested in shaping the next generation. The path forward is certainly not more federal control or even state control but a reinvigoration of local institutions that respect tradition, cultivate responsibility, and foster intellectual curiosity. Only then can we hope to recover a broader education system worthy of a free people.
[1] “How Education Letters Have Wasted Billions.”
