The US Department of Education: End the mistake
President Donald Trump has targeted the US Department of Education for elimination with a new executive order, and he is right to do so. The department should never have been created. There has never been a need for it, and constitutionally, education is reserved to the people and states. As it should be: Education is about nothing less than the formation of millions of unique individuals, and control should be as close to each one as possible, not lodged in some distant bureaucracy.
For the vast majority of the country’s history, we had no federal department of education. A department was created in 1867, tasked with collecting data about American education, but it was downgraded to a bureau just a year later. It was not until 1979 that the current department was created, largely driven by the National Education Association, the country’s biggest teachers’ union, which wanted a cabinet-level department and would work for a presidential candidate who would create one. Jimmy Carter said he would, and after dragging his feet and some close votes, Congress enacted it. The department started operation in 1980.
There was no reason to think we needed an education department. Before 1979, we had educated countless children, become the world’s preeminent economy, and put a man on the moon. The federal government had an important job prohibiting racial discrimination by states and school districts, but we already had an agency for that: the Department of Justice.
The Department of Education’s primary task is as a “compensatory” funder – basically, trying to boost resources in low-income districts – which is both unconstitutional and unwise. The Constitution gives Washington no education spending power, while federal money incentivizes districts and states to spend their own funds with less discipline, and in places other than education. Don’t worry – the feds will handle it!
But Washington has not just spent. After starting to expend significant funds on education in the mid-1960s, concerns grew that the money was not doing any academic good. So the federal government started to attach more rules to the ducats, culminating from 2002 to 2015 in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), Race to the Top, and Common Core. With NCLB, the federal government imposed a uniform structure on states and districts: achieve “adequate yearly progress” to full math and reading proficiency by 2014, as measured by state standardized tests aligned to uniform state standards. With Race to the Top and Common Core, the feds tried to impose a single set of national standards, and just two tests, on all states.
The Trump administration is targeting the department, but the battle plans need to be filled in.
This micromanagement came nowhere close to getting the country to full proficiency – indeed, performance by high school seniors has been largely stagnant during the life of the department – but it did spur a national revolt. Many states started chaffing under rigid federal controls early on, and after the feds started strong-arming states to use the Common Core standards, federally selected tests, and evaluate teachers on their students’ test scores, everyone from libertarians to teachers’ unions had had enough. In 2015, NCLB was replaced with bipartisan support by the less controlling Every Student Succeeds Act. Ironically, with its heavy-handedness the federal government likely poisoned standards-based reform even for states that might have embraced it on their own – a hazard of ignoring the Constitution and bypassing the “laboratories of democracy.”
The department’s role in higher education impacts states less powerfully than K-12 policy. This is because funding colleges directly is a relatively small part of what Washington does. Much bigger is running student aid programs, including Pell Grants and student loans, which go to students.
That said, there is also no constitutional authority for this, and while different student aid programs have different degrees of impact, all enable price inflation. Why should schools keep their prices low, or use their own funds to aid low-income students, when the federal government will keep shoveling money to students?
Making matters worse, the Department of Education has failed at basic jobs like tracking repayments and making the form to apply for aid – the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) – simpler.
The Trump administration is targeting the department, but the battle plans need to be filled in. In the short term, ending the department could look a lot like sending its parts to other departments and agencies, and perhaps much of the money being block-granted to states. In the long term, the goal should be to end federal intervention in education, leaving power over education where it belongs: with the people and states.
Neal McCluskey directs the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.
