The Department of Education, From an 1867 Office to a Cabinet Fight

Washington has never met an office it could not promote, rename, reorganise or move to a bigger building. The one thing it almost never does is send an office home. Keep that in mind, because the story of the Department of Education is the story of an agency that was demoted once, wandered for a century, got a Cabinet chair, and then outlived every promise to abolish it.

Here's the thing most people do not know. The country got along without a Cabinet-level education department for its first two centuries, and when one finally appeared, the argument over whether it should exist was already as old as the idea. The department did not come out of nowhere in 1979, and the fight over it did not begin with the latest news cycle. Let me tell it in order, because the order explains the fight.

Before there was a department: the Founders' silence

The Constitution says nothing about schools. We will not rehash that here, because it deserves its own treatment in The Constitution Never Mentions Schools and That Is the Whole Point. The short version is that education was left to the states, and the states and towns built the schools: the common schools of New England, the township schools of the Midwest, the church and academy schools everywhere else.

Washington did have a hand, but a financial one. The Land Ordinance of 1785 reserved a section of every township in the western territories for the support of public schools. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared that schools and the means of education "shall forever be encouraged." In 1862 the Morrill Act, signed by President Lincoln, granted federal land to the states to fund colleges teaching agriculture and the mechanical arts. Notice the pattern. Washington gave land. It did not run schools. That distinction held for most of a century.

1867: a small office with a big mission

Then came the Civil War, and with it came a question the country had never had to ask on this scale: what do you do about the education of millions of newly freed people, and about a South whose school systems had been wrecked? The Freedmen's Bureau, created in 1865, helped to establish schools for the freed. A national conversation about schooling followed.

On March 2, 1867, President Andrew Johnson signed a law creating a federal Department of Education. Its first commissioner was Henry Barnard, an experienced school reformer who had run the schools of Connecticut and Rhode Island and edited a journal on education. The mission was modest by any modern measure: gather information about schools across the country, report on what worked, and spread good ideas. It was a statistical office with a dignified name. It had no power to order a school to do anything and no money to hand out.

1868: the first demotion

It lasted about a year. In 1868 Congress cut the department down to size. It became an Office of Education inside the Department of the Interior, with a smaller staff and a smaller budget. Barnard left in 1870.

Why? Historians give several reasons, and I'll give you the two that matter. The first was cost: legislators were nervous about spending money on a new Cabinet-level bureaucracy. The second was the one we still hear: a fear that a federal education department would meddle in local schools, which most Americans regarded as nobody's business but the town's. The members of Congress who pushed the demotion were not worried about the information, which everyone liked. They were worried about the precedent.

That is the whole drama in a nutshell, and it is worth saying plainly. In 1868, the people who wanted the department to stay small were making the argument that a small-government conservative would make today. They lost the long game, but they won the first round.

The wandering decades

For roughly seven decades after that, the Office of Education sat inside the Interior Department, publishing reports and gathering statistics, its commissioner a minor figure in Washington. It was a bureau, not a power.

Federal involvement grew anyway, in steps:

• 1917: the Smith-Hughes Act, the first major federal aid for vocational education in high schools, which you can read about in What America's Shop Class Lost, From Smith-Hughes to the Perkins Act.
• 1939: President Franklin Roosevelt's reorganisation moved the Office of Education out of Interior and into the new Federal Security Agency.
• 1944: the GI Bill, which paid for veterans' college and training, and which changed higher education for good.
• 1953: under President Eisenhower, the Federal Security Agency became the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, with a Cabinet secretary, Oveta Culp Hobby, as its first head. Education was now one of three words in the name of a giant department.
• 1957 to 1958: after the Soviets launched Sputnik, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which put federal money into science, math and foreign language instruction, and which opened the door to the idea that schooling was a national security matter.
• 1965: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, which opened the spigot for K-12 aid and which comes up again in From Title I to ESSA, Fifty Years of Washington Meddling in Your Schools.

By the end of the 1970s, a lot of money and a lot of programs had piled up in the Office of Education and in dozens of other places around the government. Nobody was running the whole thing. That was the case for a department, and it was a respectable one.

1979: the Cabinet department

Now we come to the fight. In the 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter promised to create a separate Cabinet-level Department of Education. It was a promise to the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, which endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its history that year, and endorsed Carter. The union wanted a seat at the Cabinet table, and a president who owed it one.

Supporters made a straightforward case. Education programs were scattered across the government, with no single official responsible for them. A Cabinet secretary would give schooling a voice and an advocate. A department would be accountable to Congress and the President for the money it spent. And a Cabinet department would let HEW, which had grown unwieldy, be split into two.

Opponents, many of them Republicans and some of them Democrats, made the older case. A Cabinet department meant a bigger federal role in schools, a bigger bureaucracy, a powerful ally for the teachers' union in the Cabinet room, and, in the end, more federal pressure on what happens in classrooms. They also asked the question that has never gone away: how does a Cabinet secretary in Washington improve a school in Wichita?

The fight in Congress was close. The House passed the bill narrowly, and the Senate approved a version of it, with the argument turning on exactly the questions above. On October 17, 1979, President Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act. The new Department of Education began operating in May 1980, and Shirley Hufstedler, a federal appeals court judge, became the first Secretary of Education. The rest of HEW became the Department of Health and Human Services.

What the new department inherited

It helps to know what the department in 1980 actually was, because it was less a new invention than a moving van. The programs came over from HEW and from other corners of the government: the K-12 aid under the 1965 law, the special education grants that Congress had created in 1975, the student aid programs, the Office for Civil Rights and the statistical work that traced back to Henry Barnard's original office. Congress packed them into one building, gave them one Secretary and called it a department.

That origin explains two features that critics and defenders both mention. First, the department has always been mostly a funnel: it takes money Congress appropriates and sends it to states, districts, colleges and borrowers, with rules attached. It does not run schools. Second, because it inherited its programs from other places, nearly all of its activity rests on separate statutes, each with its own constituency of schools, advocates and members of Congress. That is the reason a department that Republicans promised to abolish in 1980 was still standing in 1990, in 2000, and in every year since.

A fair observer should add what the department's defenders say here: an agency with one head can be called before a committee, can be audited and can be fired by the voters through the President. The scattered offices before 1979 could not. Whether that accountability is worth the apparatus is a judgment, and conservatives can land on different sides of it.

The promise to abolish it

Here is the part that conservatives love to tell, and I'll tell it straight, including the awkward ending.

In 1980 the Republican platform called for dismantling the new department, and the Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan, ran on the promise. He won. His first Secretary of Education, Terrel Bell, arrived at a department the President had pledged to close. And then, in 1981, Bell did something that has to count among the great ironies of Washington: he created a National Commission on Excellence in Education. The commission's report, A Nation at Risk, arrived in April 1983 and warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity" in American schools. It was a sensation. It put education on the front page for a generation. And it made the case, for many Americans, that Washington should care about schools.

The abolition proposal went nowhere in Congress. Presidents and Congresses of both parties found that cutting the department was a lot harder than promising to.

The promise did not die. Republican platforms continued to call for abolishing or sharply reducing the department. In the 1990s, Republicans who took over Congress introduced plans to eliminate it. None of those plans became law. In Congress, the votes were never there, and the programs the department runs are popular with the people who receive them.

Why only Congress can end it

This is the sentence I want every reader to remember. The Department of Education exists because Congress passed a law. It is not in the Constitution. It is not a creation of any President's executive order. It was created by a statute, the Department of Education Organization Act, and its programs, such as Title I for low-income schools, special education grants under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Pell Grants and the federal student loan programs, exist because separate statutes authorise them.

The consequences follow in numbered form.

1. A President cannot abolish a statutory department alone. A President can direct what the department does within the law, appoint its leaders and propose a budget. But the department's existence, its offices and its programs are written into law. Closing it requires Congress.
2. Abolishing the department does not abolish the programs. If Congress repealed the Organization Act tomorrow and did nothing else, Title I, IDEA and the Pell Grant would still be on the books, with no agency in charge. Congress would have to decide where each one goes: to another Cabinet department, to the states as block grants, or out of existence.
3. The votes are the problem. A bill to close the department would have to pass the House and clear the Senate, where 60 votes are usually needed to end debate, and win the President's signature. Even in years when Republicans held the White House and Congress, they did not assemble that coalition.

Which brings me to the point conservatives need to hear, even the ones I agree with. The tough, honest version of the abolition argument is not a slogan. It is a plan: block-grant the money, send it to the states, and repeal the layers of regulation that come attached. That is a case a conservative can argue on the merits. A slogan alone doesn't get a single vote.

The case for keeping it, answered

The strongest argument for the department is this: whatever you think of its origins, it now administers a lot of money and enforces civil rights laws. Students in poor districts, children with disabilities and borrowers with student loans depend on offices that a Cabinet department runs. If you scatter those functions, you do not make them go away. You make them harder to find and harder to hold accountable.

That has real force, and it deserves a straight answer. The answer is that a function is not the same as a department. Nothing about running the student loan system or enforcing the civil rights laws requires a separate Cabinet agency, and nothing about not having one means the work disappears. It could live in the Treasury, in Justice, or with the states. The question for a conservative is whether the national government is best placed to do each job, and whether the department's real product, a steady stream of rules and conditions attached to money, is worth what it costs. What the Education Department Actually Does, and What It Cannot lays out what the agency does and the limits the law places on it.

And remember, too, that money from Washington always comes with strings. The college in The College That Turned Down Washington's Money and What It Teaches Us decided the strings cost more than the money was worth, which tells you the strings are real. For the larger principle that Congress, not the executive, is supposed to write the rules, see Congress Should Write the Laws, and Other Radical Ideas From Article I.

The bottom line

• The department is young, and the argument is old. A federal education office was created in 1867, cut down within a year, and became a Cabinet department only in 1979.
• The founding objection has not changed. In 1868 and in 1979, the worry was that a federal education agency would meddle in local schools. That is a legitimate concern, and conservatives are right to keep raising it.
• Only Congress can close the department. A President cannot do it alone, and closing it would not end Title I, special education grants or Pell Grants unless Congress rewrote those laws too.
• Argue for a plan, not a slogan. If you want less Washington in your school, say where each program goes, what the states would do with the money and what happens to the families who rely on it.
• Call your members of Congress. They write the education laws and pass the budgets. The department answers to them, and they answer to you. Look up their votes in /politics/votes/.