What the Education Department Actually Does, and What It Cannot

Stop a hundred people on the street and ask what the Department of Education does all day, and you'll get roughly three answers. Some will say it writes the textbooks. Some will say it tells their kid's teacher what to say. A few will say "I have no idea, but I'm against it," which is the answer that wins the most elections and explains the least.

All three are wrong in different ways, and so is the answer on the other side, the one that says the department is the thing standing between your child and the abyss. The truth is duller and more interesting. The department is mostly a funnel for money, a rulebook for the strings that come with it, and an enforcer of a handful of civil rights laws. It does not run a single neighbourhood school.

If you want to argue about the department, and conservatives have been arguing about it for forty years, you should argue about what it really does. A fight with a cartoon is easy to win and worth nothing. Let me lay out the real job description.

Start with the money map

Before the four jobs, one fact reorders the whole debate: who pays for your child's school? In the United States the answer is, overwhelmingly, state and local government. Property taxes, state income and sales taxes, and state aid formulas carry most of the load. The federal government supplies a minority of K-12 funding. In most years the federal share has been closer to a tenth than a fifth, and the National Center for Education Statistics, itself part of the department's research arm, publishes the exact breakdown if you'd like the current figure.

That ratio explains something about influence. When you pay about a tenth of the bill, you shouldn't expect to run the house. But you can still shape it, if you attach conditions to every dollar. Keep that in mind, because the conditions are where the real argument lives.

Here is what that looks like in a single hypothetical district. Say the general fund is $60,000,000, of which $3,000,000 arrives as federal grants. The federal share is 3,000,000 divided by 60,000,000, which is 0.05, or 5 percent. Now say the district also has a federal compliance office of four people, a part-time grant writer and a reporting calendar that fills every spring. Five cents of every dollar come from Washington, and the paperwork behind that nickel can feel like it governs the other ninety-five cents. That is the grievance, in one picture. If you want to run the same numbers on your own district, A Worksheet for Reading Your School District's Budget Line by Line shows how.

Job one: Title I, the money for low-income schools

One of the biggest K-12 programs is Title I, created by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which President Lyndon Johnson signed on April 11, 1965, at the one-room school in Stonewall, Texas, where he had once been a student. Title I sends money to school districts with high numbers or high percentages of children from low-income families. The money is distributed by formula, which means a law, not a bureaucrat, decides how much each district gets, based on poverty counts from the census.

The rules attached are about how the money is used. The central one is "supplement, not supplant": federal dollars are supposed to add to what the state and district would spend anyway, not replace it. Another rule requires states to test students and report results.

Here is the strongest argument for the program: districts with poor families have a smaller property tax base, and without help, their children would get less. That's a serious argument, and you should be able to state it. The conservative response is that a fixed formula that sends the same money to the same places, year after year, with a mountain of compliance paperwork and a mixed record of results, deserves a tough look. A responsible critic doesn't say "end it." He says "show me what it bought."

Job two: special education grants under IDEA

The second job is special education. In 1975 Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, in 1990. The law requires every public school to provide a "free appropriate public education" to children with disabilities, through an individualised education program written for each child. It is a civil-rights-style mandate on schools, and a spending program, in one.

Here is the catch that every school board member in America can recite from memory. When Congress passed the law, it authorised the federal government to pay up to 40 percent of the extra cost of educating children with disabilities. Congress has never come close to appropriating that much. The states and districts carry the remaining cost, which is one reason local budgets for special education keep growing. This is an unfunded-mandate argument that conservatives and school boards share. If you want a lever to pull, ask whether Washington should either fund its promise or loosen the strings.

The department's Office of Special Education Programs oversees how states use the money and monitors compliance. The department doesn't write any child's plan. That's done by the school team and the parents, which is a point parents should remember: you are a member of the team.

Job three: Pell Grants and student loans

The third job is the one with the most money and the most shoe leather: federal student aid. The department runs the federal student aid system through its Federal Student Aid office.

• Pell Grants are need-based grants for undergraduates that don't have to be repaid. They began in 1972 as Basic Educational Opportunity Grants and were renamed in 1980 for Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, one of their champions.
• Federal student loans are made directly by the government to borrowers. How they work, and why balances keep growing, is explained in How a Federal Student Loan Works and Why the Balance Keeps Growing.
• The FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, is the form that decides who gets what.
• Accreditation oversight. The department doesn't accredit colleges, but it recognises the private accrediting bodies whose approval is the gate to federal aid. That gatekeeping power is the subject of Accreditation, the Gatekeeper Nobody Elected That Decides Who Gets Federal Money.

This is where the department behaves most like a bank, and where most of its dollars go. It has a lot of power here. If a college wants its students to use federal aid, it must meet the department's rules.

Job four: civil rights enforcement

The fourth job is enforcement. The department's Office for Civil Rights investigates complaints that schools and colleges receiving federal money are discriminating. The laws it enforces are:

• Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.
• Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars sex discrimination in education programs.
• Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which bars discrimination on the basis of disability, and the Americans with Disabilities Act as it applies to public schools and colleges.
• The Age Discrimination Act of 1975.

The tool is the one these laws provide: a school that takes federal money agrees to follow the rules, and a school that doesn't can lose the money. In practice, most cases end in a negotiated resolution agreement.

The conservative position on this job is more complicated than a slogan. Republican votes carried the Civil Rights Act of 1964 past a filibuster, as Republicans Delivered the Votes That Broke the 1964 Filibuster explains. Few Americans want to repeal the principle that a school cannot discriminate on race. The fight is about how the law is interpreted and enforced, and by whom: whether an agency can expand a statute by guidance letter, or whether Congress must amend the law. That is a fight over process, and process is where conservatives usually have the best arguments.

What the department also does that nobody mentions

Two quick items, to complete the job description. The Institute of Education Sciences, through the National Center for Education Statistics, collects data and runs the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation's Report Card, a sample test that lets us compare states over time. And it supports research. These are the quiet, useful pieces of the portfolio. Even people who want a much smaller department often want somebody to keep counting.

What the law forbids the department from doing

Now the part that surprises both sides. By statute, the department is barred from controlling curriculum.

1. The General Education Provisions Act. This law, which governs most federal education programs, says that nothing in those programs authorises any federal officer to exercise direction, supervision or control over the curriculum, the program of instruction, the administration or the personnel of any school or school system. It's in the law, in plain words, in Title 20 of the U.S. Code, section 1232a.
2. The Department of Education Organization Act of 1979. The very law that created the department says it is not to increase the federal government's authority over education or diminish the responsibility for education reserved to the states and local school systems.
3. The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015. It repeats the prohibition and sharpens it, barring the Secretary from mandating or pressuring states to adopt particular academic standards, curricula or assessments. It specifically names the Common Core standards.

So the department cannot tell your district what to teach, which books to use, who to hire or how to run the school day. It cannot certify teachers (the states do) or set graduation requirements (the states do). It does not own or operate schools in your town. Two other federal agencies do run schools: the Department of Defense runs schools for military children, and the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Education oversees schools for Native American students. Neither is the Education Department.

So where does the control come from?

Here's the honest part, and I'd say it is the heart of the matter. The law says the department can't control curriculum. Skeptics reply: "Then why does it feel like it does?"

Because there are five ways a funder steers without technically controlling.

1. Conditions on the money. Congress can attach conditions to federal funds under the Spending Clause, and the Supreme Court allows it within limits. In South Dakota v. Dole (1987), the Court said conditions must be stated clearly, relate to the purpose of the spending and not be coercive. In NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), the Court found a coercive limit in the Medicaid expansion, which NFIB v. Sebelius Lost the Mandate Fight but Won a Limit on Federal Strings explains. A school that wants the money accepts the strings.
2. Regulation. The department writes rules to carry out the statutes, and those rules fill thousands of pages of compliance requirements.
3. Guidance. Letters and documents that say how the department will read the law. Guidance isn't binding the way a regulation is, but a district that wants to avoid an investigation will often follow it. Many conservatives object that guidance lets an agency make new rules without the notice-and-comment process.
4. Competitions and waivers. The department can offer money or flexibility in exchange for adopting policies. That's how the federal government encouraged states to adopt certain standards in 2009 and 2010, a story told in From Title I to ESSA, Fifty Years of Washington Meddling in Your Schools.
5. Reporting. What gets measured gets managed. A mandatory report on a metric nudges every principal toward that metric.

None of this is curriculum control in the legal sense. All of it can feel like it. That is the difference between the statute and the experience.

The strongest objection

The best defense of the department's current role is this: "Without federal money and federal rules, poor districts and children with disabilities would be at the mercy of the states and the local majority. The federal government stepped in because the states did not do the job. The strings are the price of the guarantee."

That has real history behind it. Before 1975, many children with disabilities were kept out of public schools entirely, and the 1975 law was a response. Before the 1960s, state-sponsored segregation was the law in much of the country, and no one will tell you the states were fixing that on their own timetable.

The reply for the conservative is to accept the premise and take issue with the remedy. The principle that a child cannot be excluded from school for race or disability is settled and deserves to be settled. The question is whether the guarantee needs a Cabinet department, and a mountain of paper, rather than a clear statute, a court to enforce it and a block grant to pay for it. That argument can be made seriously, and it is made best by people who know what the department does.

The bottom line

• The department is a funnel, a rulebook and an enforcer. It sends money for low-income schools, special education and college aid, and enforces civil rights laws. It does not run your school.
• The federal share of school funding is a minority. State and local taxpayers carry most of the load, which is why your school board and your statehouse matter more than the Cabinet.
• The law bars federal control of curriculum. Three statutes say so. If someone in Washington claims to be telling your district what to teach, ask which law gives the authority.
• The real influence runs through strings. Conditions, regulations, guidance and competitions steer districts. That's where reform has to happen, and it takes an act of Congress.
• Argue with the real department. Learn the four jobs, find the statute behind each and then make your case. Start with your own representative at /politics/members/.