Do We Need the Department of Education?

The Department of Education has been around for 45 years. It’s fair to ask: has it improved the American education system?

Before going any further, I want to make it clear that, as much as I believe in decentralization and a limited role for the federal government, I’m not opposed to politicians in Washington, D.C. wanting to play a role in how Americans are taught. We can look back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which set aside land to be used for the building of public schools, and to the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862, which created a national system of state universities and colleges. It was a good thing that, following the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which provided $1 billion in funding for education. I also love the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, more commonly known as the GI Bill, which assisted over ten million veterans. Perhaps most important, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government the authority to ensure that schools do not discriminate against students. These were all important interventions by the federal government.

Following the success of the GI Bill, Congress expanded the federal role in education even further. In 1965, Congress passed the Higher Education Act, which opened federal grants and loans to all students who wanted to pursue a postsecondary education, and created the Head Start Program, which provided early childhood education to low-income families. Meanwhile, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 provided more federal funding to schools and the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 addressed the educational needs of students with limited English proficiency. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1975 guaranteed free and appropriate public education to children with disabilities. By the late 1970s, there was an appropriate desire to reduce administrative costs by housing all the programs under one roof. Hence, in 1979, we end up with the Department of Education Organization Act, which was passed by fourteen votes in the House of Representatives and by a much larger margin in the Senate.

From its inception, there have been efforts to eliminate the Department of Education. In his 1982 State of the Union speech, President Ronald Reagan called for its closure. The demands are being renewed by Donald Trump.

Skeptics wonder whether its 4,400 employees have improved education outcomes. They point to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress found in the Nation’s Report Card. Math scores between 1978 and 2022 have barely budged and reading scores are pretty much unchanged. (For thirteen-year-olds, they have dropped.) Paul E. Peterson, the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, was a member of an independent review panel that evaluated the No Child Left Behind law. About ten years ago, Peterson wrote, “The achievement gap in the United States is as wide today as it was in 1971 [even though] school spending has tripled over this time period.” A few years ago, Peterson co-authored A Half Century of Student Progress Nationwide. Bringing information from every nationally representative testing program consistently administered in the United States over the past 50 years, Peterson points out that student achievement is pretty much the same.

When thinking about the Department of Education and its impact, it is legitimate to wonder about whether the money is actually reaching the classroom. Even though the DOE provides a fraction of K–12 funding, complex funding formulas, grant applications, and reporting requirements pervade local and state school systems. The first big research on this topic took place over two decades ago, when a commission led by Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan released Education at a Crossroads: What Works and What’s Wasted in Education. Based on extensive interviews and data analysis, the commission estimated that the fifty states completed a total of 50 million hours of paperwork just to get their federal education dollars. It argued that just 65 cents to 70 cents of each federal taxpayer dollar made its way to the classroom. Though this data is old, there is no reason to think that things have gotten better. A more recent analysis estimates that local and state education agencies have hired tens of thousands of people whose main job it is to get the available federal funding.

The weight of Washington’s bureaucratic paperwork burden helps explain why, in school districts across the country, the hiring of administrators outpaces the hiring of teaching staff. According to one analysis of data from Department of Education, school district administrative staff grew 74.9 percent , principals and assistant principals grew 33.4 percent, while teachers only grew 7.7 percent between 2000 and 2017.

When we wonder about the question posed in the beginning—“Has the Department of Education improved the American education system?”— it’s important to point out that even critics of the Department of Education support certain expenditures. At the height of the Tea Party in 2011, movement when Republicans sought to slash spending, Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers introduced an amendment that restored $557 million in special-education funding. She explained to her conservative constituents, “As the mom of a child with special needs, I know how critical it is to fund educational opportunities for children with disabilities.” House Republicans backed the amendment 232 to 5. Or consider the controversial “Project 2025” by the Heritage Foundation. Rather than trying to eliminate funds for individuals with disabilities, its authors argue that the funding should be converted into a no-strings formula block grant that would be administered by the Administration for Community Living, an office within the Department of Health and Human Services.

For what it’s worth, I think it is important to spend federal funds on educating and assisting those with special needs. I think of my cousin, David and my sister-in-law, Iva. Both work with children and teens who have major challenges with learning and interacting with other people. Government should help people who truly can’t help themselves. This work is the essence of the safety net. It is evidence of societal progress that we are allocating millions of dollars to help those with special needs. For millennia, in societies across the world, weak or disabled infants were often left to die. Many with special needs were feared and ostracized and kept hidden and placed in asylums. Now we try to train, integrate, and educate. When thinking about federal funding of DOE, It’s important to recognize that 95 percent of children with special needs attend assigned public schools.

But while the federal government has important things to fund, is it radical to ask if we need all 4,400 DOE employees to allocate those funds? Is it crazy to argue for more block grants instead? After all, block grants allow programs to be more easily tailored to local needs and priorities, have fewer administrative requirements and regulations, and reduce bureaucratic red tape. Block grants allow programs to be more easily tailored to local needs and priorities.

While I support the goal of the DOE in funding to help those who truly need help, I don’t dismiss out of hand the argument that the Administration for Community Living within DHHS could distribute funds authorized by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. I also see where critics are coming from when they argue that the Bureau of Indian Affairs should handle education for Native American children and that the Justice Department could take over litigating civil rights violations. A big role of the Department of Education is overseeing the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program. Why couldn’t the Treasury Department take on that responsibility?

Of course, as I’m writing these very words, we saw the release of DeepSeek by a Chinese company. It’s a new “Sputnik moment”. How do we compete with China? How do we respond to the fact that they are kicking our butts when it comes to educating young people in STEM? Is it possible that we need a Federal Government intervention now just like we had in the 1950s? It’s a fair question. Just as it’s a fair question to ask if the Department of Education has actually made things better.