Abolish the Department of Education
Love or hate the Project 2025 blueprint for the next conservative president, it has done at least one good thing: revive discussion of ending the U.S. Department of Education. That department has no constitutional business existing. But eliminating the programs it administers, many of which predate the department, is just as important.
In the early 1970s, the National Education Association transformed from a professional association to a labor union and offered its endorsement to a presidential candidate who would support a stand-alone education department. Democrat Jimmy Carter made the promise and was elected in 1976.
The idea was controversial, including on the left. Joseph Califano, Carter’s secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), objected to taking education programs from under the broader welfare roof and saw a standalone department as a threat to higher education’s independence. Albert Shanker—the president of the other major teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers—opposed a department as likely ineffectual and a threat to state and local K-12 control.
In 1979, the department squeaked by: 20–19 in the House Rules Committee and 210–206 in the full House. In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran for president pledging to kill it, but there was little congressional Republican desire to fight again.
The department became the K-12 controller that Shanker feared, peaking with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) from 2002 to 2015. Though the Constitution gives the federal government no authority to govern education, NCLB required states to have uniform math and reading standards and make “adequate yearly progress” to full proficiency by 2014. In 2010, the department brought the country to the brink of a national curriculum, coercing states to adopt the Common Core standards and associated tests. Only when teachers unions opposed tying test scores to
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