Do we need a US Department of Education?

Have an open mind.

Change is hard. As humans, we become accustomed to routines and traditions. We like to know what to expect. My youngest son eats Honey-Nut Cheerios for breakfast every morning. He would tell you that he needs Honey-Nut Cheerios daily, but of course this isn’t true. He’s just used to the routine and he likes how they taste.

In the past 48 hours, it’s become clear that the U.S. Department of Education is the next target for the newly-established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). After a rapid hollowing-out of USAID last week, is ED facing a similar fate? More importantly, does it matter? Do we need the US Department of Education? Let’s try to unpack some arguments for and against this move.

The main argument for closing ED seems to be: There’s not a big enough federal role in education to merit an agency with 4,400 staff.

The federal government plays a fairly minor role in K-12 education these days. Federal funding for K-12 education is around 13% of all education funding, but from a policy perspective, there’s little direction or oversight from the feds. The zenith of the federal role was likely the Race to the Top era of the Obama years, building on the strong federal role in No Child Left Behind accountability and taking it a step further to incentivize participation in the development of common curriculum and assessments. (Which, of course, was torpedoed by the combined efforts of the Tea Party and the teachers unions. Sigh.)

But for the past decade, there’s really no essential role that the federal government plays in the oversight or administration of K-12 education. “But wait!” you say. “What about ESSER funding?!” Yes, the Biden administration gave an unprecedented, one-time gift of $129B to K-12 education. But with almost no reporting requirements or any real accountability, there was no real role for the feds. It was just a money transfer.

In fact, a lot of the funding from ED occurs as formula-based transfers. Congress approved $79B in 2024 for ED. Of that, about $18B is Title I funding that goes to districts and schools educating low-income kids and about $14B is funding for students with disabilities. Both of these are distributed by formula. Similarly, about $890M in grants for students who don’t speak English are also distributed by formula.

From that perspective, assuming the Trump administration maintains funding flowing to states, there is a reasonable argument that significantly shrinking ED could have little impact on the quality of public schools or students outcomes. (A lot of people won’t like that I say this, and I mean no disrespect to my friends and former colleagues who work at the department. You are good people serving the country and I don’t want you to lose your jobs! But academically, we have to consider all sides of the argument.)

The Office of Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Education has thousands of ongoing investigations - as of January 14, there are 9,007 open investigations in elementary and secondary schools. These include denial of disability benefits, disability harassment, Title IX sexual harassment, Title VI racial harassment, and more. Disability investigations are the biggest category, so it may be fair to say that there’s an ongoing federal role in ensuring school districts comply with federal law for the education of students with disabilities. That said, there is of course a civil rights division in the U.S. Department of Justice that perhaps could lead this work without changing the ability of parents or students to demand their rights. There is certainly subject matter expertise within ED’s OCR but that doesn’t have to be lost - just move those lawyers or staff to DOJ.

When President Jimmy Carter worked with Congress to establish the Department of Education on October 17, 1979, he claimed that creating ED would save tax dollars. “By eliminating bureaucratic layers, the reorganization will permit direct, substantial personnel reductions.” It’s seems to fair to say that in 45 years of existence, ED has almost certainly added bureaucratic layers. So a strategic pruning of the agency could arguably be aligned with Carter’s original vision.

Moreover, it’s well-documented that Carter’s push to establish the Department fulfilled a campaign promise to the teacher’s unions. If the unions want the Department of Education, I have to ask what’s in it for kids. Teachers unions are exceptionally good at looking out for teachers; it’s not their job to look out for students, so we shouldn’t pretend it is. Michael Hartney’s 2022 book “How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education” shows how by the 1980s, shortly after ED’s creation, teachers unions had PACs in all 50 states and were sending more delegates to the Democratic National Convention than did the state of California. It’s not because ED was created that unions became so powerful, but correlation suggests that the Department was a boon to a powerful interest group. It’s fair to consider whether that still serves the best interests of American children today.

The main argument for keeping ED: The optimal role of the federal government in education hasn’t yet been achieved, and we want a department to focus on that work. Plus, ED was established to increase standing and visibility of education as a national priority, and we still care about that.

Carter also wrote in announcing the creation of the Department of Education that “the federal government has for too long failed to play its own supporting role in education as effectively as it could. Instead of assisting school officials at the local level, is has too often added to their burden…the federal structure has contributed to bureaucratic buck passing.”

I don’t know enough about what was happening in 1979 to evaluate the veracity of this statement. But let’s assume there was a real feeling that the feds were making it harder for state and local officials to effectively run public schools. Any change to today’s ED would want to ensure that we don’t return to such a state. At a minimum, then, we’d want to maintain clear lines of reporting and compliance to ensure federal funds are being spent legally.

The most compelling part of Carter’s explanation for ED is that it mandates “a cabinet-level leader in education, someone with the status and the resources to stir national discussion of critical education concerns.” I would argue we still want this, maybe even more so. Having a Secretary of Education means that we agree that education is a cornerstone of the United States, an ongoing public commitment to education as the engine of economic mobility. I want someone sitting at the table with the Defense Secretary and the Secretary of State and the President who is there to represent America’s future—our children.

Some functions at ED do serve national interests. For example, there’s a good argument that the Department of Education is the leader of research and innovation to improve educational practice and build better tools to support learning. The National Center for Education Statistics, which also releases the NAEP assessment data, is an important hub that provides data across all states, districts, and schools. Their data allow for a lot of important analyses. Maintaining this kind of work is essential to keeping our promise to American families of a quality public education, and for identifying national exemplars. With 13,000 school districts, we might want someone combing through all of their data to figure out who’s doing a great job and how other districts can emulate them.

The best argument for a bigger federal role in education would be the development of a national skills mastery baseline. At a minimum, the Department of Education could select five texts or books that every student would read at each grade level and establish a baseline list of math skills for each grade. In addition, the Department could develop and administer a national civics test (we can debate the best grade level for this).

This would solve so many core problems—it would increase academic consistency across states, it would reduce the amount of money spent on curricular materials, it would make it easier to train teachers nationally, and it could open the door to school choice while maintaining a baseline of content. As in England, you could enroll your child in a public, private, or religious school (assuming the Supreme Court upholds the Oklahoma religious charter school, which the consensus seems to believe they will) but all kids would learn the same material.¹

But America can’t agree on almost anything right now, so there is no chance of getting a national standard of skills mastery (and forget about anything called “curriculum”).

What’s the worst that could happen?

The counterfactual is always critical in big policy shifts. The problem is that it’s really hard for ED to make a case that public education is going well in the US. With fewer than one-third of 4th and 8th grade student proficient in reading on the 2024 NAEP, it feels a bit like rock bottom.

Of course, that’s not universally true when you look across and within states. There are bright spots to be found. We have scant evidence, however, that the current US Department of Education has a role to play in growing the number of bright spots, or in the substance of learning. A massive scale-down of the agency—which seems the more likely play, as opposed to full closure which requires Congressional approval—might mean nothing at all to districts working with students every day.

I hope we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Where there are essential functions, we should preserve them. Where there is evidence that the work makes a difference to how schools function or how students learn, we should keep that work going.

Assuming the funding continues to flow to states and districts, downsizing ED will be dramatic and stressful for anyone working on national education policy, for anyone with a job related to federal education policy in the DC area, and, of course, for the many dedicated employees currently working there. I just don’t know that it matters to families in Bangor or Omaha or Los Angeles, especially the families whose children can’t read or perform basic math.

1. For more on this, read Ashley Berner’s Educational Pluralism and Democracy. For more on why knowledge-rich curriculum is likely a huge missing piece in American education, read E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit.