Raze the Department of Education

T here is nothing wrong with the Department of Education that could not be solved with a tactical nuclear strike.

Earlier this week, my friend and fellow podcaster Kevin Williamson proposed that while the existing Department of Education is a mess, we should not conclude from this that a Department of Education is unnecessary. “Missing from the conversation,” Kevin complained, is a “basic distinction” between these two propositions.

I must disagree. In my view, there is no such distinction to be made, for the ills that Kevin attributes to this Department of Education are the inevitable product of its design and, as, such, are ineluctable. They would arise on schedule in a Department of Education that was run by Kevin Williamson as certainly as in a Department of Education run by Barack Obama. They are irresistible, unavoidable, and inevitable. To inaugurate a Department of Education is to create the Department of Education. The flaws are baked into the concept itself.

In its oh-so-close sensibility, Kevin’s piece reminds me a little of John Roberts’s opinion in NFIB v. Sebelius, in that it is a thoughtful, coherent, and typically eloquent argument that is followed by a head-twisting non sequitur. Kevin concedes that the “Department of Education we have exists primarily to service the interests of the largely unionized public-school personnel who do irreplaceable work funding and staffing Democratic political campaigns” and “maintains a sideline interest in Kulturkampf.” In addition, he admits that the incumbent DoE lacks “innovation, flexibility, and basic administrative competence,” that “American education excels precisely where it is most insulated from the careful attentions of the federal Department of Education,” and that, far from being a problem unique to the United States, there is in fact no evidence that “the Europeans and the Brits have much better luck with their model than we have with ours.” Then, though, he switches gears, submitting that education will be one of the ways that the United States wins the future, deducing that such an endeavor “will involve national policy and national decision-making,” and concluding that, ergo, we need a federal Department of Education.

But why?

I suppose it is possible that Kevin has in mind the conversion of the current Department of Education into a minuscule and manageable agency that is limited to a handful of small tasks, that is ruthlessly superintended by Calvin Coolidge–types, and that is defined in scope by a set of carefully written statutes. If so, he might consider writing a follow-up in which such a plan is laid out. But even then, I would likely dissent, because any institution worthy of the name “Department of Education” would, by definition, be a stretch too far. In our constitutional order, education is the preserve of the states, and it ought to be the preserve of the states — not only because educational institutions work best when they are close to their benefactors and beneficiaries, but because education is power and because the centralization of power presents enticements that are beyond any human being’s ability to resist. To try to turn the American Department of Education into a lean enterprise charged solely with the efficient distribution of cash would be a little like trying to turn Napoleon into the manager of a local Chili’s. The first day might go well, but within a week he’d have taken over the mall, and within a year he’d be running Oregon.

As someone who deals with ideas for a living, I comprehend the temptation to believe that, somewhere in this vast country of ours, there exists a sober and wise Goldilocks figure who, appalled by the status quo, and egged on by a citizenry that has had enough of failure, will taste the educational porridge until she gets it just right. I do not, however, comprehend the willingness to believe that this person’s virtues would be echoed by her successor. If there is a government department that has not come to consume everything that is even remotely within its ambit, I would like to know its name. We have now seen the failure of nationalized education policy under presidents of both parties: George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” was a signature of his campaign in 2000 and his pre-9/11 presidency and has been largely abandoned, as has Common Core, which started life as a “conservative” idea but was quickly sucked into the maw under President Obama. The problem, as so often, is the system itself.

One would expect me to make this point, of course. I’m a broken record on the matter. But ignore my libertarian-federalist objections for a moment and ask yourself whether, as a matter of elementary prudence, it would be sensible even to consider entrusting such an important task to a federal government with this history? If, as Kevin suggests, it is true that maintaining our “educational preeminence” is the key to America’s future then, on purely practical grounds, we would presumably do well to seek a different model than the one that in just over four decades of existence has been so thoroughly corrupted. And, if we were to seek such a model, wouldn’t it be the one within which “American education excels” already?

At root, this is a disagreement over structure, not over aims. Progressive advocates of the status quo often try to cast opponents of the Department of Education as if they were opposed to education per se, which, of course, they are not. (I, for example, am against a Department of Underwear, but that tells you nothing about how I dress.) Rather, they are against entrusting anything of value to the care of a single, depraved bureaucracy. Kevin may well be right that the United States would benefit from a carefully developed national approach to, say, research funding. But it is not at all obvious that, once that approach was filtered through what federal Departments of Education seem inescapably to become, the United States would come out ahead. We’ve made that gamble already.

And we’ve lost.