The Department of Education Was a Bad Idea Then — and It Still Is

P resident Trump has been battling to take down a behemoth that has menaced the American people since the Carter administration.

The Islamic Republic of Iran? No. It’s the Department of Education.

“The Trump administration will transfer several core Education Department responsibilities, including its civil rights and special education programs, to other federal agencies as part of its efforts to dismantle the Education Department,” Politico reported earlier this week. Along the same lines, Artforum.com noted that the House Appropriations Committee earlier this month requested $0 in allocations to the department’s Assistance for Arts Education program, which received $36.5 million last year.

Through piecemeal budget reductions, and a shift in responsibility for more popular programs to other departments, the Trump administration hopes to demonstrate that it does not need an entire bureaucracy for a function traditionally — and constitutionally — outside of the purview of the federal government.

The usual suspects, including this magazine, opposed the Department of Education’s creation nearly 47 years ago.

National Review wryly pointed out in its April 27, 1979, “The Week” section that reducing the layers of bureaucracy from 26 at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to eleven at the proposed Department of Education stood as reason of sorts to support President Carter’s teacher-union boondoggle. The item prophetically concluded, however: “Don’t expect any improvement in the country’s hapless education system.”

One expects such usual suspects to oppose new federal bureaucracies. But prominent liberal voices in the House of Representatives — such as Shirley Chisholm, John Conyers, and Henry A. Waxman — voiced opposition to the new department as well. So did the National Education Association’s rival, the American Federation of Teachers.

A much more shocking opponent, at least from the perspective of 2026, came from the New York Times editorial page. And the surprise comes not merely from the source. Whereas many liberals grounded their opposition in convoluted reasoning that related to a bureaucracy turf war, the Times presented an argument largely based on principle, including deference to subsidiarity and federalism.

The newspaper worried about “the intimate relationship that might develop between a separate education department and the National Education Association.” The NEA, in 1976, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, for the first time in its history. Carter, in turn, promised to create a special department devoted to education. The NEA, the Times noted, “is committed to a much larger Federal role in school financing than is compatible with the tradition of state and local responsibility.” The editors worried that “to fulfill a campaign pledge to the N.E.A” would set a precedent for other special interests. Would a “Department of Women,” “Department of Science,” and “Department of Consumers” follow?

They, thankfully, did not. But budgets of more than a quarter trillion dollars a year, accompanied by adult illiteracy that went from fewer than one in 100 adults to more than one in five adults, eventually did. Spending more money to graduate dumber people would seem to undermine arguments for the continuation of this experiment. Instead, for too many folks, the failure of the federal government to improve literacy, math, and other education-related skills perversely acts as the strongest argument in favor of spending even more money.

For many conservatives, the issue revolves not so much around the existence of a federal department of education but the federal government’s involvement in an important mark of civilization that it stayed out of for most of the history of the republic. Roger A. Williams, an adviser to President Eisenhower and then-Governor Ronald Reagan, surely felt that way. In the August 4, 1978, issue of National Review, Williams noted such anecdotes as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare threatening to withhold federal funds from Scottsdale, Ariz., schools if they did not cease and desist from holding “father-son” and “mother-daughter” events for grade-schoolers and ordering thousands of black students and teachers to white schools and thousands of white students and teachers to black schools in twelve urban school districts.

“Only because of their bizarre nature did some of those events, not very important in themselves, gain wide attention,” Williams admitted. The most transformative — and damaging — changes to education he described as “not spectacular” enough to generate media interest. “Yet they significantly alter the purposes, goals, and methods of American education by shifting control from local administration to Washington.”

Whether it amazes more that a magazine opened up nine double-columned pages to an article titled “Uncle Sam’s Heavy Hand in Education,” or that in the midst of a drive to establish a federal department of education, that article never mentioned the drive for a federal department of education, remains all these years later a debatable question. Forty-seven years after Congress passed President Carter’s tax-funded payback to his NEA supporters, the Department of Education remains a debatable question, too.