The Department of Education is a federal-level agency that performs several valuable and necessary functions both in education and for the country as a whole. In light of some calls to eliminate the Department of Education, it’s worth taking a closer look at what the agency actually does, and what impact it has on U.S. schools.
First, a little historical context: The Department of Education (DOE) has been around longer than most people realize. Andrew Johnson established the first DOE back in 1867 as part of Reconstruction-era efforts to reform education in ways that offered some racial equality. Politics surrounding race at this time were both contentious and toxic and there was extensive push-back against the agency. The crux of the argument was whether the federal government had any right to meddle in education at all, and if it did, how much influence should it have? In this highly-charged environment, the Department of Education lasted just one year before congress abolished it. It’s important to understand the existential conflict the DOE was born into, because that conflict is still very much in play in 2024, with politicians, super PACS, and individual citizens arguing for or against specific educational policies and laws, turning nearly every educational change into an impassioned philosophical battle.
The U.S. government did legislate education prior to 1867, but only lightly. It required land to be reserved for public schools in its various territories. It also authorized schools when it formed the District of Columbia in 1804. Later, the federal government mandated the creation and funding of schools on American Indian reservations.* The sea change came with the education reform movement of the early 19th century. This movement, spearheaded by Horace Mann, sought to systematize education — set basic minimums and parameters for what children would learn and require teachers to be both educated themselves and specifically trained to teach. It’s fascinating to see the critical thinking operating throughout this movement as the reformers analyzed what worked and tried to identify what was needed to replicate that for all children. In this vision of education, the federal government would be the arbiter of the system, legislating the various aspects to insure children were better, more consistently educated.
When the first DOE was established in 1867, it was almost laughably weak. It was allowed just four employees – the Commissioner and three clerks – and its powers were limited to “collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the United States,” publishing information on the “organization and operation” of school systems, and “promot[ing] the case of education throughout the country.” Yet even this timid beginning threw opponents into frothing protest against government overreach. The DOE was demoted to the Office of Education and housed in various other agencies like the Department of the Interior and the catchall Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services). But throughout the 1950s and ’60s, federal funding for education had been steadily increasing, driven first by the Sputnik-era fears that the U.S. would fall behind the USSR in science and math and later by LBJ’s war on poverty. In the ’70s, the federal government provided funding to help ensure access to education for women, racial minorities, and disabled students. Because of the sheer amount of federal money being poured into it, President Jimmy Carter reinstated it as a cabinet-level agency in 1979.**
From this somewhat inauspicious beginning, we can see the seeds of one of the DOE’s most important functions over the past 45 years: the collection of educational data. When the current DOE was re-established in 1979, one of its stated missions was “to promote improvements in the quality and usefulness of education through federally supported research, evaluation, and sharing of information.” The value of this service cannot be overstated. Here’s a short list of the kinds of data the DOE collects:
- Student demographics by district and school. These data include program participation and performance data.
- Education statistics like high school and college graduation rates, enrollment rates, and average income for young adults. These are collected through the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
- Student achievement data, via the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This has been ongoing for the last 30 years and provides valuable macro-trend data.
- Civil rights data. This is where we get data on preschool and K-12 suspensions and expulsions broken out by race and ethnicity. These data are collected via its Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) arm.
- Postsecondary education. These data include institutional characteristics, prices, admissions, and more, also through the NCES.
- COVID-19 pandemic data. This includes data on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students and educators and tracked the status of in-person learning during the pandemic.
CMSi is a big proponent of making data-driven decisions in education and the DOE is a valuable source for the kinds of data districts need to do that. The DOE also requires states (who then require districts) to track specific data, such as achievement levels by ethnic, racial, and socio-economic groups, participation in programs like special education, ELL, gifted education, and so on. The DOE uses the data it collects to help policy-makers make strategic decisions. These data collection efforts can have significant impact on education by:
- Improving student success by addressing resource disparities and promoting equitable outcomes.
- Improving the quality of classroom instruction by helping to understand what constitutes excellent teaching.
- Bringing attention to civil rights disparities in schools.
- Assisting states and districts to use data and evidence-based practices to improve opportunities for learners through its Regional Educational Labs (REL) program.
Additionally, the DOE doesn’t just collect data, it materially funds research through its Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to help solve real-world challenges in education. Although it’s a government entity, its status as a funder of research is essentially neutral, meaning it doesn’t influence outcomes or findings. This is of great value in research, where funding sources have been shown to influence findings. The DOE makes the results of this research available for everyone, which means states and districts and even individual schools have free and open access to research to help them improve learning for their students. As a compiler and disseminator of educational research as a whole, the DOE provides important digests of current findings for legislators and individual districts to promote understanding of effective instruction, identify trends in education, and highlight which student groups may not be experiencing success. In this, it hews very closely to its original mandate in the 1860s to “[collect] such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the United States,” publish information on the “organization and operation” of school systems, and “promote the case of education throughout the country.”
That’s one extremely important function the Department of Education fulfills. Stay tuned for Part 2…
____________________________________________
*This began in 1819, when the U.S. Congress passed The Civilization Fund Act. The act encouraged American education to be provided to Indigenous societies and to enforce the “civilization process”. The first boarding school for Native American children opened in 1860. “Civilization” here meant “assimilation”: eradicating all traces of the Native American way of life, language, and cultural heritage. About a third of the eventual 357 schools were run by missionaries. Physical and sexual abuse abounded, to say nothing of the long-term psycho-social effects of having one’s cultural identity stripped from them.
**In a move reminiscent of the congress of 1868, Ronald Reagan pledged in 1980 to dismantle the Department of Education if he became president. But Reagan’s own new Secretary of Education released a now-famous national report entitled “A Nation at Risk,” highlighting the need for such a department to continue to push American students to be competitive with the USSR. Public sentiment turned in favor of the DOE and Reagan left it alone.