Writing at Frazzled About Education, Jed Bookout provides some history of the movement to shut down the Department of Education. Turns out we tries it before.
If you go to the Department of Education website right now, there’s a section titled, “Returning Education to the States.”
“Our nation’s failing education system is a direct threat to our economic strength, national security, and civic health. We must restore excellence in education,” states the website. “Secretary McMahon is entrusted with delivering one of President Trump’s most consequential promises: breaking up the education bureaucracy in D.C. and returning educational responsibility to state and local leaders – and ultimately parents – to unleash a new era of excellence.”
But that’s not the Department of Education we’re talking about. The one we’re talking about was founded during President Andrew Johnson’s term… all the way back in 1867.
This was the Reconstruction Era, and the start of it to boot: the Civil War may have ended, but racial politics were contentious at best – following the Civil War, “Black Codes” were passed in the South, laws that required Black Americans to sign yearly labor contracts, and in some cases, limited economic freedoms for freedmen. Voters in the North hated this, and so, the U.S. Congress began taking more of an overall federal approach to unifying the country… including within education.
Throughout the Civil War, Confederate laws made it so schooling was prohibited for currently and formerly enslaved people. As a result, by the time the war ended, literacy rates in the South were at a low, with only 10 percent of enslaved people being literate. While this was happening, the “common school movement” led by Horace Mann was seeking a state-funded universal schooling system at no additional cost to the family. It succeeded in Massachusetts, though still segregating by race and/or gender – yet the movement sought to give universal education to all children.
This movement reached the U.S. representative from the state of Ohio…. James Garfield. Yes, that James Garfield. Along with other abolitionists and a litany of Northern congressmen, Garfield introduced the bill that would provide the basis for the founding of a Department of Education to solve the illiteracy crisis in the South and strengthen education in the North. The bill passed, and made its way to President Andrew Johnson, who you may remember as the first-ever president to be impeached. Why? Because of his ATROCIOUS record during Reconstruction.
Johnson, desperate for approval, signed the bill. After all, he believed the bill was, as Politico put it back in 2015, “harmless. It was a meek agency. Congress authorized it to have just four employees…and limited its powers to “collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the United States.” The DOE also was to publish useful information on the “organization and operation” of school systems and “promote the case of education throughout the country.””
Despite the limitations imposed upon the Department, a bunch of Congressmen thought of the Department as “an unconstitutional power grab” and believed that the country was better off by… leaving decision-making at the hands of individual states.
Did it turn out well? It did not. Read the whole story here.