We Need a Department of Education

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, March 21, 2021

 

Conservatives have hated the Department of Education since it was founded, and before it was founded, we preemptively hated the notion of it.

 

It is not difficult to see why.

 

The Department of Education was a Jimmy Carter project, and Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 promising to abolish it. Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and principal architect of those “Reagan deficits,” had other ideas, and, though Reagan kept up the pressure (in his 1982 State of the Union speech, he promised to “dismantle” the department), he was unsuccessful. When Reagan ran for reelection in 1984 (winning 49 states in the Electoral College), he was supported by a Republican party that had quietly dropped abolishing the Department of Education from its platform. Desultory efforts have been made from time to time to revive the issue, but the bureaucracy isn’t going anywhere.

 

Surviving is what bureaucracies do.

 

There is a difference between the idea of having a Department of Education and having this Department of Education, doing the things it does in the way it does them. Because our political discourse is conducted at such a low level of intelligence and such a high volume of hysteria, such basic distinctions often are missing from the conversation.

 

Consider the parallel case of labor unions: It is easy to imagine a world in which U.S. labor unions performed a useful function as advocates for workers and brokers of labor — the problem is not unions per se but the corrupt, self-dealing, mobbed-up unions that we actually have. Germany’s IG Metall is in its context more powerful than our United Autoworkers, but it is also more responsible (on a spectrum, dear friends, on a spectrum) and less corrupt than the UAW. The question of the value of unions is separate from the question of the value of, say, the Teamsters.

 

The same principle holds true for the federal apparatus tasked with developing and implementing national education policy. The actual 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. It also maintains a sideline interest in Kulturkampf. Our Department of Education is incompetent to the point of enabling corruption (“weak internal controls led to instances of fraud and other improper payments,” reports the risibly misnamed Government Accountability Office), and the sums in question are not trivial: Under the Barack Obama administration, the department saw some $100 billion go out the door without effective oversight.

 

Like most similar government agencies, the Department of Education spends a very large share of its money on personnel, in the form of salaries and benefits for its own employees and grants that will be used in some part to fund salaries and benefits for local school districts. It is, to no small extent, a jobs program, and where it is not a jobs program is it mostly a stealth welfare program. That’s where the billions go. By way of contrast, its spending on support for the teaching of American history and civics is, at just over $5 million annually, something less than what a professional athlete signed to a fat new contract might spend on a top-flight sportscar.

 

In the United Kingdom and the EU countries, the ministerial portfolios for education and scientific research often are conjoined, though last year the British government uncoupled them, effectively demoting the relevant minister by taking university oversight out of her office. It is not clear that the Europeans and the Brits have much better luck with their model than we have with ours. But it is very much on our allies’ minds: Post-Brexit, the United Kingdom is increasingly of the view that its standing in the world will depend much more acutely on its education and research capabilities than on such traditional British strengths as trade and sea power, and Washington might consider the possibility that this will bring the United Kingdom closer to China’s orbit than the U.S. government foresees or prefers.

 

But the United Kingdom is hardly alone in that. The United States, too, is likely to rise or fall in the remainder of the 21st century on the strength — or weakness — of its achievements in research and education. So is China. The United States is for the moment the undisputed educational superpower, with a system of higher education that is the envy of the world, even as our humanities departments and deans of students are engaged in much that is silly, destructive, or both. It is notable that American education excels precisely where it is most insulated from the careful attentions of the federal Department of Education and the control of the union bosses and politicians who run K–12 education as a patronage farm.

 

It is good to have a powerful navy. But the course of the future is going to be determined by artificial intelligence and advances in medical genomics, not by aircraft carriers. The United States already has squandered many of the advantages it enjoyed from the middle of the 20th century as the world’s peerless techno-industrial champion and cultural exemplar, practically unique among major nations in that it emerged from World War II stronger rather than diminished. We should not squander the advantages that we have retained, including our position of scientific and educational preeminence. Preserving them will involve national policy and national decision-making. And it will demand innovation, flexibility, and basic administrative competence far in excess of what the relevant federal bureaucracy has so far been able to muster.

 

A Department of Education? We probably could use one of those. Just not this one.