This isn’t the first time the department, a perennial target of conservatives, has been stripped for parts. The OG version of ED survived just one year before losing its department imprimatur. Roughly 150 years ago, a brand-new Department of Education had been chartered with an ambitious vision: evening out the quality of schools throughout the land in the aftermath of the Civil War and making the case for public education as a worthy investment.
But the project and its head, Henry Barnard, the nation’s first commissioner of education, quickly ran into the buzzsaw of Reconstruction politics. Abolitionists were keen on the new department, while the former Confederate states revolted against the idea that the federal government would now be monitoring the literacy rates of the formerly enslaved. Barnard barely survived long enough to deliver his first report on the state of the nation’s schools to Congress before his agency was demoted to a mere office, its funding reduced. Even Barnard’s own salary was cut.
“The tactics were very similar to what we’re seeing today,” says education historian Adam Laats. The funding cuts ensured that people would leave, the department’s programs withering in their wake, but the nineteenth-century version of the wrecking crew also understood the power of demonizing civil servants. If the cuts to his budget and staff made the job more difficult, his sense that he’d somehow become the enemy in the eyes of the officials he served made it impossible. “Henry Barnard felt personally humiliated. You can smell it in his papers,” says Laats.
Barnard resigned in 1870 and returned to his native Connecticut, his dream of transforming American education abandoned. In the words of present-day administrative state smasher Russell Vought, he’d been “traumatically affected.”
Fast forward a century and a half, and the same unresolved questions that torpedoed Barnard’s project haunt the current effort to do away with the Department of Education. Should the federal government be involved in education at all or is that a job for the states? What do we owe the students with the least? And is using state power to further equality the goal, or the problem?
The insistence that schooling can smooth out our inequalities is an exceptionally American idea. “Public schooling was arguably the American public investment of the early twentieth century,” argues Tracy Steffes in her history of modern U.S. education, School, Society, and State. Even when the Great Depression birthed the welfare state, Americans went with a stingier version of the sorts of social programs that took root in other industrial economies. In lieu of a more expansive and expensive social safety net, Americans plowed money into public education, says Steffes.