What Happened? A Brief Chronicle of the Storied History of the US Department of Education
As stated by the US Department of Education, its purpose is to “establish policy and administer federal assistance to education.”
President Andrew Jackson instituted the Department of Education to collect information and statistics about the nation’s schools. “However, due to concern that the Department would exercise too much control over local schools”, it was downgraded to an Office of Education in 1868.
Nearly a century later, during President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”, the “Department” was restored and its role expanded to include federal monitoring of schools receiving Title I funding under the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA,1965). The first Education Secretary, Shirley Hufstedler (Serving under President Jimmy Carter), stated in 1980 that the department’s role would be a “Helping, supportive friend of education, as a simplifier and streamliner of regulations and paperwork, and not as the holder of an unlimited federal purse, and not as a power beyond the reach of local decisions.”
Through the decades, the role of the Department expanded and legislation was enacted giving it additional powers. This included No Child Left Behind in 2001, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 2004 (this replaced the earlier EHA act), Race to the Top in 2009, and the most recent renewal, the Every Child Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015)
Today, the Department of Education holds accountable nearly 100,000 public schools and 3 million teachers serving 56 million students. It has a total budget of $154 billion (this varies by source). It oversees enactment of policy and maintains data on testing, family demographics, staff qualifications, school funding, international comparisons, and more. In their Digest of Education Statistics, you can find multifaceted data, tables, and reports on virtually every aspect of education in the United States.
This makes me wonder how the intentions of Andrew Jackson and Shirley Hufstedler turned into the department’s current role of “improving results and promoting student achievement through the administration of programs that cover every area of education and range from preschool education through postdoctoral research” (USDOE).