A Nation Unlearning Itself: The Quiet War Over American Education

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter, bruised by an economy in free fall and humiliated by 52 Americans held hostage in Tehran, did something bureaucratic and arguably revolutionary. He created the United States Department of Education.

There were no dramatic speeches etched into history. But with the stroke of a pen, Carter attempted to bring order to chaos, consolidating over 150 federal funding programs scattered across 24 separate agencies into a single unified voice for American education. The mission was as ambitious as it was idealistic: equal opportunity regardless of race, sex, economic status, or disability. A federal government that didn’t just fund education, but stood for it.

Even the worst roads, however, are paved with great intentions.

Because the road that led to 1979 was not paved at all. It was broken and contested. Twenty five years earlier, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court shattered the legal foundation of segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that separate was never truly equal. Six years later, on November 14, 1960, a six year old girl named Ruby Bridges walked through a screaming mob into William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana, the smallest soldier in America’s largest cultural war. Then in 1971, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg forced the issue further still, approving the use of buses to physically carry integration across school district lines whether communities welcomed it or not.

America had been asking a dangerous question long before any department existed to answer it:

Who is education for in America?

For decades, the answer had been in practice if not in law: not everyone. The Department of Education was born as the federal government’s most direct answer to that moral failure. Its very existence was a statement: that education was too important, too unequal, and too consequential to be left to chance, geography, or the prejudices of local power. Now, nearly half a century later, that answer is being challenged. Not quietly, but deliberately. And a nation is once again being forced to confront the question it has never fully resolved.

The Illusion of Freedom: When Power Doesn’t Disappear, It Just Changes Hands

Power doesn’t disappear. It relocates.

When the federal government steps back from education, the immediate narrative is one of liberation. States freed from bureaucratic overreach, local communities reclaiming their schools, parents regaining their voice. There is something genuinely appealing about that picture. For decades, critics of federal education policy have watched Washington impose sweeping mandates on communities with no understanding of their local realities, their cultures, or their children. That frustration is legitimate and it deserves to be heard.

But follow the money long enough and that picture gets complicated fast.

Enter the “Big Beautiful Bill”. Passed through the House in May 2025, this sweeping budget reconciliation bill proposed dramatic cuts to federal education funding as part of a broader vision of government reduction. To its supporters, it was long overdue fiscal discipline, a correction to decades of federal overreach into spaces the Constitution never intended Washington to occupy. To its critics, it was the quiet financial dismantling of the Department of Education, defunding it before formally abolishing it. Because you don’t always have to close a door to lock someone out. Sometimes you just take away the key. By taking the money, you take away the power. And when federal money dries up, someone else’s money flows in.

Private foundations, ideological donors, and corporate interests have been circling public education for decades. Names like the Walton Family Foundation, the Koch network, and various charter school advocacy groups have invested billions into reshaping American education. Not necessarily out of malice, but out of vision. Their vision. And vision, when backed by enough capital, has a way of becoming policy. The question worth sitting with is this: is a wealthy private donor with an ideological agenda really less dangerous than a federal bureaucrat with a standardized test? At least the bureaucrat is theoretically accountable to voters.

But the people who want the federal government out of education are pointing at something real. The United States has spent well over $3 trillion in federal education funding since 1979. And in that same window of time, American students have fallen significantly behind their peers in other developed nations. In the 2022 PISA rankings, which measures 15 year olds across 81 countries in reading, math, and science, the United States ranked 26th in math. Countries like Estonia, Canada, Japan, and South Korea, with considerably smaller education bureaucracies and budgets, are consistently outperforming American students. The federal government stepped in to fix American education and American education, by many measurable standards, didn’t get fixed.

Then there is the gap between wealthy states and poor ones. A state like Massachusetts could plausibly absorb the loss of federal oversight and thrive. But what about Mississippi? What about rural Appalachia? What about the hundreds of school districts where the federal dollar isn’t a supplement, it’s the foundation? When the federal government steps back, wealthy states don’t just maintain their footing. They accelerate. And everyone else watches the gap widen. Local control sounds like freedom. But freedom, as it turns out, isn’t equally distributed.

Built to Protect, Designed to Fail: The Children the System Left Behind

The Department of Education was never really just about education. It was about justice.

The Civil Rights movement didn’t end at the lunch counter or the voting booth. It walked into the schoolhouse. And by the time Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act in 1979, the federal government was making a very specific promise to very specific children: that where you were born, what you looked like, how much your parents made, and whether your brain worked differently than your classmates would not determine the quality of your education.

That promise had several names. Title I, federal funding specifically directed at low-income schools, currently reaches approximately 26 million children across the country. These are schools in neighborhoods where property taxes can’t sustain a functioning library, let alone a competitive curriculum. Without federal Title I dollars, those schools don’t get local control. They get less. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, known as IDEA, is the legal backbone that guarantees children with learning disabilities, autism, physical impairments, and developmental differences the right to a free and appropriate public education. It is the reason a child with dyslexia gets accommodations and a child with autism is not warehoused in a corner and forgotten.

Now consider what it actually means to design an education system for a country stretching from the frozen tundra of Alaska to the subtropical heat of South Florida. A country where a family in rural Wyoming and a family in downtown Detroit are raising children in worlds so different they might as well be different countries. The federal approach attempted to build one curriculum framework, one set of standards, one testing regime, and one compliance structure for all of them.

The people who designed these frameworks were not villains. They were trying to lift the floor. They looked at a country where the quality of your education was largely determined by your zip code and said: that is not good enough. So they built national standards, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, designed to ensure every child had access to a baseline of educational quality.

But here is the question that didn’t get asked loudly enough: what happens to the kids who can’t reach the baseline?

When you set a national standard, you create almost by definition a group of children who fall below it. Children who might have been identified early with dyslexia, ADHD, or processing disorders got shuffled through a system that measured them against a single standard and labeled them under performers rather than investigating why they were struggling. The relentless drive for standardization may not have just failed struggling learners. It may have actively hidden them inside a system too focused on compliance to notice them.

Under current proposals, Title I and IDEA functions would be shifted to the Department of Labor or Health and Human Services. Proponents argue this is more efficient. But the Department of Labor operates on a budget of roughly $14 billion annually while the Department of Education manages over $200 billion in federal student aid alone. When a department absorbs a responsibility it was never designed for, who pays the price during the learning curve? It will not be the children in well-funded suburban districts. It will be the same children the system was already failing. The one-size-fits-all framework didn’t just fail to account for the diversity of American communities. It may have failed the very children it was most urgently designed to protect. But dismantling the framework entirely, without a clear plan for what replaces it, risks failing those children all over again in a different way.

The Uncomfortable Truth: What This Decision Says About Who We Really Are

Step back from the policy and ask the simplest and most human question at the center of all of this: what does it say about us?

Every society makes choices about who it protects. The children most directly affected by the dismantling of the Department of Education are disproportionately poor, disproportionately children of color, disproportionately children with disabilities living in rural communities whose parents don’t have the time or resources to navigate a newly fragmented state by state patchwork of educational rights. These are not children with lobbyists.

And yet there are parents of these same children who genuinely want local control. Who feel that federal mandates have produced curricula that don’t reflect their community’s values or their vision for their children’s future. Their frustration is real and it deserves to be heard without being dismissed. Both sides believe they are fighting for children. They simply have different theories about how.

Which brings us to the question that makes people on both sides quietly uncomfortable. Was the Department of Education ever supposed to exist in the first place?

The 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Education is not mentioned in the Constitution. There is no clause granting the federal government authority over curriculum, no article establishing a national standard for schools, no founding document that imagined Washington as the architect of how American children learn. By a strict reading of the 10th Amendment, education is precisely the kind of power the founders intended to leave with the states and the people.

The federal government has used the Commerce Clause, the General Welfare Clause, and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantees to justify its role in education for decades, and courts have largely upheld that role. But the constitutional tension has never disappeared. It has simply been deferred.

Dismantling the Department of Education, to its most principled advocates, is not an act of abandonment. It is an act of restoration, a return to a constitutional order that was quietly bypassed in the name of progress. That argument deserves to be taken seriously. But so does this one: the same 10th Amendment that gives states the right to govern their own schools also gave them the right, for most of American history, to govern those schools unequally. That is not ancient history. That is living memory. A country that invokes the 10th Amendment to return power to the states must also reckon honestly with what those states have historically done with that power.

Follow the Money: The Century Long Fight Over Who Controls the American Mind

To understand where we are, you have to go back to 1867, when the Office of Education was first created just two years after the Civil War. Its mission was modest: collect data and help states build effective school systems. It had no enforcement power and no real influence. For decades it drifted, underfunded and underestimated, its central tension never resolved.

Franklin Roosevelt confronted that tension during the New Deal era. His thinking rhymed with Carter’s in important ways. Both believed the federal government had a meaningful role in the lives of ordinary Americans. But FDR drew a firm line. He did not believe education should be under direct federal control. He wanted the government to support education, not define it. And yet even his support came with the same asterisk that has followed American education policy ever since. The New Deal helped, but not everyone. African Americans were systematically excluded through discriminatory local administration. Indigenous communities were largely invisible. Women remained confined to a narrow lane of acceptable aspiration. The New Deal was fair in its rhetoric. It was not equal in its execution.

Ronald Reagan wanted to dismantle what Carter had built before the paint was even dry. He saw the Department of Education as a symbol of everything he opposed. Congress blocked him. But the more surprising resistance came from his own Secretary of Education, Terrel Bell, who commissioned A Nation at Risk in 1983. The report declared America was committing what Bell called “an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament,” threatened by “a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” A conservative man appointed by a president who wanted to abolish the department ended up making the most powerful argument for why it needed to exist.

The argument never went away. It just waited for Donald Trump.

Where Reagan’s opposition was rooted in a coherent philosophy of smaller government, Trump’s push felt more targeted and more cultural. The central flashpoint was DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs characterized as a woke agenda imposed on American schools. But DEI is not purely a conversation about race. These programs touch gender equity, disability access, and socioeconomic inclusion across the board. Dismantling the framework that enforces them removes the structural protections Carter fought to establish. The ones that said your race, your sex, your zip code, and your disability would not determine the quality of your education.

In favoring states’ rights, Trump is consistent with Republican tradition stretching back through Reagan. It is a philosophically coherent position. But it carries a history that cannot be separated from its present application. The last time states had unchecked authority over education, they used it to segregate schools, deny women access to higher education, and exclude children with disabilities from classrooms entirely. The federal government inserted itself into education because states, left to their own devices, had made choices the Constitution’s promise of equal protection could not survive.

Making a Working Class: The Education Decision Hidden in Plain Sight

Moving education functions to the Department of Labor is not, on its face, a bad idea. Countries like Germany, Switzerland, and Austria have built world class education systems around exactly this kind of integration, weaving vocational training, apprenticeships, and workforce readiness directly into the educational framework. There is a legitimate argument that the Department of Education has spent too much energy on academic credentialing and not enough preparing young people for the actual world of work they are entering. That is a fair critique and other nations have proven it can be done well.

But the question nobody wants to answer directly is the one that matters most.

Who decides which children get the academic track and which children get the vocational one?

If that decision lives at the state level, shaped by local economic needs and political priorities, the risk is not theoretical. In economically depressed communities where the local economy runs on manufacturing, agriculture, or service work, the path of least resistance is to build a school system that produces the workers that economy needs. That is not malicious. That is just how systems respond to incentives.

But it means that a child capable of solving problems the world hasn’t thought of yet, a child who could write, lead, discover, or create, may never get the chance to find out. Not because they weren’t capable. But because the system decided, based on geography and quiet political calculation, what kind of future they were worth preparing for.

We could end up with factory workers who could have been engineers. Janitors who could have solved the world’s toughest math problems. Not because they weren’t smart enough, but because no one with the power to decide thought it was worth finding out.

If you cannot turn a generation into a working class, you will make one instead. And whether that is a tragedy or a policy decision depends entirely on whose child we are talking about.

Deserve: The Most Dangerous Word in American Education

Linda McMahon, the new Secretary of Education, has a favorite word.

Merit.

Merit based education. Merit based funding. Merit as the great equalizer, the objective standard by which every child is measured and every opportunity assigned. It sounds clean. It sounds fair. It sounds like exactly the kind of principle no reasonable person could object to.

But sit with the word long enough and it starts to ask its own questions.

Merit. From the Latin meritum, meaning to deserve. To be worthy of.

Buried inside the word that is supposed to end the argument is the word that opens it back up entirely.

Deserve.

Deserve is not an objective measurement. Deserve is a judgment. And every judgment requires a judge. Someone has to look at a child, at their circumstances, their test scores, their family’s income, their school’s resources, and decide whether they have done enough. Whether they deserve it. And the question that word never answers is the most important one of all.

Who gave them the right to decide that?

Who decided that the child born in a well-funded suburban district, surrounded by advanced coursework and the quiet inheritance of generational stability, deserves more than the child born forty miles away in a school that can’t afford textbooks? Who decided that merit looks the same in a family with resources as it does in a family without them?

This is not a new question. It was asked when Ruby Bridges walked through that door and the crowd outside decided she didn’t deserve to be there. It was asked when the New Deal drew its lines and decided which Americans deserved its benefits. It was asked when Reagan’s America decided the federal government didn’t deserve its role in the schoolhouse. It is being asked right now in budget meetings and executive orders by people who have already decided the answer before the question is finished.

The word merit implies a level playing field. But a level playing field is not something you declare. It is something you build. You cannot build it by dismantling the very structures, imperfect and bureaucratically bloated as they may be, that were put in place because the field was never level to begin with. And you cannot ignore the 10th Amendment’s legitimate claim that the people closest to children, their families, their communities, their states, may be better positioned to build that field than a federal bureaucracy a thousand miles away.

Both of those things can be true at the same time. That is precisely what makes this debate so consequential and so unresolved.

Education is not just about what you learn. It is about who gets to tell you what you are worth. Who gets to decide what you deserve. Who gets to determine the ceiling of your becoming before you are old enough to know you had one.

The question was never really about the Department of Education.

It was always about us.

And whether we are finally ready to be honest about who we have been, so that we can choose deliberately and courageously who we want to become.