Why the U.S. Might Not Need a Federal Department of Education, From a Rural 4th Grade Teacher
Last Tuesday, I sat across from Javi’s mom at our rickety folding conference table, the smell of leftover cafeteria pepperoni pizza drifting through the classroom door, and slid a crumpled spreadsheet across the Formica. Javi, my 9-year-old dyslexic student, had just scored 12% higher on his phonics check after three weeks of 20-minute small-group work with our reading specialist—but I couldn’t keep the schedule going. Federal Title I rules, tied to Department of Education accountability requirements, said 80% of that funding had to go to whole-group core instruction: the 90-minute daily block where Javi spent most of his time twisting the eraser off his pencil and staring out the window at the oak tree by the playground.
She leaned back in her chair and wiped a smudge of farm dirt off her jeans—she’d come straight from feeding calves at the family dairy down the road. “Wait,” she said. “People in Washington, D.C., are telling us we can’t do the thing that’s actually helping my son learn to read?”
That’s the question I get at least once a month after 14 years teaching 4th grade in this rural Ohio town of 2,100 people. It’s also the core of the debate over whether the U.S. even needs a cabinet-level Department of Education at the federal level. I didn’t always land on this side of the argument. When I studied elementary ed in college, I thought the department was a safety net: a way to make sure low-income kids like I’d been got the same shot at a good education as kids in wealthy suburbs. Fourteen years of paperwork, monitoring visits, and rules written by people who’ve never met a kid like Javi changed my mind.
Last spring, two federal monitors flew in from the regional office in Columbus, walked through my classroom for 12 minutes, checked that my posted daily schedule had the 90-minute reading block written in 14-point font (that’s actually a written rule), and left. They never talked to a single student. They never asked why 30% of my class doesn’t have reliable internet at home, or why half our kids don’t own a single book that matches their interest in trucks, livestock, or hunting. They just checked the box on their form and drove back to the city.
That’s the reality of most federal education policy: it’s designed for an average student that doesn’t exist, applied equally to a dairy town in Ohio, a housing project in Houston, and a wealthy suburb outside Boston. Post-COVID, when half our 3rd graders were still solidifying single-digit multiplication after months of spotty remote learning, federal pacing rules tied to Common Core standards forced us to keep teaching grade-level fraction work anyway. When we asked for flexibility to slow down, the answer was no: if our test scores didn’t line up with the federal timeline, we’d lose 10% of our annual Title I funding.
Critics of scaling back the department often say it’s necessary to protect civil rights for disabled, low-income, and Black and Latino students, and to stop discriminatory local districts from cutting services. That’s not an unreasonable fear. Just last year, a district an hour east of us tried to ban all books by Black authors from their high school library, and federal civil rights staff did step in to push back. But that work doesn’t require a 4,000-person cabinet department. The U.S. Department of Justice already enforces anti-discrimination laws across every sector, from housing to employment, and state-level civil rights commissions handle most local school complaints far faster. A few years back, a nearby district tried to cut all after-school tutoring for English language learners; local parents filed a complaint with our state civil rights board, and the decision was reversed in six weeks, no forms sent to DC required.
The bigger irony is that the department hasn’t fixed the inequality it was created to address. Forty-four years after it was elevated to cabinet status, low-income school districts in our state still spend 23% less per student than wealthy districts a 45-minute drive away. Federal rules don’t force state legislatures to fix that. All they do is tie the little money we do get to piles of reporting requirements. Our superintendent calculated last year that we spend 18 cents of every federal Title I dollar just filling out forms and collecting data to keep the funding. That’s nearly $220,000 a year in our small district alone—money that could pay for two more teacher aides, or 10,000 new books for classroom libraries.
None of this means we should eliminate all federal funding for public schools, or throw out every national protection for kids. Most teachers and parents I talk to who support disbanding the department just want the money sent directly to states and local districts, without 40 years of accumulated red tape written by people who haven’t worked in a classroom in decades. The choices that actually move the needle for kids are always made by people who know their names, not people who see them as a data point on a spreadsheet.
I gave Javi’s mom the same simple first step I give every parent frustrated with a school rule that doesn’t make sense for their kid: next time an administrator says “we can’t, it’s a mandate,” ask one specific question: “Which level of government requires this, and what funding do we lose if we opt out?” Half the time, rules people assume are federal are just district policy, easy to shift if parents speak up. Even when the rule is tied to federal cash, most districts hold small pots of unrestricted local levy money that doesn’t come with federal strings.
She took that advice. She showed up to the next month’s school board meeting, brought a list of 17 other parents whose kids struggled with the rigid whole-group reading block, and asked the board to reallocate money from the district’s instructional contingency fund to pay for extra small-group reading specialist hours. Three weeks later, they voted yes: $75,000 a year, no federal approval needed.
I also tell parents they don’t have to organize a national campaign or run for school board to make a difference. Most decisions that shape daily classroom life happen at district meetings in the high school gym, and most of those meetings have rows of empty seats. Sign up for the district’s public comment email list, show up once a quarter if there’s an issue you care about, and speak for three minutes about your own kid. That moves the needle far more than sharing a national petition signed by people who live 1,000 miles away. For teachers, I keep a $1 spiral notebook on my desk where I jot down what actually works for each kid—Javi does phonics far better when he can trace letters in the dirt on the nature trail behind school, for example. Hard, local data about real kids makes it much easier for administrators to sign off on workarounds, even when federal rules tie our hands on paper.
Technically, the 90-minute whole-group reading block is still on my classroom schedule, in the required 14-point font, for the next federal monitoring visit. But Javi and four other kids pull out for 20 minutes of small-group work every day, paid for with local money. Last week, he brought in a tattered John Deere picture book he bought at our PTA book fair, and sounded out “combine harvester” out loud to the whole class.
We’re now working with the curriculum committee to set aside local money for after-school tractor repair and 4-H clubs for kids who don’t thrive sitting at a desk all day. We don’t know if the federal department will ever be disbanded, and most days, that’s not the fight we’re focused on here. What we know is that change for kids doesn’t start in an office building 300 miles away. It starts at a folding table in a classroom, when a parent asks a simple question, and people who know the kid show up to fix it. Some days the red tape still feels thick enough to stop anything new, but last week I watched Javi grin after he finished that page, and that felt like enough for now.
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