Why Do Some Say the U.S. Doesn’t Need a Central Department of Education? A Local Parent’s Take
Last October, I sat across from my son’s third grade teacher at a rickety folding table in the school gym, half a crumbly chocolate chip cookie on the paper napkin between us. The air smelled like burnt coffee and lemon disinfectant, and other conferences hummed a few tables over. She pushed his reading benchmark scores across the table and sighed. His scores were fine, she said, but the whole grade was spending three weeks on a nonfiction passage about Alaska king crab that none of the kids cared about. The district had bought the $120,000 curriculum package two years prior specifically to check boxes on federal Every Student Succeeds Act reporting requirements. If they missed participation and growth targets tied to the curriculum, they’d lose 12% of their annual budget—money that paid for the part-time art teacher and the free breakfast program 40% of the school’s kids relied on.
I drove home thinking about a recent call with my best friend Lila, who teaches 10th grade social studies at a rural high school outside Birmingham, Alabama. She’d complained that her students kept asking for a unit on the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, a site most had visited on elementary field trips 20 minutes from campus. The federally aligned state pacing guide required those same three weeks to cover the Industrial Revolution in New England, and shifting even two days would require a 17-page waiver that took six weeks on average to process. She’d tried once before, to add a lesson on local civil rights activists, and been denied because the district said it risked their funding.
A week later, I ran into Maria, another mom from our district, at the playground while our kids climbed the monkey bars. Her 9-year-old son has dyslexia, and for years she’d defended the U.S. Department of Education, saying federal IDEA rules were the only reason the district paid for his specialized tutoring. But that afternoon, she sounded worn out. For two years, the district had assigned him a tutor through a pre-approved federal vendor that ran sessions over Zoom for $180 an hour, and his reading skills barely moved. When she asked why they couldn’t use one of three certified local Orton-Gillingham specialists 15 minutes away, who charged $90 an hour, she learned none had completed the 80 pages of federal paperwork required to join the approved vendor list. The district couldn’t hire them without months of extra hoops, even though they were cheaper and more effective.
Stories like these are why a growing number of parents and teachers across the political spectrum say the U.S. doesn’t need a standalone, cabinet-level Department of Education based in Washington, D.C. I didn’t always buy that argument. For a long time, I assumed the department was the only backstop against local school boards that might shortchange low-income, disabled, or Black and Latino kids. But after a year of sitting through school board meetings and talking to teachers in very different contexts, I’ve seen how its one-size-fits-all rules often do more harm than good, even when written with good intentions.
The core problem is simple: a district in rural South Texas where 70% of students are learning English has almost nothing in common with a wealthy suburban district in Connecticut where most kids have private tutors and summer enrichment. A district bordering a Native American reservation in North Dakota has different needs than a downtown Chicago campus. Federal rules tie nearly 10% of all K-12 funding to uniform testing, curriculum, and reporting requirements that ignore those gaps. Districts end up spending time and money on compliance instead of the things their specific students need.
Critics of scrapping the department rightly point out that federal oversight has been essential to enforcing desegregation, protecting disabled students, and sending funding to low-income districts that can’t raise enough property tax revenue on their own. That’s not a hypothetical. At book club last month, another mom whose daughter attends a predominantly Black district across the county line noted that without 1970s federal desegregation orders, the all-white local school board would never have funded Black schools equally. That risk hasn’t gone away. Local control doesn’t automatically mean fair control.
But many people don’t realize the Department of Education as a standalone cabinet agency is relatively new, created in 1979. Before that, federal education funding and oversight were handled by a small office within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Civil rights protections didn’t disappear before 1979, and they don’t require a separate cabinet department today. Anti-discrimination rules for schools can be enforced by the Department of Justice, which already has civil rights teams with far more investigative power than the Education Department’s backlogged internal office. Federal education funding can still flow to states and local districts as block grants, with narrow, clear anti-discrimination rules, instead of thousands of pages of curriculum and testing mandates unrelated to equal access.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that parents and teachers don’t have to wait for federal policy change to make schools work better for kids. Most changes that actually move the needle happen locally, and they’re far easier to pull off than most people think.
If you’re a parent, start by showing up to your local school board’s curriculum and instruction committee meeting, not just the viral full-board meetings that draw crowds arguing over book bans. These monthly meetings usually draw three or four regular attendees and reserve 15 minutes for public comment. Bring one small, specific request instead of a broad demand to overhaul the whole system. A group of four parents from our school did that last spring, asking if teachers could swap 20% of mandated reading passages for pieces about local Pittsburgh history and community members. The board approved it in two meetings. This fall, our school’s overall reading growth went up 8% in the first semester, because kids were excited to talk about the stories.
If your child has an IEP or 504 plan, ask your district’s special education coordinator for a full list of eligible local service providers before accepting the default vendor. Most families don’t know federal rules already allow you to request a local provider if you can show the default isn’t working. Maria did that last fall, brought three months of progress notes showing no growth with the Zoom tutor, and got the local specialist approved. Her son is now nearly at grade level six months later.
If you’re a teacher, you don’t have to wait for district approval to swap in more relevant content. Lila gathered 11 other local social studies teachers last summer, and they built a shared pacing guide that hits all required federal benchmarks but swaps 30% of mandated content for local Alabama history and civil rights stories. They document how each lesson meets standards, so no waivers are needed, and share plans for free to cut down on extra work. Her students this year say social studies is their favorite class for the first time in her eight years of teaching.
No one I talk to thinks scrapping the department would fix every problem with U.S. public schools. We still have unfair funding gaps between rich and poor districts, local officials who make choices that hurt marginalized kids, and thousands of students who don’t get the support they need. But I also don’t buy that the only way to fix those problems is from an office building 200 miles away from most schools it regulates.
Last month, I volunteered in my son’s writing workshop. He finished a personal story about helping his grandpa fix fence lines on the family farm an hour outside the city, and his teacher taped it to the hallway bulletin board next to every other kid’s work. It wasn’t a prompt from a federally approved curriculum, and it didn’t count toward any benchmark. It was just his story, and that’s the part of school he still talks about at dinner most nights. For now, that’s enough to keep me showing up to those small committee meetings, even when the bigger questions about federal policy stay unresolved.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Do Some Say the U