Why the U.S. Doesn’t Need a Federal Department of Education: A Local Paraeducator’s Take
Last Tuesday night, I sat on a dented folding chair in our elementary school cafeteria, listening to a mom named Lisa lean into the microphone at the school board meeting. The spot by the soda machine was still sticky from a root beer spill back in September, and the whiteboard in the corner still had October’s homecoming football score scrawled in blue marker. Lisa’s 8-year-old son Javi has ADHD, and she’d just gotten his third behavior referral in a month, all for getting out of his seat during the 90-minute uninterrupted phonics block the district adopted last year to meet U.S. Department of Education requirements.
“My kid can’t sit still for 45 minutes without wiggling, let alone 90,” she said, her voice tight, not yelling the way people do in viral school board clips. “Why does someone who’s never met Javi, who’s never even stepped foot in this town, get to decide how his school day works?”
That line stuck with me on the drive home, past the cornfields and the single stoplight downtown. I’ve worked as a paraeducator in this rural western Ohio district for 11 years, and both my kids went K-12 here. I’ve watched four different presidential administrations come and go, each bringing a new stack of federal education rules, new curricula we have to buy, new hoops we have to jump through to keep our funding. Most days, it feels like the U.S. Department of Education does far more to get in the way of good teaching than it does to help kids. That’s why I’ve come to think we don’t need a cabinet-level federal education department at all.
Two years ago, we got a federal math improvement grant that required us to roll out a $180-per-student Chromebook program, with a mandatory 45 minutes of independent work per week, most of it assigned for home. Our district sits in a hilly part of the county where 22% of households don’t have reliable broadband, and most of our kids grow up helping with family farms, 4-H projects, or local construction. Half of them can calculate the square footage of a new goat pen or measure lumber for a raised bed faster than I can pull the problem up on the program. But because the federal rules tied grant money to strict participation metrics, 12 kids who couldn’t log on at home got marked as “below benchmark” on their report cards, even though they could do the math just fine with a pencil and a tape measure.
We spent three months going back and forth with district administrators, who kept saying the rules came straight from Washington, there was no flexibility. It turned out most of the strict requirements were written into the state’s grant application, not federal law itself. We got three local farmers who serve on the ag booster club to come to a meeting, brought samples of the kids’ project work, and the state eventually let us count hands-on ag math toward the required minutes. We set aside 30 minutes a week of in-school Chromebook time for kids without internet at home, and the “below benchmark” labels disappeared by the end of the semester.
I know the Department of Education wasn’t created to make life harder for kids. When it was elevated to cabinet level in 1979, its biggest jobs were enforcing desegregation orders and making sure kids with disabilities got access to public school, something plenty of local districts refused to do on their own. I grew up 45 minutes east of here, and my cousin who had spina bifida had to be carried up the school stairs by his dad every day until the federal government threatened to pull district funding in 1982, forcing the school board to install ramps. That guardrail matters, and I don’t want to see it go away.
But what started as a small civil rights enforcement agency has grown into a 4,000-person bureaucracy that churns out new rules tied to national political whims, not local student needs. Every four or eight years, a new administration comes in with a signature education agenda: Common Core under Obama, school choice pushes under Trump, new equity mandates under Biden. Each time, districts across the country spend millions buying new textbooks, rewriting lesson plans, and pulling teachers out of class for training, only to scrap most of it when the political winds shift. We still have 300 unopened Common Core math textbooks in a storage closet by the gym, bought with $200,000 of local taxpayer money back in 2012.
None of these national agendas account for the fact that a 3rd grader in a border district in Texas needs most of their reading materials in both English and Spanish, while a 3rd grader in northern Maine might speak Acadian French at home. A district full of military kids who move every 18 months needs different attendance and enrollment rules than our district, where 80% of families have lived here for at least two generations. The federal department can’t write rules that fit all those contexts, so it writes one-size rules that fit almost none.
Most of the actual good the department does—enforcing disability rights, investigating racial discrimination, distributing free lunch funding for low-income kids—could be handled by other existing agencies. The Department of Justice already enforces civil rights laws across every other sector, and free lunch funding could be run through the Department of Agriculture, which already oversees school meal programs. We don’t need a separate cabinet department to write thousands of pages of extra curriculum rules just to keep those basic protections in place.
I talk to parents all the time who feel frustrated by these mandates, like there’s nothing they can do unless Washington changes. But most of the flexibility we’ve won over the years started right here, with a handful of people showing up to boring weeknight meetings.
For parents, the first thing I always tell them is to ask for the exact text of the rule your school is citing. After Javi got his third referral, Lisa sat down with his teacher and asked to see where the federal government said phonics had to be done seated at a desk. It turned out the federal rule only required 90 minutes of phonics instruction total per day; the seated requirement was a district call to make standardized testing easier to run. We worked out a compromise: 15 minutes of that block is now phonics hopscotch out on the blacktop, where kids yell vowel teams as they jump between squares. Javi hasn’t had a behavior referral this semester, and his reading assessment scores are right on grade level.
If that doesn’t work, bring it to your local school board. Most board members are just local parents, farmers, and small business owners, and most have no idea how much red tape the district is dealing with until someone points it out. We got the math waiver approved unanimously after three of us showed up to a meeting with the kids’ ag math work in hand. Districts can opt out of plenty of federal grant requirements if they’re willing to do the paperwork, but most won’t bother unless parents push them.
For teachers, I’ve found it helps to connect with other staff across grade levels to map federal standards to activities that already work for your kids, instead of throwing out everything you know about how kids learn. We didn’t have to choose between meeting federal requirements and giving kids movement; we just had to stop assuming the rules were stricter than they actually are.
None of this is to say local control is perfect. Our school board still argues about whether to add more advanced placement classes, and we still have gaps in funding for low-income kids that local property taxes can’t cover. Some of my coworkers who moved here from larger districts argue federal funding is the only reason we can offer free meals to every student, and they’re right that pulling all federal support would leave a lot of kids behind. We’re still sorting out where the line should be between basic national guardrails and local control over how kids actually learn.
Last week, I stood on the blacktop watching Javi and three of his classmates race through the vowel hopscotch, yelling so loud the preschoolers turned to look. When they finished, they trundled back inside, sat on the reading rug, and flipped through their books for 20 minutes quiet, no wiggles, no referrals. It works for now. Next year, there will be a new set of federal rules, a new grant to chase, a new fight over what our school day should look like. For now, though, we’re just making it work for the kids we actually see every day.
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