Why the U.S. Doesn’t Need a Federal Department of Education: A Teacher and Parent’s Take
Last Tuesday, I sat through a 90-minute after-school staff meeting while a stack of half-graded 4th grade multiplication quizzes sat crumpled in my canvas tote bag, and our district’s curriculum coordinator walked us through the latest federal reading accountability mandate. The rule required every third grader in the country to take the same 45-minute digital benchmark three times a year, starting that fall. Our rural eastern Iowa K-8 school has 12 third graders total. Three live in homes without reliable broadband, down dirt roads where internet cuts out every time strong winds blow. One is a migrant student whose family follows corn and soybean harvests across three states, so he might only be enrolled with us for six weeks. Two have fine motor delays that make mouse work painful enough to qualify for paper accommodations—wait, the coordinator said, flipping to slide 17, the federal portal only approves accommodation requests submitted 40 days in advance, with signed medical paperwork on file.
A murmur went around the room. Our special ed teacher raised her hand. “The migrant family doesn’t have a permanent pediatrician. They get care at the free clinic when they can get an appointment. Am I supposed to tell them they can’t have a paper test?”
The coordinator sighed. She’s a former 2nd grade teacher, so she gets it. “I don’t make the rules,” she said. “They come from D.C.”
I’ve taught at this district for 11 years, and my own third-grade daughter Lila attends class here. I don’t oppose all federal support for schools; I’ve seen free and reduced-price meal grants keep food on kids’ desks when their families can’t make rent. But after a decade of filling out federal compliance forms and rearranging lesson plans for one-size-fits-all mandates from both Democratic and Republican administrations, I’ve come to see a central U.S. Department of Education as unnecessary, and often counterproductive, for the actual work of teaching kids.
Three years ago, our science teacher pushed to update our 4th grade units to match the world our students live in. Half our kids go home to chores on family farms: feeding hogs, mending fence lines, helping plant vegetable gardens. The federally recommended curriculum kits, which cost $1,200 a set, focused entirely on urban scenes: subway noise pollution, neighborhood park ecosystems, solar panels on apartment buildings. Most of our kids had never ridden a subway. With $800 raised from the local farm bureau and PTA, our teacher built his own unit plans that wove all required test topics into local contexts: soil chemistry tied to fertilizer use, food webs tied to corn-soybean crop rotation, physics tied to center-pivot irrigation systems. One boy who rarely turned in homework handed in three pages of notes about his family’s hog manure compost program. We still had to carve out three full weeks to teach the federal curriculum for the year-end standardized test, though. Half the class spent those periods twisting in their seats, staring at tractors passing the playground.
For special education students, the gap between federal rules and on-the-ground reality is even wider. Mia, one of my 4th graders with dyslexia, gets 30 minutes of daily small-group reading support from a retired teacher trained in the Orton-Gillingham method. Our district picked that method after tracking local student data for years, and a local Lions Club chapter paid for the training. Federal special education funds cover just 14% of our district’s special ed costs; the rest comes from local property taxes and state allocations. What federal rules do add is paperwork: our part-time special ed teacher spends two hours every week filling out standardized progress forms for a national portal, retyping the same notes she already shares with parents and administrators. She can’t write “Mia lit up when she finished a full page about horses” on the official form; she has to tick boxes for pre-defined skill benchmarks.
Critics often argue a federal department is needed to protect marginalized kids and equalize funding between rich and poor districts. I share that concern, but those guardrails don’t require a 4,000-person bureaucracy 1,000 miles away. Civil rights laws already ban discrimination based on race, disability, and national origin, and courts can enforce those rules without an education department attached. Funding can flow directly from states to districts, cutting out federal administrative overhead and the strings that force small districts to waste money on ill-fitting programs. Our three neighboring rural districts already run a shared cooperative for special ed staff and curriculum purchases, and it’s far more flexible than any federal program I’ve used.
For parents and teachers frustrated with top-down rules, you don’t have to wait for national legislation to make a difference for your kids. First, show up to your local school board’s monthly meeting. Most draw fewer than 10 community members, and specific, personal feedback carries far more weight than national policy takes. You don’t have to give a speech; just say something like, “My 3rd grader says art class gets cut for test prep every week. Can we fix that?” Two parents brought that exact complaint to our board last year, and members voted to limit test prep to the two weeks before exams.
Second, if your kid comes home with a confusing assignment or new testing requirement, ask their teacher which rules are actually federal mandates, and which are local choices. Administrators often blame unpopular decisions on D.C. when they have full authority to change them. Try: “I don’t need to see the policy fine print. I just want to know how much class time this takes away from things my kid cares about.” Most teachers will tell you straight.
Last year, Lila came home after her first federal reading benchmark and tossed her favorite Magic Tree House book on the shelf, saying reading was just “reading short paragraphs and picking the right answer.” Our primary grade teachers brought that feedback to the board, and we got approval to keep 80% of reading time for self-selected books and small-group book clubs, with only short, targeted test practice in the weeks leading up to exams. Lila still doesn’t love tests, but she’s back to reading horse stories for 20 minutes every night.
Last week, our coordinator sent a follow-up email about the new digital benchmark. Small rural districts can apply for a waiver, but the application is 27 pages long, requires a full survey of home internet access, and takes up to six months to process. Our principal is splitting the paperwork with the three nearby districts, and the PTA is sending paper surveys home this week, since half our families don’t check email regularly.
If we get the waiver, we’ll use the one-on-one reading assessment our own teachers built, which uses passages about 4-H and farm animals and lets us pinpoint exactly where a kid is stuck. If we don’t, we’ll carve out 20 minutes a week for mouse practice, and make up the lost reading time with extra free reading on Friday afternoons.
Either way, we’ll still take the 3rd graders to the local dairy farm next month. Mia will still get her daily reading support. The migrant student in 3rd grade will still get to take home bilingual picture books about trucks during his time with us.
National politicians talk about the Education Department like it’s the backbone of student learning. From my classroom, it’s mostly a layer of paperwork and rules between the people who know kids best—their parents, teachers, and neighbors—and the actual work of learning. We don’t need a central office in D.C. to do that work. We’re already doing it.
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