Why the U.S. Doesn’t Need a Federal Department of Education: A Classroom Teacher’s Perspective
Last Tuesday, I sat across from Lila’s mom at our fall parent-teacher conference, a half-empty mug of burnt lukewarm coffee between us on the scratched kidney bean table, while she tapped a neon-yellow printed email she’d gotten from the district. The feds were requiring all 3rd through 8th graders to take three extra 45-minute reading screeners this year, she read, on top of our regular state tests and weekly phonics quizzes, because the U.S. Department of Education wanted more granular data to track post-pandemic learning loss. “Why does someone in Washington get to decide how much test time my kid gets?” she asked. “They don’t even know our kids here.”
That’s the question I get at least once a month, from parents, other teachers, even occasionally our school principal, after another long compliance meeting: why do we even have a federal Department of Education, anyway? After 12 years teaching 4th grade in rural western Michigan, where 42 percent of our students qualify for free or reduced lunch and a quarter speak Spanish as their first language, I’ve landed on an answer that surprises a lot of people: we don’t need it.
Two years ago, our district had to scrap the phonics curriculum a group of local regional teachers built over 15 years, because federal Title I rules required us to use a curriculum on the Department of Education’s pre-approved list to keep our 8 percent federal funding share. The old curriculum used examples kids recognized: passages about apple harvest at the orchard where half their parents work, word problems about 4-H show animals, stories about ice fishing on the local lake. The new approved curriculum is written for suburban and urban kids in the northeast. I remember the first week we rolled it out, Milo, a quiet kid who lives on a 200-acre corn and soybean farm, raised his hand mid-lesson and asked what an elevator was. The closest thing he’d ever seen to a multi-story building was his family’s 60-foot grain silo.
For Javier, one of my students with dyslexia, the switch set his reading progress back three months. Our reading specialist had him on a steady, slow rhythm with the old materials that matched his pace, and the new curriculum’s fast, one-size pacing left him confused and frustrated. It took her six weeks of filling out waiver forms, submitting progress data, and waiting for sign-off from three levels of admin to get permission to use the old lessons with him again. Six weeks of learning time he never got back.
Most people assume federal education money flows straight to classrooms, but every dollar comes with a pile of strings. Our district employs one full-time administrator whose only job is filling out federal reporting forms, updating policies to match new Department of Education rules, and managing grant applications. That’s a $75,000 a year salary, plus benefits, that could pay for a full-time teacher aide to help with small reading groups, or update our 10-year-old classroom library, or fix the broken playground slide that’s been fenced off since last spring. A 2022 Michigan State study found that districts in our state spend 17 to 22 cents of every federal Title I dollar just on compliance, not on services for low-income kids.
Priorities shift every four to eight years, too, depending on who wins the White House, and districts are left scrambling to rewrite policies and spend money on new initiatives even when our kids’ needs haven’t changed. One administration pushes for more college prep classes and ties funding to four-year college acceptance rates, so we cut half our welding and vocational agriculture classes to make room for extra AP courses, even though 60 percent of our graduates don’t go to a four-year school. The next administration pushes different priorities, and we have to scramble to rearrange everything again. Local needs don’t swing that fast.
I get the pushback, and I don’t dismiss it. Last month, I brought this up at happy hour with Clara, our district’s special education coordinator, after she’d spent three weeks rewriting 40 IEPs just to match new federal documentation rules that didn’t change a single service any kid would receive. She pointed out, correctly, that before federal intervention in schools, plenty of districts across the country turned away kids with disabilities, refused to enroll Black students in white schools, and gave low-income districts almost no support at all. Those protections matter.
But those protections are written into federal law—the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—not created by the Department of Education itself. The department is just an administrative layer. Anti-discrimination rules for schools can already be enforced by the Department of Justice, and most on-the-ground enforcement of special education rules already happens at the state level. Eliminating the cabinet-level department doesn’t erase those legal guarantees. It just cuts out the middleman writing unnecessary rules for districts 500 or 1,000 miles away.
I also grew up in a poor district in the Missouri Bootheel, where local property taxes couldn’t cover new textbooks or free breakfast in the 1990s, and federal money paid for both. I’m not naive enough to say low-income districts don’t need that support. But that money doesn’t have to be filtered through a huge federal bureaucracy with endless strings. Congress could send the same funding directly to states as flexible block grants, letting local leaders decide how to spend it based on what their kids actually need, instead of forcing everyone to follow the same rulebook.
After that conference with Lila’s mom, she asked what she could actually do besides vote every two years, and that’s the question most people leave with. You don’t have to organize a protest or run for school board to shift how this works, even with federal rules in place.
The first, easiest step is to show up to your local school board’s monthly work sessions, not just the viral public meetings about book bans or mask rules. Most of those work sessions have fewer than 10 community members in the room, and public comment about testing time, curriculum choices, or federal grant applications actually shifts votes. Last year, three local parents came to a work session to talk about how extra federal test days were pulling their kids away from 4-H and farm work, and the board voted unanimously to turn down an optional federal grant that would have added even more required screeners.
Second, look up your district’s public annual budget, which is posted on the district website every year, and ask one simple question at a board meeting: how much of our federal funding goes to administrative compliance, versus direct classroom spending? Most board members don’t know that number off the top of their head, and just asking the question out loud puts it on their radar.
Third, fill out those short surveys your district sends home about curriculum, testing, and student needs. Most parents throw them away, but state education teams use those responses when they negotiate flexibility with the federal department. A 10-minute survey can actually move the needle on what rules local districts are allowed to opt out of.
Last week, our school board voted to ask the state for a waiver from those three extra reading screeners Lila’s mom asked about, after a dozen parents showed up to share their own stories about lost class time. We don’t know if the request will be approved yet. We still have to use the federally approved phonics curriculum for whole-group lessons, even if most of us pull the old local materials out for small groups when central office isn’t observing.
This gets framed as a partisan cable news fight most of the time, but for me it’s never been about politics. It’s about the fact that the people who sit with kids every day, who know their families, their strengths, the things that trip them up, are always going to make better decisions than a team of policy writers who’ve never visited our town. I don’t know if Congress will ever vote to dissolve the Department of Education, and I know there are real risks to shifting more power back to states that have a history of failing marginalized kids. But even if that never happens, every time parents and teachers show up locally to ask for more flexibility, we get a little more say over what happens in our classrooms. That work matters, regardless of what happens in Washington.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why the U