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As part of the debate over whether to dismantle the US Department of Education, some have argued that the department should be disbanded because it has completely failed in achieving its purpose. Student test scores have not significantly risen over the last 42 years. Gaps in achievement between different racial and income groups have not closed. Educational attainment has risen, but this largely seems to have been produced by degrading the standards for completing high school and enrolling in college. 

But the evidence documenting long-term stagnation in educational outcomes does not demonstrate the failure of the department in achieving its goals. The Department of Education has performed wonderfully once you understand what its true purpose has always been. The department is designed to provide material and political benefits to the teachers’ unions, not to improve student outcomes. In achieving this goal, the Department of Education has been a smashing success. 

You can divine the true purpose of the Department of Education from its history as well as from its spending priorities. The department was founded in 1980 by President Carter as a political reward to the National Education Association (NEA). Before the 1970s, the NEA largely operated as a professional association, focused on increasing the requirements for becoming a teacher. Of course, increased standards reduced the potential pool of teachers, which tended to increase the compensation to attract qualified educators. But these material rewards were largely a side-benefit and not the central concern of the NEA, which was more preoccupied with the status and perhaps the actual quality of the teaching profession. 

As baby boomers aged out of K-12 schools, there was a sharp reduction in enrollment nationwide. Facing property tax revolts and empty classrooms, districts began to close schools and lay off teachers. Threatened with job losses, teachers flocked to the NEA and transformed the organization into behaving more like a traditional labor union. In its new political incarnation, the NEA made its first presidential endorsement by backing Carter in the 1976 election. In exchange, Carter’s running mate, Walter Mondale, promised the NEA at its annual meeting that their administration would create a Department of Education. With a tough fight for re-election looming, Carter fulfilled this campaign promise, and the department was born in 1980. 

Looking at the department’s spending priorities confirms how the department was meant to address the material and political concerns of the unions. In its first year, more than half of the department’s budget was designed to pour cash into districts facing a financial pinch from the Baby Bust and local taxpayer revolts.  

Over half of the 1980 appropriation for the Department of Education was devoted to elementary and secondary education, with the two largest programs being Title I and special education. While those programs are intended to provide resources for the education of low-income and disabled students, the money is distributed by formula to districts without any requirement that they provide an accounting of whether those funds were spent only on those services. Federal cash for Title I and special education pours into districts’ general coffers and can be spent on whatever districts may need, which in 1980 was offsetting the loss in local tax revenue to prevent schools from closing and teachers from being laid-off. 

Four decades later, Title I and special education remain the two largest federal programs serving K-12 schools. They have also been the fastest growing. Looking at appropriations to the Department of Education in 2019, before Covid money was added, Title I has grown 79 percent and special education has grown 348 percent since the department’s original 1980 budget, after adjusting for inflation.  

In addition to these two programs representing 73 percent of federal spending on K-12 schools, the department has added two other sizable initiatives to reward their union benefactors. One provides more than $2 billion in grants to support teacher professional development. Unions love money spent on professional development because their members and allies often become the providers of that training. And teachers enjoy getting paid while taking a break from having to be in the classroom while receiving professional development. 

The other major new program provides more than a billion dollars for “21st Century Community Learning Centers,” which expand the set of services provided by schools to include doctors, nurses, dentists, social workers, and psychologists. The unions love this “Broader Bolder” vision of education, as they call it because it allows them to add a whole new set of staff to their union rolls. Having maxed out on organizing teachers, the unions would like to recruit health and social workers. The Department of Education obliges the unions by paying for schools that employ more non-teaching professionals. 

It is also revealing to note which programs in the Department of Education have actually shrunk in real terms over the last four decades. Appropriations for career and technical education have fallen by 50 percent after adjusting for inflation between 1980 and 2019, from $2.54 billion to $1.27 billion. Many career and technical training programs are run by community colleges and businesses whose staff are not members of the teachers’ unions. 

Appropriations for Indian education have declined 27 percent and impact aid for schools serving military families has dropped by 41 percent between 1980 and 2019, after adjusting for inflation. The unions prefer formula funded programs that pour money into districts’ general coffers over grant-based programs that would actually obligate them to serve discrete communities. 

Perhaps most surprising, appropriations for civil rights enforcement by the Department of Education have also fallen 16 percent between 1980 and 2019, adjusting for inflation. The unions may talk a lot about protecting the rights of minorities, but actually sanctioning civil rights violations would involve punishing schools and teachers, which the unions would rather avoid.  

Anyone who thinks it is essential to have a Department of Education to protect civil rights or to deliver programs to disadvantaged groups, like Native Americans, hasn’t looked at the department’s budget trends. They also don’t understand who the department is meant to serve. The Department of Education was created as a political payback to the teachers’ unions and it is designed to advocate for the material interests of the unions and their members, not to serve the needs of minorities. 

As the pork-barrel politics of the Department of Education are laid bare, the survival of the department will depend on the continuing political influence of the unions. Unfortunately for the unions, their influence over the Republican party has largely evaporated as they went all-in on backing Democrats. And even among Democrats, their influence will shrink as the new Baby Bust reduces student enrollments and the number of unionized teachers serving that declining pool.  

The Department of Education may not be dismantled during the next Trump administration, but its days are likely numbered. And when it is eventually dismantled and existing programs are reallocated to other departments, no one will really miss how the department advocated for increased spending for a narrow constituency other than the direct beneficiaries of that spending. Naked power politics is a double-edged sword. The unions could extract resources when they were powerful political brokers, but those resources disappear when their power declines.