Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee recently, I was asked by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) if, with respect to higher education, I would favor eliminating the U.S. Department of Education.
She was aghast when I said “yes.”
Before I go into the damage our national educational ministry has done to higher education, it is worth reviewing its creation in 1979.
The Democrats then controlled all of the federal government, with large congressional majorities. The party had promised to create the Department in its 1976 platform. President Jimmy Carter advocated it, as did the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Educational Association (NEA).
Yet the bill barely passed. The House committee considering it advanced it to the floor on a 20-19 vote—with seven Democrats voting no. The liberal press such as the New York Times and the Washington Post opposed it editorially.
In particular, the criticism leveled by the Times in its May 22, 1979 editorial “Centralizing Education Is No Reform” was sharp and prescient: