With the passing of Jimmy Carter at the age of 100, there is a scurry to rewrite the history of our 39th president. According to the popular narrative, Carter faced economic and foreign policy challenges, yet his accomplishments, such as the Camp David Accords, are remembered, as well as his lifelong dedication to humanitarian efforts and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
Carter’s true legacy is quite different. He was a godly man who was unprepared to serve as leader of the world’s superpower. His good — but naïve — intentions too often created disastrous results for our nation. His administration was soundly rejected by the American people, with a landslide loss for re-election. Voters were fed up with high inflation, gas prices that doubled, and a scarcity of gas with rationing and long lines at stations to fill tanks.
On the international stage, our enemies deemed Carter weak and took advantage of his nice-guy policy of “co-existence.” The Soviet Union stormed Afghanistan, while Islamic revolutionaries took control of Iran and held Americans prisoner for the remaining 444 days of Carter’s presidency.
In his post-presidency, Carter undermined American leaders in foreign policy. He wrote letters to Arab leaders to persuade them to abandon support for the United States. In North Korea, he undermined the efforts of our leaders to stop the buildup of a nuclear arsenal. In the Middle East, he befriended PLO terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, condemned Israel, and embraced Hamas.
One of Carter’s most infamous domestic policies was the creation of the Department of Education. Its establishment was a marriage of political expediency and dissatisfaction with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which failed to end poverty despite massive government spending — more than 23 trillion dollars to date. The purported purpose of the department was to close the academic achievement gap between children from low-income families and their higher-income peers. Forty-four years later, not only has there been little change with the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Education, but much evidence suggests that federal control of education has been detrimental.
The establishment of centralized education had long been a goal of the National Education Association (NEA). Founded in 1857 as a teacher organization, the NEA became the nation’s largest teachers union when it transitioned from an advocacy association to a collective bargaining organization. In the early 1900s, the NEA began lobbying for a federal agency to train teachers and improve literacy. Ramping up their lobbying efforts during World War II, they supported enactment of the G.I. bill and more federal aid to schools near military bases. In 1976, they endorsed their first presidential candidate: Jimmy Carter. Carter’s running mate was Walter Mondale, brother to an NEA official. Mondale strongly supported organized labor and a greater role of the federal government in education. NEA delegates were Carter’s largest bloc of delegates at the nominating convention in 1976. In a candidate questionnaire, Carter reinforced his support for a federal Department of Education.
Once in office, Carter worked with lawmakers on legislation for a Cabinet-level education department. To allay public fears of increased federal control over education, the House bill was amended to prohibit “federal direction supervision, or control of local education programs.” Despite opposition to a standalone agency, the NEA won the battle and President Carter signed into law the unconstitutional Department of Education Organization Act on October 17, 1979 with the official opening on May 4, 1980.
Since every state already had its own well staffed department of education with statutes, edicts, and directives, why was a U.S. Department of Education (USDE) necessary? The answer is simple: to gain control of our children and their minds and thus control of our nation. To achieve control over a nation of people, statism must be imposed. The most powerful and significant expression of statism is a state education system. Without it, statism is impossible. With it, the State can, and has, become all powerful.
The creation of the USDE was the culmination of a movement that began in the North in the 1830s to create a free centralized education system that would be funded by the states. Led by Horace Mann, public education was the result of an alliance with those who wanted to promote socialism, those who wanted to get rid of Calvinist influence, and Protestants who wanted to counter the influence of Catholic immigration. In 1867, the first federal Department of Education was created but demoted in 1868 to an education statistics gathering Office of Education, later housed in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
The role of the Office of Education was expanded with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the cornerstone of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society K–12 education programs. Under the ESEA, state leaders have been brainwashed to view the federal government as a money tree for financial assistance to K–12 education for children from low-income families or with special needs. This raises the question: why do we allow Washington to take so much of our money and then make us jump through federal hoops just to get back a small portion with strings attached — when the federal government has no constitutional authority over education?
States spend millions of paperwork hours to receive federal dollars. In 1998, U.S. rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) led a commission that reported numerous problems with federal regulations and state K–12 authority: “There are nearly three times as many federally funded employees of state education agencies administering federal education programs as there are U.S. Department of Education employees.”
As expected with government agencies, the USDE has become a bloated behemoth. Today it operates more than 100 federal programs with 4,400 employees and an annual budget of $68 billion. During the 1995 government shutdown, the Clinton administration found that 89 percent of USDE employees were non-essential. In the 2013 government shutdown, the Obama administration found that 94 percent of USDE personnel were non-essential.
Liberal legislators have a “slobbering love affair” with any large central government agency, no matter what the cost or damage — in this case, the children be damned. With the Cabinet-level Department of Education, the nose of the camel has been moved entirely inside the education tent, with hundreds of programs and mandates, while creating a staggering federal budget and failing to narrow the gaps in academic achievement.
Establishing a Cabinet-level Department of Education was a colossal and expensive mistake of the Carter administration. There was never a national need for such an entity. Distant federal policy makers cannot effectively develop programs or education interventions because they have no knowledge about the children. Eliminating many programs and housing the remaining ones at other agencies will allow control to be returned to parents and state and local government as our Founders intended. DOGE has promised to cut spending and regulations, and the USDE is on its radar.
Pixabay.
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