Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW)
Office of Education—1953
Created in 1953, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) combined health, education, and welfare into a single agency.
Within that structure sat the Office of Education.
K–12 student performance was neither a central focus nor addressed.
Then came John F. Kennedy
Failure of the states. When President Kennedy was elected 10 years later, he was alarmed by the widespread failure of the states to deliver strong K–12 outcomes.
Kennedy understood the Constitutional need for state autonomy over education. However he also recognized that the nation was suffering egregious K–12 student productivity losses—from which student victims and families might never recover.
The opportunity missed: the Office of Education’s legislated focus was on administrative responsibilities (see outline below), not on the nation’s K–12 student performance.
The President had to choose his battles: most of his K–12 initiatives were blocked by Congress. In that climate—and with his assassination cutting short his presidency—he never advanced a proposal to modify or replace the Office of Education with a standalone department focused singularly on K–12 student performance, while preserving full state control over K–12 education.
1953 responsibilities of the Office of Education (within the HEW)
- School statistics and research
- Federal aid programs
- Vocational and higher education
- Civil rights compliance
- Educational studies
There was no K–12 student performance mandate to:
- Facilitate sustained, system-wide K-12 improvement across the states
- Verify K-12 performance results
Then came the DOE—years after Kennedy’s assassination
In 1979, the U.S. Department of Education (herein, the DOE) replaced the Office of Education, becoming its de facto successor.
The opportunity missed (again): the new department largely mirrored its predecessor—with no central focus on K–12 student performance.
John F. Kennedy—a relentless champion of what this HSe4Metrics explainer terms K–12 student performance—would likely have fought to make the DOE’s preeminent, uninterrupted mission the remaking of K–12 student performance outcomes.
Ideally, other education programs could have been housed elsewhere—fully separate from the K–12 student performance focus—perhaps returned to their original agencies.
Key code 190, 191