John F. Kennedy and K-12 student performance
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Remember when there was no U.S. Department of Education—and before that, no National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)?
When John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency, education policy was overseen only by the Office of Education, a subdivision of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). The Office of Education had no Cabinet-level standing, and education was treated as just one of many HEW functions. In effect, it served as the only central coordination “hub” for K–12 education, but its role was largely administrative, with little focus on actual K-12 student performance.
President Kennedy recognized that the states’ K–12 results were, collectively, abysmal. His remedy was to press Congress for corrective federal involvement—not to control state education systems, but to establish a framework for elevating what we here call “K–12 student performance.” Many of his proposals were rejected—and then he was assassinated.
Seventeen years later, a Democrat-controlled Congress, with Republican support, created the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). Yet in terms of a dedicated strategy to fundamentally remake the nation’s K–12 student performance, the department’s creation was a nonstarter—so much so that NAEP outcomes became a recurring high-profile news story.
No Congress and no president has ever come together to rewrite the foundational documents that define the Department’s purpose in elevating nationwide K–12 performance. It is time for a second chance for America’s schools.
President John F. Kennedy’s time in office was limited to just three years and ten months, during which he faced strong Congressional resistance to many of his education initiatives—often rooted in opposition to civil rights. But every effort he made was foundational to the future of every K–12 student and younger child.
Clearly, K-12 results across the states, taken as a whole, were a dramatic failure.
“JFK” unsuccessfully begged, pressured, and cajoled Congress to create a central management hub to coordinate K-12 nationally. He wanted results. He knew America’s young people in the K–12 system needed to be rescued–which NAEP results have subsequently and screamingly confirmed. Yet Congress stood in the way.
His fight suddenly ended on November 22, 1963–at the bookbindery in Dallas, Texas.
After President Kennedy’s assassination, his brother—U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, known as both “Bobby” and “RFK”—carried forward his brother’s push to expand federal support for K–12 education.
Tragically, RFK was also assassinated. Yet, before his death, Bobby helped secure passage of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s former vice president.
Nearly 17 years after JFK’s death, Congress finally established a federal education agency—a central hub intended to oversee national education efforts. However, the outcome—the creation of the U.S. Department of Education—was a far cry from what either Kennedy had envisioned. Rather than being a vigorous national driver of K–12 student performance, the legislation that formed the DOE created a perfunctory catch-all agency.
The president who signed the Act creating the DOE was Jimmy Carter.
The Democratic Party introduced legislation in 1979 to create the U.S. Department of Education. With some Republican crossover support, it passed both chambers of Congress. President Carter signed it into law in October 1979, and the Department officially began operating on May 4, 1980—though Carter himself reportedly admitted he did not fully understand the legislation.
Had he survived, President Kennedy would likely have seen the DOE creation as a miscarriage of his vision for K–12 education. With Kennedy no longer alive, the inept DOE legislation failed to establish critical focus on K–12 student performance and imposed no rigorous accountability on the Secretary of Education.
Adding to the absurdity, the legislation bundled unrelated tasks into the DOE’s mandate, creating the risk that an ineffective Secretary might divert attention from the core issue of K–12 student performance and hard-number accountability as measured by NAEP. Unfortunately, that described every DOE decade thereafter.
Rather than fix it, Reagan pushed to end it.
President Ronald Reagan, likewise, a great American leader and coming after Jimmy Carter as president, had campaigned in 1980 on a promise to abolish the DOE, advocating for K–12 education to be returned to state and local control—and yet Regan knew that the states’ lost an inhumane portion of its K-12 demographic to the bottom of NAEP. How could he not?
Of course, Reagan’s intuition was correct: the DOE was, in essence, useless. But the question is whether he understood why.
The reason the DOE was useless was its legislation. It needed to be rewritten.
It needed to be aligned with President Kennedy’s vision.
The DOE legislation signed into law by President Carter was never replaced.
Bold leadership is needed to correct the DOE’s flaws.
With bipartisan alignment, a rewrite can be quick: Implement the simple reforms detailed on our U.S. Department of Education page. By executive action, the President can fast-track the DOE changes, albeit only on a temporary basis.
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