John F. Kennedy—and K-12 student performance
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 (abbreviated in this explainer website as the DOE). Yet when it came to a dedicated strategy for fundamentally remaking the nation’s K–12 student performance, the department’s creation proved to be a nonstarter—so much so that NAEP’s alarming 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 DOE’s purpose in elevating nationwide K–12 performance.
It is time for a second chance for America’s schools—time for bold and overwhelming bipartrisan leadership.
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 John F. 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.
Ronald Reagan, following the presidency of Jimmy Carter, campaigned in 1980 on a promise to abolish the U.S. DOE—advocating that K–12 education be returned to state and local control. And yet Reagan also knew that the states had collectively lost an inhumane share of their K–12 student population to the bottom tiers of the NAEP. How could he not?
Ronald Reagan’s intuition was correct that the DOE was, in essence, ineffective. But did he fully understand why?
The reason the DOE was ineffective lay in its foundational legislation. It was never written to drive, measure, or elevate nationwide K–12 student performance. It needed to be rewritten.
The DOE legislation signed into law by President Carter was never replaced
Action. Today, bipartisan legislation can quickly implement the reforms detailed on this website’s U.S. Department of Education page.
In the interim, progress can be achieved through a presidential executive order, pending a warranted legislative rewrite by Congress.
Key code 182, 183, 187, 190