Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Or amend it?
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It was only the states. Upon taking office as President, John F. Kennedy was determined to confront the state’s alarming K–12 results. No, the U.S. Department of Education (herein, the DOE) did not exist.
Whether the devastating K–12 student performance crisis across the states was driven by racial inequality, income disparity, or a lack of educational priority, President Kennedy believed Congress needed to focus on remaking what we refer to herein as “K–12 student performance.” The Office of Education, a subdivision of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), was not created for that purpose. What was needed was a federal agency to serve as a central coordination point—a true “hub”—for the benefit of the nation’s K–12 student performance.
President Kennedy understood that K–12 student performance across the states was in dire condition—an assessment later confirmed by the creation of the NAEP Act, soon after his assassination. His death came before he could formally request the establishment of a non-intrusive central federal hub to evaluate and work with each state on K–12 student performance, as Congress had already been regularly rejecting many of his education-related proposals.
Nearly 17 years after Kennedy’s assassination, Congress ultimately established a central management hub—the hub would be called the U.S. Department of Education.
But the hub was fatally flawed.
Despite the high-stakes nature of U.S. K–12 performance, the DOE hub’s founding legislation was not laser-focused on the mission to drive K–12 student performance. Instead, the DOE hub was created as a catch-all for assorted education programs—important in themselves, but distractions from a singular mission to elevate nationwide K–12 results. For K-12 student performance, the DOE hub was no better than the Office of Education.
Moreover, the role of Secretary of Education—arguably one of the most critical positions in the country—was left to routine political appointment, perhaps as a favor, without any requirement for the exceptional talent needed to deliver a dramatic, hard-number turnaround in student performance.
To remake the existing DOE, strip away the flaws. Remove the list of added programs, perhaps returning them to the agencies where they were formerly housed. Return state administrative duties to the states. Codify the DOE’s leadership requirements. Codify the core K–12 student performance mission and establish the use of hard-number metrics to measure nationwide gains.
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In a mega organization, a central coordination hub is vital; thus, if the DOE is terminated, a replacement will be inevitable
Central Monitoring Hub—how can any system be expected to excel without a dedicated central hub for monitoring, by whatever name?
For highly productive organizations to achieve award-winning results, a central hub is indispensable—to coordinate strategy, monitor performance, and ensure accountability.
The issue is not whether a DOE hub should exist, but that the existing DOE hub was poorly designed and fatally flawed. It was never legislated with the exclusive purpose of remaking nationwide K–12 student performance. Yet flawed legislation can be corrected—whether fast-tracked by Congress or temporarily expedited by executive order, with Congress following up later through legislation.
Therefore, the solution is not to abolish the DOE as an agency. The solution is to amend it. If it were terminated, a replacement would inevitably be required—but not before decades of K–12 progress were lost, along with a critical boost to U.S. competitiveness on both the national and global stages.
Although the DOE hub is best structured as a standalone entity, it could—less ideally—be placed within a range of organizations, such as one of the 15 federal departments (including the U.S. Department of Labor, DOL) or one of the roughly 100 independent government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation.
No need for authority. The DOE hub need not control state K–12 education beyond the right to request and receive K–12 data from the states. On all K–12 issues and opportunities, the hub would collaborate with each of the states in pursuit of exceptional outcomes and innovation, with each state processing the interactions and acting as it sees fit.
A newly legislated DOE hub, inspired by John F. Kennedy’s K–12 vision and informed by subsequent decades of technological advancement, must be lean, well-led, and mission-driven—remaking K–12 performance nationwide, measured by hard metrics such as NAEP assessments.
Note: The existing DOE, though misguided in focus, has collected a vast trove of data that a re-legislated DOE cannot afford to lose. Even if the agency failed to use it to raise K–12 performance metrics, this legacy information must be preserved for a DOE built to finally deliver results.
DOE at a crossroads: abolish it or reform its leadership and mission
The states had failed. Collectively, a decade before Congress created the flawed DOE, K–12 student performance across the states left many students unable to meet even the NAEP Basic achievement level or their own state standards.
Thus, the DOE was created—but founded on misguided legislation, it failed. Decades of priceless K–12 opportunity were squandered, a loss that can never be recovered. More than 100 million students graduated without the lifetime—for many, potentially profound—advantage they deserved, while tens of millions more never graduated at all.
Legislative action: amend, codify, and establish parameters
Amend and codify the DOE’s mission: to deliver sustained, cumulative, and dramatic gains in K–12 student performance nationwide—verified by hard-number metrics.
Establish clear parameters for the Secretary of Education:
- Independent oversight of the Secretary’s performance by an entity external to the DOE
- Authority for immediate removal of the Secretary, without prior notice, if performance is deemed unacceptable—allowing for continued hiring and replacement until the right individual is found
- A formal mandate to pursue and sustain visionary, results-driven leadership
Snapshots in time
John F. Kennedy (president from January 20, 1961, until his assassination on November 22, 1963) fought for a rigorous focus on K-12 student performance—likely by a federal agency. Congress voted no to many of his K-12 efforts.
No national K–12 standard: In addition to there being no central management hub when Kennedy was president, there was no national standard for K–12 education. Some states had their own performance benchmarks, but they varied widely from state to state, leaving the nation without a unified framework to guide or measure student achievement.
Then came the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Six years after President Kennedy’s assassination, NAEP was first administered nationwide in 1969 to provide a consistent benchmark of student performance across all 50 states. Before receiving its official name, NAEP began as a federally funded project to measure student achievement.
NAEP results confirmed widespread K–12 failure nationwide. Viewed collectively, the states revealed a sobering reality: a significant portion of U.S. human capital was being lost—something had to be done.
The U.S. Department of Education. Nearly 17 years after President Kennedy’s assassination, Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act, which President Jimmy Carter (in office from January 20, 1977, to January 20, 1981) signed into law on October 17, 1979. This act formally established the Department—intended as the nation’s central coordination hub. However, the legislation bore little resemblance to Kennedy’s vision, arguably rendering the DOE meaningless in that regard. Incredibly, this 1979 version of the DOE—despite NAEP assessments exposing the ongoing tragedy of K–12 performance—has remained in place for decades.
Ronald Reagan, who served as president from January 20, 1981, to January 20, 1989, campaigned on eliminating the DOE and attempted to terminate it while in office. Congress voted no.
George W. Bush, who served as President from January 20, 2001, to January 20, 2009, did not, unlike Presidents Carter or Reagan, appear to have articulated a clear opinion regarding the DOE or the validity of its founding legislation. However on January 8, 2002, he signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into law.
President Barack Obama (president from January 20, 2009, to January 20, 2017) likewise may not have expressed an actionable opinion of the DOE, but on December 10, 2015, he signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
Repeating the cycle: mostly do away with the DOE to see what the states can do—all over again
Remember, despite the understandable impulse to abolish the DOE and its poorly handled relationship with the states, no state has ever achieved the urgently needed, year-over-year, multipoint gains on the SAT, ACT, NAEP, or international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS.
And beware: momentary gains—like the much-publicized Texas Miracle—can be misleading and may have influenced the drafting of NCLB. Momentary improvements that persist beyond a single testing cycle tend to be a cause for hope and celebration, but likewise tend to be short-lived, eventually slipping back within the margin of error. U.S. K–12 education does not need fleeting, marginal gains; it demands sustained, significant, cumulative multipoint advances. Without this level of progress, how can U.S. student performance ever recover?
No sign of it. For decades since the inception of the existing DOE hub, there has been abject failure to dramatically—or even slightly—increase nationwide K–12 student performance, as exposed by hard numbers such as NAEP assessments.
The nationwide K-12 penalty is clear: K-12 graduates, by the tens of millions, are subjected to greater hardship and socioeconomic risk, along with their progeny. This demographic blow of such magnitude weakens all aspects of the nation, including its trades, colleges, and mega factories.
The elephant in the room
Some states consistently outperform others in K–12 education. While state leaders may credit their policies, the reality is that high-performing states often reflect populations with a strong cultural emphasis on education. The fact is that even within these high-performing states, low-performing schools persist.
For U.S. student performance to be globally competitive, every high-performing K–12 school must achieve substantially better results than it does today—and every low-performing school must rapidly improve until its outcomes begin to overlap with those of higher-performing schools.
As a matter of writer’s discretion within this website, the commonly recognized abbreviation “DOE” is used to refer to the U.S. Department of Education—rather than the official “ED”—despite “DOE” also being the abbreviation for the Department of Energy.
Key code 178, 179, 188