President Donald Trump says he is preparing an executive order to shutter the Department of Education. He talked about abolishing the department throughout his campaign. But this idea is hardly a new one: it has been a part of conservative Republican orthodoxy since 1980, when candidate Ronald Reagan promised to close the newly opened department.
But the idea of eliminating the Department of Education—and any federal control over education—is even older than that. The history goes back all the way to the Civil War and to America’s foundational struggle over slavery, citizenship, and federalism.
America’s first federal Department of Education was also its most short-lived. Signed into law in 1867 after the Civil War by president Andrew Johnson, it was demoted by Congress the very next year into a relatively obscure office, not to emerge again until president Carter recreated the department 109 years later.
Although the term diversity, equity, and inclusion didn’t exist back then, the objections to that original department mirror the current right-wing Republican arguments against DEI. That first Department of Education was in fact the brainchild of Northern abolitionists and universal-school advocates to educate “freedmen”—formerly enslaved people—in the South.
At the time, none of the formerly Confederate states permitted schooling for Black people, and all of them objected to this new Department of Education on the grounds of “federal over-reach,” which was a euphemism for their horror at the idea of educating the formerly enslaved people that constituted nearly 40% of the southern population.
Proposals for a centralized federal education department began in the late 1830s with the rise of the Common School movement. The Common School movement called for free, universal, public education for all children, regardless of race, class, or economic status. It endorsed a standardized curriculum across the country, and championed moral and civic education in order to assimilate immigrants and people of color.
The Yale-educated lawyer Henry Barnard, who was to become the first head of the Department of Education, wrote in the report of the Commissioners of Common Schools in Connecticut in 1839, that “the object of the common school system is to give every child such instruction as is indispensable for the performance of his duties as a man and as a citizen.” Citizenship was a core curriculum. The common school movement also advocated for the right of girls to attend public schools—the first co-educational high school in America only opened in 1840—which became widespread by the 1870s.
It was the North’s Civil War victory which propelled the creation of the Department of Education. Northern legislators and educators believed that it was the superior education of young men in the North—and the lack of widespread education in the South—that had helped win the war. “Who can doubt,” the Connecticut churchman and educator, B.G. Northrop, wrote in the journal of the American Institute of Instruction in1865, “that had a national Bureau of Education been established fifty years ago…this terrible Rebellion would have been averted.”
The idea of this new Department of Education was that while the South had freed enslaved people, only education could complete their liberation.
The bill for the Department of Education was introduced by Ohio Congressman and later president James A. Garfield in 1866 and simply said the department was responsible for “collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the conditions and progress of education in the several States and Territories.” The purpose of this collection, it said, was “the establishment and maintenance of efficient school systems,” and to “promote the cause of education throughout the country.”
Innocuous enough. The legislators knew that if they endorsed the idea of federal control of schools in the South and the schooling of formerly enslaved people, the bill would never have passed.
That first Department of Education had four employees and a budget of $15,000.
Even so, the move to abolish the new agency began within months of its creation. The arguments were familiar: too big, too expensive, unnecessary, and an unconstitutional use of federal authority. But there were more, well, undisguised arguments. “Those thousands of lazy, idle Negroes,” said New York Congressman Fernando Wood, “people who do not work, people who will not work, people who are supported out of the public Treasury by appropriations of Congress.” Wood was a New York city real estate speculator and former mayor of New York whose terms were characterized by authoritarian rule and political corruption.
In 1867, the House voted to completely eliminate the new department, but the Senate settled on a compromise measure that demoted the agency from a cabinet department to a sub-cabinet bureau in the Department of the Interior. It was led initially by Barnard, who was considered an inept administrator. He was succeeded by John Eaton, a Civil War veteran who had served as superintendent of the army’s freedmen department, which had also sought to establish schools for Black Americans. The bureau remained an obscure one, and even though Easton chided Congress and the nation’s educators for unequal treatment of Black and white students, the southern states did not heed his call.
“By the end of Eaton’s term as commissioner,” wrote scholar Donald R. Warren in his history of the early department, “it was clear that in the critical matter of educational policy, the South and the past were winning the Civil War.” Where there was public education, separate and unequal schools would become the norm, both for children of color and for immigrants. That only began to change with Brown v. Board of Education in 1955.
In 1976, presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, whose first public office in Georgia was a county school commissioner, campaigned for the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Education which would consolidate, streamline, and elevate educational programs through the government. He believed the federal government needed to be a better partner with the states, where most of education spending resided. In 1979, President Carter and Congress established the Department of Education. Carter proclaimed the importance of education to the nation’s security and its future, and sought to increase the accountability of federal education programs to the president. The act creating the department also cited part of its mission this way: “To strengthen the Federal commitment to ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual.”
Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign—whose slogan was, yes, “Let’s Make America Great Again”—called for the dismantlement of the new Department of Education. The Republican Party platform endorsed the abolishment of the department arguing that the “crazy quilt of wasteful [federal] programs” should be replaced by block grants to the states. Even during his early years as a TV and radio presenter, Reagan had been opposed to the civil rights movement. As a candidate, Reagan often used “unmistakable dog whistle(s) to white bigots,” writes Max Boot in his masterful new biography of the 40th president. Reagan also saw federal involvement in education as an engine of affirmative action, and he popularized the concept of so-called reverse discrimination.
Reagan also opposed what he called “forced busing” to achieve racial integration in schools, calling it a “social experiment that failed.” His administration intervened in court cases to spur the dismantling of busing plans. In 1982, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights accused the Reagan Administration of deliberately undermining the federal goal of school desegregation. They called it “a retreat from the nation’s long held goal of equality in educational opportunity.” The head of the commission, Clarence Pendleton, said Reagan’s policies “will lead us back to a separate-but-equal society.”
In his 1982 State of the Union address, Reagan said, “The budget plan I submit to you on Feb. 8 will realize major savings by dismantling the Department of Education.” But Reagan faced a Democratic House of Representatives that objected, and by 1984, the GOP had abandoned its call for abolishing the department. That could well have ended the conservative opposition to the Department of Education.
But the desire to end the department became a Republican dream that would not die.
Almost every Republican presidential candidate paid some lip-service to this idea, but the movement and strategy to end the Department of Education was re-energized by Project 2025. Project 2025 not only called for the end of the department, it called for the elimination of Head Start and Title I. Head Start was created in 1965 as Part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and over its history it has helped nearly 40 million families with food and healthcare for children living in poverty. Project 2025 dismissed it as a program “fraught with scandal and abuse.”
Title I provides $17 billion in funding for schools where at least 40% of the students come from low-income families. This includes schools that serve 200,000 homeless children, 1 million children with disabilities, and 2 million students with limited English proficiency. Yes, the Project 2025 architects would turn Title 1 grants to block grants for each state, but then suggests that Title 1 funding would be phased out entirely over ten years. Project 2025 also recommends rescinding federal civil rights protections for LBGTQ students, reducing funding for students with disabilities, and doing away with federal student debt forgiveness programs. All of these programs disproportionately affect students of color.
During his presidential campaign, Trump said the Department of Education was infiltrated by “radicals, zealots and Marxists.” He talked about its “radical woke agenda” and criticized the teaching of “critical race theory.” He disparaged public schools for “teaching white children to be ashamed of themselves and their country.”
Since taking office, Trump has worked to fulfil his campaign promises and enact some of Project 2025’s education-related policies. Early on, he scrapped some protections for LGBTQ students. Trump has also said that the first task of his nominee to head the department, Linda McMahon, the former head of Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment, is “to put herself out of a job.”
Nine days into his new term, in a January 29, 2025 executive order entitled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” Trump states that education about “White Privilege” or “unconscious bias” “actually promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity.”
The order prohibits any “ideology” making “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race, color, sex, or national origin, bear responsibility for, should feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of, should be discriminated against, blamed, or stereotyped for, or should receive adverse treatment because of actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin, in which the individual played no part.”
Trump’s executive order and his efforts to end the Department of Education seem designed to take us backward, not forward.
The post A Brief History of Efforts to End the Department of Education appeared first on TIME.
