The modern U.S. Department of Education was established by President Jimmy Carter, who signed it into law in October 1979. However, the country’s first federal education department, though short-lived, was created over a century earlier, in 1867, during the presidency of Andrew Johnson.
With the support of abolitionists in the years following the Civil War, Ohio Representative (and future president) James A. Garfield introduced the bill to form what became the U.S. Department of Education. President Johnson was ambivalent about it, at best and it lasted only a year before Congress demoted it to an office in the Department of the Interior. It wasn’t re-established as a department for another 111 years.
Both the rise and short-lived nature of the first federal Department of Education were fueled largely by the politics surrounding Reconstruction efforts to rebuild the South after the war, which included educating formerly enslaved people, says Adam Laats, professor of education and history at Binghamton University in New York.
“You can’t overestimate how inflammatory it was for former Confederate leaders to have a federal Department of Education because they equated ‘federal’ with Reconstruction,” Laats says.
Education in the South
During the Civil War, Confederate laws in many states and towns prohibited schooling for currently and formerly enslaved people, Laats says. That started to change with the Union’s victory, he says, but the federal government’s support of their education incensed former Confederate leaders.
After the war, literacy rates were low—especially in the South and poorer states, says Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Only about 10 percent of enslaved people were literate, which helped inspire the building of schools in the South, including for its Black population.
“The South had also been decimated by the Civil War in ways the North hadn’t been,” Zimmerman says. “So it makes sense that illiteracy would be extremely high, including in the South.”
Federal Education Department Is Born
Meanwhile, the common school movement in the North had been underway since the 1830s. Led by Horace Mann, who advocated for a free and universal schooling system funded by the state, the movement reformed public schooling in Massachusetts, and other states gradually adopted its model. Though these schools were segregated by race and sometimes gender, Laats says, the reform effort called for changes that allowed for universal education for any child.
After the North won the Civil War in 1865, “[Education] was seen by victorious Union leaders as key to their victory,” Laats says. “Therefore, winning the war means this is how the government should be—it should include an organization of education because that’s one of the Union’s strengths.”
Backed by fellow abolitionists, Garfield introduced the bill that formed the federal education department. President Andrew Johnson, already an unpopular leader, agreed to the idea, though he didn’t staunchly advocate for it. He had allegedly been told that the department would yield little power and would serve more as an “empty gesture” that would appease Republicans calling for its establishment, Laats says.
The first Department of Education was tasked with “collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several States and territories,” including at schools for newly emancipated African American children. It had only four employees: three clerks and its commissioner, Henry Barnard, a well-known education reformer and a leading figure in the common school movement. Barnard had established a state school board in Connecticut in the late 1830s.
The federal education department, which ran on a small budget, followed a similar model to the state-run departments, which had seen success in collecting statistics, primarily student attendance and tax data, says Laats.
Department Dissolved
Many of the department’s critics associated it with ongoing efforts to educate formerly enslaved people, which didn’t sit well with many in the South, but also in the North. Beyond race, though, there were other factors at play, Zimmerman says.
“In fairness, the critics weren’t wrong when they said that up until that point, the federal government had almost no involvement in education whatsoever,” Zimmerman says, albeit for minor laws and indirect engagements. Its creation, in that sense, was a “radical move,” he adds.
After Congress proposed dissolving the department in 1868, the Hartford Daily Courant published an editorial outlining the merits of keeping it. In addition to providing information that could support efforts to educate the formerly enslaved, the newspaper argued, the data collected by the department would allow the federal government to compare the success of school systems in different states, and could help showcase to other countries the United States’ willingness to invest in its public schooling system.
“As soon as [former Confederate leaders] get their political influence back," Laats says, "it’s one of their first targets.” The Department of Education was then demoted to an office—and would remain so for decades.
A Modern Department of Education
Until the mid-1900s, the Office of Education—at one point renamed the Bureau of Education—played a similar information-gathering role as the original department had imagined, Zimmerman says. But that role expanded with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
“That’s really the first big infusion of federal dollars into day-to-day classroom and school activity,” Zimmerman says. Before then, Congress had only passed smaller, more targeted legislative acts that impacted education. For example, the National Defense Education Act (1958), which was introduced in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, gave increased aid and funding for science education.
As the Office of Education continued to expand, President Carter signed a 1979 bill that re-established a federal education department. It began operating in May 1980, yet controversy around it remained in the years that followed. For example, President Ronald Reagan had shared his plans to dismantle the department.
“By eliminating the Department of Education less than two years after it was created,” Reagan said in 1981, “we cannot only reduce the budget but ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children.”
Ultimately, Reagan abandoned the move, citing a lack of congressional support.
