Toward a New Educational Federalism

Editor's Note

The goal of the destructive Left is revolutionary: to tear down the American regime and replace it with a new one founded on a new conception of justice. In order to accomplish this, the destructive Left must convince large swathes of Americans that the old conception of justice is flawed, that the regime in which they were raised is evil and must be supplanted. For decades, the Department of Education (ED) has been one of the chief tools of this revolution, enforcing first liberal and then woke orthodoxy in schools across the country.

In a recent essay, Pavlos Papadopoulos argued that conservatives must abandon the idea of “value-free” education and use ED to set forth a positive vision for American education. Here, Scott Yenor argues that this new vision must extend not just to the substance but to the forms of U.S. K-12 education. Under Republican leadership, Yenor suggests, ED must become a counterbalance to the educational infrastructure set up by the destructive Left, proposing and implementing new models of schooling better suited to the needs of our republic. This is the third installment in Educating for Virtue, a series of essays on the potential for a conservative agenda at ED in a Republican administration.

Conservatives have long hoped to abolish the United States Department of Education (ED) both to restore a healthy vision of American federalism and improve education itself. “We’re going to end education coming out of Washington D.C.,” said President Donald Trump in a 2023 campaign video. “We’re going to close it up — all those buildings … and people that in many cases hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the states.” Education is, after all, the quintessential state and local function. People often move to the suburbs or to different states for “good schools.” During Covid, citizens also fled locked-down blue state schools for red states such as Florida and Arizona, which remained relatively open. 

The desire to eliminate ED is understandable. The department, established as a pay-off to the teacher’s unions in 1979, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the education establishment. The Biden administration prioritized Covid funds to school districts that adopted equity plans. ED monies are used to hire social workers, incentivize the adoption of woke curricula, sue school districts or universities for failing to adhere to the trans agenda, and more. Ending the department means robbing corrupt and incompetent educrats of their safest space — and it might have the ripple effect of ending the left-wing ratchet in state departments of education. 

Yet there are reasons for caution. Republicans have tried to eliminate ED in 1980 and 1994, times when the political winds were quite propitious to get the job done. Those efforts failed, proving that, as President Reagan once said, “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Part of the reason bureaus appear immortal is that Congress has passed many education laws, which need to be administered somehow.

Abolishing ED would not end the national role in education. Plans to abolish ED imagine, in the words of Project 2025, that, upon abolition, it would be necessary to “redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government.” Data collection would move to the Census Bureau. Adult education programs to the Department of Labor. Student loan oversight for higher education to a new bureau within the Department of Treasury. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights activity would be transferred to the Department of Justice.

On the deepest level, the desire to abolish ED reflects a decisive strategic weakness in the Right’s education agenda: we oppose the Left’s equity and diversity agenda, but we hardly know what we want as an alternative. The Left has a corrupt, anti-civilizational, almost Maoist conception of woke education that it promotes through ED, in state departments of education, in teacher preparation programs, and in a thousand other places. However, since the Right refrains from promoting a substantive vision for American education, its political agenda is limited to seeking to ban Leftist practices, abolish Leftist agencies, promote school choice, and aspire to institutional neutrality in education. Absent a political vision for education, we embrace an incoherent demand that education cease being political. 

School Choice Is Not Enough

A generation ago, President George W. Bush feinted toward using ED’s power to accomplish an agenda. The watchwords of the Bush reforms were testing, accountability, and standards, but the education establishment absorbed and coopted these merely formal goals. The accountability movement died a quiet death. Its apolitical vision had no chance against an anti-racist, multicultural Left that knew what it wanted. 

Today, educational choice has replaced accountability as the conservative goal in education policy. School choice allows more students to flee failing, ideological, disorderly public schools. It is based on a workable, indirect mode of accountability (dissatisfied parents can take their money elsewhere, while excellent schools will attract parents). Parents, not school districts, should make decisions about where students should attend school. The freedom of charter schools should be restored or expanded. Title I funding to school districts (more than $20 billion in aid to poor districts) could be conditioned on the adoption of robust school choice programs. Through this, red school districts in blue states could expand choice. Federal money could incubate alternative schooling options in rural areas. Aid to people with disabilities could be put in the form of Education Savings Accounts (à la Arizona) rather than administered through school districts. Ditto for families on military bases or on tribal lands or under the jurisdiction of Washington D.C. The conservative and libertarian policy establishment has school choice covered.

School choice is not enough, however, as I argue in detail elsewhere. Getting something like 30 percent of students in charter schools, private schools and homeschooling would be a heavy lift. Even if more students use school choice options, the public system will draw lots of students. We have school choice in higher education, effectively, and that has not brought with it excellence or conservative results. Systemically, K-12 is connected to undergraduate and professional schooling through policy and a system of honor.

As detailed in Frederick Rudolph’s Curriculum, the adoption more than a century ago of a progressive higher education system dictated corresponding changes in K-12 education. Colleges and universities admit students whose work they could recognize. This demanded a standardization among American high schools, which had to offer “Carnegie Units” to help their students qualify for admission. Certified teachers were needed to deliver such classes. Professional schools made demands on colleges and undergraduate programs as well. If anything, the status of K-12 schools as pipelines to college has only been cemented in the years since these changes occurred. Thus, schools of choice are still shaped by the quite uniform demands arising from the necessary connection to the higher education system. 

The greatest failure of the conservative education establishment, however, is that the Right has no blueprint for an American school or school system or institution of higher education. Conservatives have adopted the progressive K-12 model of education (e.g., big schools, students divided up by grades, bells to mark school hours, certified teachers, college advisors, sexual integration), just as conservatives have accepted the fundamental attributes of the higher education system (e.g., academic departments, the division between majors and general education, the need for PhDs to deliver higher education, professional education follows from undergraduate education). 

If the Right is going to rethink this system at a national scale, it will be necessary to use ED, or at least something very much like it.

Federalism Plus

Conservatives are caught between two stools. On one hand, conservatives aim to restore or maintain state authority in education. When states are allowed to be different, federalism can bring discipline to state systems just as the ability of parents to move to a different school district brings discipline to local school districts. National aid to poorly performing school districts has, however, prevented districts and states from being disciplined by failure and losses. 

On the other hand, since education is inherently political, relying solely on federalism means failing to offer a substantive vision. Just as the Left used ED to nudge and coerce states to adopt variations of their agenda in state K-12 schools and in higher education, the Right must develop a vision for American education toward which it will nudge state education establishments and school districts. Anything less is political malpractice. But this presupposes that the Right has a vision. 

States have much more freedom to be different from one another in K-12 than they have in higher education. This is so in part because higher education accreditors demand conformity to supposed best practices and in part because university professors and administrators are drawn from a nationwide pool of PhDs in their respective fields of study. 

The mantra for conservative education reform must be destroy and rebuild. ED should end monopolistic practices and help restore genuine diversity in higher education. Only hiring PhDs is a monopolistic practice. Ending accreditation would be better than reforming it. ED administers student loan programs, for instance, and such monies should be used to leverage meaningful reforms from universities and colleges. Institutions that violate important constitutional rights (e.g., free speech, equal treatment under the law, discrimination in hiring) should not only be prohibited from receiving student loan monies for a time, but they should be prevented from getting federal grants of any kind. 

The demographic cliff looms in higher education, just as public confidence in higher education is at its worst point ever. The number of students enrolled has dropped from more than 18 million in 2010 to 15.4 million in 2024. Colleges are shuttering or trimming programs to remain viable. ED could provide indispensable help to states in this situation, such as guidance on which programs should be cut from universities. If left to themselves, colleges and universities will simply make economic decisions. Instead, ED could help schools make decisions informed by the public interest and a conservative vision and loosen the regulatory load in civil rights and other areas so that colleges and universities could drop administrators. Ending federal subsidies for ideological forms of education is indispensable to higher education reform.

In order to achieve these goals, ED must become the conservative think tank for education. Part of this think-tankery would involve destroying and stigmatizing America’s current national obsession with equity in education. ED must help states and school districts, through studies, data, and public relations, identify how obsession with equity compromises standards, excellence, and American citizenship. Under the next Republican administration, ED must become the ideological counterbalance to the Left’s schools of education.

A New Model for American Schools

Conservatives must then leverage ED’s power to promote new models of education within the context of competitive federalism. ED should use grant money and curriculum development funds to develop several model school proposals and then use its funds and moral authority to promote these models across the country.

A dedication to new models means revisiting the substance, form, and goals born of our progressive education establishment. Americans have been stuck with sexually integrated, equity-obsessed K-12 public schools, four-year undergraduate courses of study, and then professional schools for more than a century. This model does not produce what America needs effectively or efficiently. Our system at a minimum must produce (1) students with a baseline of literacy and numeracy; (2) students with an appreciation for our civilizational and national heritage; (3) students with the talent and training for scientific studies and professional school; and (4) a sufficient number of students with basic workforce training. 

The resources of the Education Department should be used to produce multiple varieties of model schools and schooling systems to achieve these goals. All the models would begin with an appreciation of the uniqueness and heights of Western civilization and the American regime and would emphasize the foundations of all learning in numeracy, literacy, and geographic knowledge. But all would point students to different destinies for the rest of their lives. 

In Germany, for instance, all students attend elementary school (Grundschule). After that, students take an aptitude-intelligence test around age 10 to certify their basic literacy, foreign language skills, numeracy, and understanding of civilization and to help parents and teachers choose what path is best for particular students. This test points students to different brands of higher schooling. Some students attend trade schools (Hauptschule) in preparation for entering workforce and for apprenticeships at age 16 if they desire. Other students attend gymnasium, a school that offers something akin to a college general education; gymnasium ends with the Allgemeine Hochschulreife, which allows students to enter professional schools at age 18. Other students attend schools that combine the language work of gymnasium with the workforce emphasis of trade schools (Realschule). 

I do not insist on the specifics of the German system. Some model school proposals could segregate on the basis of sex. Others could emphasize science. Others yet, job preparation for business. All in all, Americans might just need fewer hours and years in school. German medical doctors begin residency at age 24 or 25, while American doctors wait four more years. The American education establishment has been obsessed with equity and group quotas at the expense of standards for more than three decades. The German system, in contrast, defends standards instead of processes and credentials — it uses high-stakes exit exams in schools, it has serious tracking, it teaches foreign languages, it connects students to jobs and employers. A reconfigured ED must develop a substantive vision of education that ignores and transcends the equity regime and then nudges states or school districts to accept its strictures. 

This “federalism plus” vision for ED will help to destroy and stigmatize our decadent education monopolies while offering substantive models for American education within the proper context of federalism. It fits our traditions and our needs.