History of Education Quarterly has published an excellent forum on the history of the U.S. Department of Education. On BlueSky, Jack Schneider of the University of Massachusetts posted non-paywalled links to each of the articles, and hopefully those links will also work here. (If not, these should be available from academic libraries).
The titles themselves reflect the scope – and historic necessity – of the work currently being dismantled.
Camille Walsh's Necessary but Not Sufficient: USDOE and Title I Funding
Michael Purdy's To Right a Wrong: The Necessity of the Department of Education for School Desegregation and Educational Equity
Mahasan Offutt-Chaney's “Common Sense School Discipline,” Repurposing Civil Rights Era Policy, and the End of Liberal Order
Laura K. Muñoz's The Fear of Bilingual Superpowers
Roger L. Geiger's Higher Education and the Department of Education
Linda Eisenmann's The Shifting Role of the US Department of Education in Title IX and Gender Equity in Higher Education
Marybeth Gasman's What the Department of Education Has Meant for Minority Serving Institutions: Struggle, Support, and SymbolismJohn R. Thelin
John Thelin's Higher Education’s Paper Trail: A Tribute to the Research Resources Provided by the United States Department of Education
Christopher Loss's How Accreditation Helped the American Public Learn to Trust Higher Education
Early efforts to expand and fund public education in the United States assumed that democracy required an educated populace who could deliberate together about shared public concerns. The Secretary of Education declared this week that children still attending school during the government shut down was proof that the Department of Education wasn't needed. Therein is evidence of the threats that the intentionally uneducated pose for democracy, as the Secretary has no idea why we had DOE (or at least pretends not to) and what we now lose in its destruction.
