What Would Schools Look Like Without a Federal Department of Education?

In the Powell Valley News for 10.2.24 a man from Kentucky describes "what education was like...before the [federal] Department of Education was established in 1980." Reading his list, I see at once that he's speaking for his Kentucky self, and he's also older than I am. By comparing memories with him, I think we can get a clearer picture of what modern education might be without a federal Department of Education.

Bottom line: in all but the very poorest areas, for which aid funds might be established, schools would be about as well funded as local people thought they needed to be. They'd lose some frills that local people think they're better off without. Funding is not, however, what makes a good school.

Here are Dave Jones' ten memories, compared and contrasted with mine. He's talking about a school in Kentucky in the 1950s. I'm talking about a school in Virginia in the 1970s. In each case I'm condensing his words.

1. DJ: There were no school buses. Kids walked to school, or Mum drove you if the weather was bad.

PK: There were school buses. Because it was the baby boom, there were not nearly enough school buses for each child to have a seat. Three or four bodies on a seat built for two was the norm. The bus stank of already breathed, deoxygenated air, and often worse than that, as a direct consequence of everyone breathing each other's breath. One thing that probably contributed to some bus drivers' turning against children was having to clean the seats and floors where kids were sick. Kids could be motivated to do a lot of things by a rare chance to walk to or from school.

2. DJ: There was no school lunch program. You brought your lunch, or walked home. There was no free lunch for low income kids.

PK: There was a school lunch program. Some items, like hot dogs and cookies, appealed to children who asked their parents to send lunch money. Most school meals disgusted children and, if their parents sent lunch money, most of the items on most of the trays went straight into the garbage bins. I often found it difficult to eat the lunch I'd brought from home amidst the clamor and odors of the cafeteria. Subsidized lunches and milk were available for children whose parents fitted inside quite liberal guidelines. My brother and I were registered for subsidized milk, so we could have fresh cold milk with lunch, but were always supplied with our own sandwiches and fruit. After a few hours in a stuffy classroom a sandwich on dry, hard, wholemeal bread and a piece of fruit that had had the peeling cut open for eating without a knife tended to lose any appeal they'd had, so even they often went into the bins. After a few years we were informed that we could eat cafeteria lunches any time we wanted them, although that was what our health-conscious mother wanted to avoid. What would you expect children to do? I never asked for a free bowl of broccoli to replace a dried-out peanut butter sandwich, but I'd take a hot dog or a cookie if those were offered. However, after grade five I was trusted to sneak into the school library alone and enjoy a good book at lunchtime.

3. DJ: If a kid had a disability, that kid did not go to school. The students' toilet was in the basement and was not accessible.

PK: The buildings were accessible to crutch or cane users, less so to wheelchair users. Disabilities were handled on a case-by-case basis.  My brother and I were aware of having more classmates with disabilities than students in the past would have had. "Progress" meant more adaptive technology allowing more people with disabilities to participate fully in social life.

4. DJ: If a kid had a learning disorder, that kid just fell behind.

PK: That had happened. Notoriously it had happened to the beekeeper with whom my brother studied beekeeping. He was the youngest of six brothers, all self-employed professionals, and he could have done any of the jobs any of them did. Built his own house, had an impressive private library, could discuss the books...but he only ever said he was storing books for his brothers. Because, due to an injury in early childhood, he couldn't speak or swallow solid food.  So he didn't learn anything in primary school and was classified as an "ineducable moron." My generation heard "retarded" as a relatively respectful and accurate word for someone who actually had a brilliant mind, but failed to show evidence of its development during a few critical years. Anyway he made a good living "being retarded," and although it was technically welfare-cheating I've never really blamed him for it. He would have been a little younger than Mr. Jones. 

Teachers were actively learning about learning disorders. A lot of people did fall behind. People in my neighborhood still employ laborers who "can't read" because of dyslexia, have speech impediments, and other things that were allowed to derail their education. But this was visibly happening to fewer people every year. Principal Oscar Peters, whom my brother and I so deeply detested, was a hero to people like the writer known as Shalecka Boone because he advocated for funding to get "homebound tutors" to visit people like SB, who he argued had a brilliant mind despite being wheelchair-bound. (SB was closer to Mr. Jones's age; her baby sister was about my age.)

5. DJ: There was no supervised physical education, art or music in elementary schools.

PK: There were supervised physical education, art, and music in elementary school but the first two depended on the individual classroom teacher's abilities. In grades one and two the teachers would let us do one or another of those things whenever we got too wiggly for other lessons. Mrs. B. in grade three actually taught p.e. on wet days; all year she dangled the promise to let us play baseball in front of us but only on the last day of school did she get permission to do it, and most of us never got a turn at bat. I'll never forget the disappointment in grade four, which I did at a different school, where they played softball regularly and I was so far behind everyone else that I never did learn to play a game I'd been led to imagine I'd like. Mrs. B.'s idea of teaching art was teaching us to maintain tidy little pigeonholes in a cardboard box she'd built for us to store crayons, glue, and scissors in. Next year Mr. Ed. in grade four took away art time if people were unruly, although the school supplied tempera paint and coarse paper, and when we did get art class Mr. Ed. usually said we had to copy one of some big cartoons that stayed on the bulletin board all year, so he could test our progress. He showed us a movie about shading our drawings but he was unqualified to teach the skill. Miss Mean in grade five didn't try to teach art at all, but did lead us in calisthenics for a week or two in spring, during which every one of us did the exercises better than Miss Mean. Mrs. Dunce in grade six didn't try to teach art or p.e. In all grades music had its own teachers and was offered more or less regularly, though not every single week unless your parents paid for piano lessons (which started in grade two) or you made it into the Beginner Band (which started in grade five), both of which brought music into your life four days a week.

6. DJ: Third and fourth grades, and fifth and sixth grades, were in one room each and had one teacher each.

PK: Each grade from kindergarten to grade six had over 100 students divided among four classes, and each year's class assignment put different people in the same homeroom--the idea was that everybody would have been everybody's classmate for at least one year. Because promotion to the next grade depended on having learned something in the grade before, grade seven had about 150 students divided among five rooms and grade eight had about 250 divided among ten. 

7. DJ: Some kids had to miss school during January and February because they did not have good shoes or coats.

PK: In Virginia everybody had shoes and coats. Not that everybody thought they had good ones, there was plenty of room for label envy, but if adults didn't think a child was bundled up to local standards they would have brought that child a coat and ordered the child to wear it.

8. DJ: I was in an all White school. Black kids went to a separate school.

PK: Grade seven still had copies, on the back shelves, of old history books that printed the old law that White and Black children could not be required to go to the same schools. (In Virginia they could choose to go to integrated private schools, unlike in Kentucky, where Berea College was forced, under protest, to segregate the dormitories.) Gate City had had segregated schools until, early in Mr. Jones's school years, the Supreme Court had legalized integration. People had seen the financial benefit of integrating the schools and done it promptly, mostly with a good will, apart from a few teachers (mostly from the Black school, of course) who had to find different jobs.

9. DJ: There were no organized sports programs until the ninth grade, then only for boys.

PK: Oh, mercy. We already had a reputation to maintain. Team sports started with boys' football, boys' and girls' basketball, in grade seven. Track meets started in grade four. The name "Blue Devils" traces back to the Great War in the 1910s but my understanding was that Gate City adopted it, a little later, in honor of the Duke University team on which some people hoped one day to play.

10. DJ: In elementary school there was no school library, nurse, or counsellor. In high school there was a library, but no nurse or counsellor.

PK: Every school had to have a library and a nurse, but baby-boomers were saner than subsequent generations and didn't have to have counsellors until grade eight when we had some choice of which classes to take. The school I attended in grade four, in California, acquired a counsellor in the middle of the year. Apart from the day he came into class to tell everyone where to find his office, when I remember thinking he was trying to imitate Morgan Freeman's character on "The Electric Company," I never saw him and don't remember his name, but a few kids went to his office regularly because they said he was cool to hang out with. 

So. Quite a range, and plenty of schools were better funded than either of ours, and plenty were worse run. Our Adayahi seldom talked about his school memories, which were not a pleasant subject; he was a war baby, not a boomer, and grew up in a mining camp where he said the school emphasized delousing more than actual education. He remembered outhouses at schools. I think all schools were required to have water-flush toilets after about 1950. 

Would more of the luxuries seem like necessities in a United States without a federal Department of Education? Probably. Would people end up paying more school taxes on the state, city, or county level to provide the kind of luxuries they thought their schools needed? Very likely. The benefit of dismantling the DoE would be more local control over, e.g., the amount of content that was there to promote p.c. attitudes rather than teach facts and skills in the local school curricula. It would be more likely to ensure that any Gate City student who went to e.g. the University of Maryland or East Tennessee State University would feel that freshman and sophomore classes at those universities were reviews of what Gate City did in grade nine. Or, if universities were required to allow students to test out of classes when they already knew the material, our students could save a fair bit of tuition money.

Because we don't need all that funding to do things better than people at other schools, that's why.