The Diocese of Gary vs. the Department of Education: A comparison

In June 2024, the Dean and Barbara White Family Foundation made the largest single investment in PreK-12 education in history. The non-profit promised to donate $150 million to the Big Shoulders Fund over the next ten years to support a network of Catholic schools in northwest Indiana that is “high-quality, data-driven,” and “outcome-focused.”

The Bishop of Gary, Robert J. McClory, who also oversaw the establishment of an independent endowment for schools within The Catholic Foundation for Northwest Indiana, had every reason to characterize these initiatives as “truly historic and transformative.”

I guarantee that the per pupil impact of those invested dollars will far exceed what the United States Department of Education (ED) accomplished with its $268-billion budget last fiscal year. The shared faith of those northwest Indiana schools, their love of students, their parents’ involvement, and the advantage of local oversight and control will ensure the maximum value of every penny spent.

In contrast, it’s painful to look back on how miserably both liberal and conservative attempts to effect any significant change through the Department of Education have failed.

The original purpose of the department, established by President Andrew Jackson in 1867, was simply to disseminate sound educational information to local and state-level authorities. After being demoted from its cabinet-level stature, the late Jimmy Carter proposed the reestablishment of the Department in 1978, though his bill passed by only a slim margin of 210-206 in late 1979. Ronald Regan campaigned on a platform to abolish the department, but the publication of A Nation at Risk eventually breathed new life into it and led to an ambitious implementation of the National Education Goals, the lasting effects of which are nil.

Well before envisioning what a “school system” might look like, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington were convinced that education was essential to the budding republic if its citizens had any hope of self-governance. Jefferson was particularly convinced that tyranny would ensue if education were left unattended to. The concern he and his fellow framers shared was not so much that young people wouldn’t be smart enough to run the country, but that they wouldn’t be virtuous enough to dedicate themselves to serving it.

If Jefferson could walk down the halls and sit in the classrooms of those northwest Indiana schools, I am pretty sure he would advise overhauling, if not eliminating, the Department of Education. He knew that determining the best means of informing the citizens’ discretion would require no less liberty than the liberty education itself was aimed at. In other words, only local communities—not the federal government—could freely and effectively deliberate how to provide a proper education and determine the institutional structures to implement it. Despite his anti-Catholic leanings, Jefferson would have been impressed with northwest Indiana.

In fact, if we study the framers’ thinking on education and their expectations of the federal government’s role in it, the ineffectiveness of relying on a cabinet-level department to increase learning outcomes is entirely obvious. Charter schools, voucher programs, religious institutions, the homeschooling movement, and a host of other alternatives show that outcomes promoting liberty are best achieved only when they are chosen freely. If liberty is the end, it is also the means.

That is why the Northwest Ordinance (1787) employed reserved language in declaring that “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” At the same time, the Ordinance was not without mandates. A portion of the proceeds from land sales was to be allotted to townships, which, in turn, were required to reserve a section therein for public schools. This measure helped ensure that educational resources would be sufficient for growing communities. John Adams similarly secured a provision for education at public expense in his contribution to the drafting of the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780.

But we don’t want to understand “public” here to necessarily mean “federal” or even “governmental.” It rather means that, insofar as education was foundational to ensuring the promotion and protection of the common good, every citizen would contribute to ensuring a sound fiscal footing for schools.

Thus, the young republic’s desire to generate revenue for schools is unquestionable. But foisting curricula upon those schools and engineering equal outcomes—let alone requiring them to design LGBTQ-inclusive learning modules—was the furthest thing from its mind. It took almost two centuries before the growing dismay at diminishing outcomes led to the standards-based reform instigated by “A Nation at Risk” in 1983. The report emerged during the early battles of the culture war, and, to a large degree, was itself responsible for the intensity of that war. While nothing in the report was immune from intense scrutiny, less attention was paid to the more general question of whether the federal government should be involved in the first place and to what extent.

One thing is clear: serious leadership is needed to inspire radical change in schools and universities across the nation, but we are far more likely to find that kind of leadership in northwest Indiana than we are at the Department of Education (though that is changing as I write this). President Trump’s former Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, said as much in an op-ed in The Free Press. “Having spent four years on the inside,” she writes, “struggling to get the department’s bureaucracy to make even the smallest changes to put the needs of students first, I can say conclusively that American students will be better off without.”

Whether abolished, merged, or massively overhauled, ED won’t budge without a fight. This was evident in the chaotic attempt of democratic lawmakers to enter the Department of Education building on February 7^th. Ideologues know well that their last grip on power is indeed the most powerful, for whoever controls education controls the future of the nation. Jefferson, Adams, and Washington knew that, but the reason they considered it important was that education was the way of instilling wise and virtuous citizenship for free, self-government. They also knew Aristotle’s teaching that the very purpose of politics is to foster virtue in its citizens.

The problem is that practically no one serving in the Department of Education under the last administration believed wisdom or virtue to be the ultimate purpose of either education or politics. I am willing to bet that wisdom and virtue are the very reason for which Catholic schools in northwest Indiana exist in the first place.

The results—not the money—will show that.