The Department of Good Things

Our friend and colleague Jaybird hit on something a while back that has some application.

Via the Ordinary Times Commentariat:

The debate over The Department of Education generally just boils down to the name.

“The Department of Good Things has failed in its mission. We should shutter it.”

“What? Don’t you support Good Things?”

The widely debunked claim that “every education statistic has gone down since the Department of Education was established!” points to a couple of claims as to why it’s not true: High School Graduation Rates and College Degrees.

Both of those have gone up since 1979. Indisputably.

Of course, we’ve discussed the whole “people graduating without being proficient at reading or math” thing a hundred times and college graduation rates have been discussed a little less (but we’ve discussed Student Loan Forgiveness a bunch… the consensus does seem to be that the degrees aren’t worth what the students paid for them).

And we’re back to arguing over whether or not we support the idea of Good Things…therefore we should support The Department of Good Things.

This is not an education problem alone.

Dare to point out any unnecessary spending at the Department of Defense — by far the largest department of the federal government — and you self-identify as one who does not support the troops. Don’t you dare point out that mid level admin junkets to Orlando have nothing to do with beans or bullets for the grunts, you hater of puppies, Francis Scott Key lyrics, and all that is American, you. Same goes with Veterans Affairs but swap “troops” for “veterans” and you see why the second largest department of the federal government suffers from many of the same challenges as the first, plus running the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States.

Consider, if you will, our most recent American Department of Good Things, the Department of Homeland Security. Coming to the conclusion that the federal bureaucracy had some blame in the failures of 9/11, the federal bureaucracy decided to solve the problem by creating more federal bureaucracy. Stopping terrorists while the deaths of thousands of Americans and the images of burning & collapsing buildings is fresh in everyone’s mind is the perfect primordial ooze for the Department of Good Things fish to evolve, sprout legs, and proceed to stomp the earth. Thus, we have DHS, the money guzzling government chimera dedicated to the proposition that if less is more imagine how much more more could be when it comes to a Department of Good Things that can’t even secure the secretary of Homeland Security’s own purse or how to conduct civil air travel without molestation of the masses.

Indeed, it is uncouth in polite circles to even ponder on the majestic galloping unicorn of the Department of Good Things with such snark and suspicion. How dare we, the little people, not stand in dumbstruck awe as the noble and pure Department of Good Things is enshrined into law and endowed by its creator with the immortality of official United States Government bureaucracy and salute.

The history of the current Department of Education stands testament to the founding American ideal that you can’t keep a Department of Good Things down. The original version of the Department of Education started in 1867 by a soon-to-be impeached President Andrew Johnson, but was quickly stripped down by congress embroiled in trying to reintegrate a South that still was plenty rebellious to ideas like educating anyone who wasn’t white.

The idea of this new Department of Education was that while the South had freed enslaved people, only education could complete their liberation.

The bill for the Department of Education was introduced by Ohio Congressman and later president James A. Garfield in 1866 and simply said the department was responsible for “collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the conditions and progress of education in the several States and Territories.” The purpose of this collection, it said, was “the establishment and maintenance of efficient school systems,” and to “promote the cause of education throughout the country.”

Innocuous enough. The legislators knew that if they endorsed the idea of federal control of schools in the South and the schooling of formerly enslaved people, the bill would never have passed.

That first Department of Education had four employees and a budget of $15,000.

Even so, the move to abolish the new agency began within months of its creation. The arguments were familiar: too big, too expensive, unnecessary, and an unconstitutional use of federal authority. But there were more, well, undisguised arguments. “Those thousands of lazy, idle Negroes,” said New York Congressman Fernando Wood, “people who do not work, people who will not work, people who are supported out of the public Treasury by appropriations of Congress.” Wood was a New York city real estate speculator and former mayor of New York whose terms were characterized by authoritarian rule and political corruption.

In 1867, the House voted to completely eliminate the new department, but the Senate settled on a compromise measure that demoted the agency from a cabinet department to a sub-cabinet bureau in the Department of the Interior.

There it remained until President Jimmy Carter, a true believing champion of the Department of Good Things if ever there was one, got congress to establish the current Department of Education in 1979. Which dovetailed nicely with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 “Make America Great Again” campaign that called for the abolishment of the Department of Education. While winning landslide elections himself, Reagan had a Democratic congress that kept that from happening. But “Abolish the Department of Education” has been bedrock rhetoric on the political right ever since. Some of the nomenclature has changed, but the basic arguments from 1867 were the same in 1987 and will be in 2027, and beyond.

Which leaves us with the eternal tug-o-war between needing federal power to try and organize, assist, cajole, fund, enforce, and matriculate the ideals of good things between 50 different states, 16 thousand plus school districts, and a legion of local, state, and federal officials, PTAs, and advocacy groups from Facebook gossip to 501c3s. All those folks and groups all having the best ideas on the best good things and please fund those ideas and my kid over those ideas and those kids, thank you very much.

After all, there is no greater Good Thing than being “for the children” which makes the mission of the Department of Good Things become gooder and gooder. Trees don’t grow to the sky, but ideas do, always evolving and reaching for the bright horizon of better that is just over the next hill of policy/election/news events. Social media peer pressure and the current social currency of everything about your kids — and the kids themselves — being online for the world to see makes the good thing of education the perfect battlefield for the five armies of government, education, parents, politics, and policy to fight it out to the death. For the children. For the good things.

Under the marble perfection of the Department of Good Things edifice are four truths:

1) there are things only the federal government can handle
2) the fact that only the federal government can handle certain things means perpetually more federal government under the eternal occurrence of things only the federal government can handle
3) “let the government do it” is most citizens go-to for things they don’t want to deal with on the day-to-day basis
4) in a constitutional federal republic system, we, the people, have the government that reflects us for good, bad, or — in most cases — indifferent

The Department of Good Things is a necessary body for the national id to funnel actionable urges within America’s ego trying to self-govern an increasingly diverse, pluralistic country. We must have some good thing to tout, just as humans being, for the same reason we, the people, don’t want to be held to account for the bureaucratic creep that comes from losing interest after the initial cries of “do something” from the mob die down. Governing is hard. Self-governing is really hard. That’s why it hasn’t been successfully done much in recorded human history compared to kings, conquerors, and tyrants of various descriptions. Eventually any kind of democratic system yields to the tyranny of “only I can fix this mess you yourselves have caused…for the children.” America is having a live action role play of this as she approaches her semiquincentennial as a country and people in a semihotmess.

The American experiment in a free people self-governing has mostly been a success story, with plenty of dark chapters and collateral human damage when the idea that an entire nation could be a good thing if properly checked and balanced failed to adhere to our better angels. The current battle in the centuries old war over how much role the federal government should have in education or anything else, and more to the point who has the power in deciding what is and isn’t a good thing, is telling. The Department of Good Things is not only out of unicorns but never had any to begin with. Good Things the idea is too often just the skinsuit for the struggle over power and money. But we still need Good Things…

History shows what happens when the Department of Good Things is not kept on task, held to account, or honestly scrutinized for solving the problem they were created to solve. But like our education system in America, no matter how annotated or required the reading is, you can’t make anyone learn the lesson if they don’t want to. And most don’t. Cause why mess up a good thing.