Throughline - The First Department of Education

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

Whose job is it to educate Americans? Congress created the first Department of Education just after the Civil War as a way to help reunify a broken country. A year later, it was basically shut down. But the story of that first department's birth – and death – set the stage for everything that's come since.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Ira Glass with This American Life. Each week on our show, we choose a theme, tell different stories on that theme. I'm just going to stop right there. You're listening to an NPR podcast, chances are you know our show. So instead, I'm going to tell you, we've just been on a run of really good shows lately.

Some big epic emotional stories, some weird funny stuff too. Download us, This American Life. You've asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection. In my childhood, a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on my mind. Hold me as I stand in the heavens. I surely would be a prophet as the Lord has shown me things that had happened before my birth. We determined to enter the house secretly. Hart got a ladder and set it against the chimney on which I ascended, and hoisting a window,

entered and came downstairs. I barred the door and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood. What you just heard was written in a pamphlet called The Confessions of Nat Turner. It was written by a white lawyer days before Turner's execution for the crime of insurrection. While scholars have debated its accuracy, what is known for sure is that over the course of an August night in 1831, Nat Turner led a revolt of enslaved black people that ended

in the killing of at least 55 white men, women, and children. It was something that white slave owners had always feared. And in its wake, slaveholding states zeroed in on one major culprit—literacy. Nat Turner knew how to read. He was deemed to be a literate slave, and he used his literacy to lead an assault against whites in Virginia. The manner in which I learned to read and write not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease. Nat Turner lived in Virginia at a time when it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read,

but he managed to learn anyway. He read the Bible, and he believed he was a prophet who would free his people. I sure live with the nonprofit. The South as a region saw education as a dangerous thing. The Black population was the majority population in a handful of states. Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama was nearly 50%, Florida was nearly 50%. The ultimate means of social control is to make sure they don't have a lot of knowledge.

— After Nat Turner's Rebellion, most of the slave-holding states passed or expanded laws to prevent enslaved people from learning to read and write. — Every southern state had some anti-literacy or anti-assemblage law, which really forbade African Americans from going to school. And that was a mechanism to control for slavery.

The last thing you want is enslaved people finding just a little bit of free time to sit around, use their literacy to say, should I be enslaved? Because there are people across this country saying otherwise? While these laws were suppressing black education in the south, reformers in the north were kicking off a national education movement. It was an uphill climb. The word education doesn't appear in the United States Constitution. The people who founded this country with names like Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster and Benjamin Rush, they were great advocates for education, of course, including its civic

function, especially its civic function. But they didn't imagine education organized at the federal level. But the Civil War changed all that. Suddenly the question of education became existential for the United States and for the formerly Confederate South. As black people were emancipated and reconstruction began, Congress created the first Department of Education. A year later it was basically shut down. The story of what happened, why it was created, and why it failed is the prologue to decades of debate over the federal government's role in education.

President Carter fulfilled one of his 1976 campaign pledges today. He signed legislation establishing a separate department of education. Mr. Reagan wants to reduce drastically. President George Bush has dominated the national debate over how schools... President Clinton signs a bill that sets national education goals. President Bush has signed into law one of the most far-reaching education goals... The Obama administration had states compete for the money... The Trump administration is withdrawing Obama-era guidelines

that encourage schools to promote their student loan. — President Trump wasted no time today announcing next steps in his bid to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. — The Department of Education, that we know, has only existed for about 50 years. Today, it oversees billions of dollars

for schools, civil rights complaints, a federal student loan program, and it's responsible for ensuring equal access to education. It's much bigger than the first department of education ever was. But the questions that drive the debates around it, about the purpose of education, who it's for, and what role, if any,

the federal government should play. They're all rooted in that very first effort. I'm Ramtin Arap-Louis. And I'm Randabdi Fatah. On this episode of Thru Line from NPR, the birth, death, and legacy of the first Department of Education. Hi, this is MK Lovell from St. George, Utah,

and you're listening to Thru Line from NPR. Thanks for making me a better American. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things and other currencies. With WISE, you can send, spend, or receive money across borders, all at a fair exchange rate, No markups or hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit wise.com. T's and C's apply.

These days there is a lot of news. It can be hard to keep up with what it means for you, your family, and your community. Consider this from NPR as a podcast that helps you make sense of the news. Six days a week, we bring you a deep dive on a story and provide the context, the backstory, and analysis you need to understand our rapidly changing world. Listen to the Consider This podcast from NPR. Hey, it's Rund.

In the latest Throughline Plus bonus episode, I'm sharing a deleted scene from one of our recent episodes. Join Throughline Plus now to listen to that and hear other behind the scenes stories in our monthly bonus episodes. Join ThruLine Plus now to listen to that and hear other behind-the-scenes stories in our monthly bonus episodes. Go to plus.npr.org slash ThruLine to find out more. Keeping up with the news can feel like a 24-hour job. Luckily, it is our job. Every hour on the NPR News Now podcast, we take the latest

most important stories happening and we package them into five-minute episodes so you can easily squeeze them in between meetings and on your way to that thing, listen to the NPR News Now podcast now. Part One. A Stick in the Dirt In the most basic terms, can you describe what education was like in the United States before the Civil War? This was a time when education was a lot more fragmentary. This is Michael Studeman. I am an assistant professor of rhetoric at Penn State University, and I studied the history of education policy in the United States

and how Americans have argued about it. In the early 1800s, there was no federal school system. There were hardly any state school systems. Schools were run by churches or untrained teachers, sometimes even the students themselves. But at their core was basic reading, math, and writing. A lot of it wouldn't be too unfamiliar. Usually students sat in rows.

A lot of the assignments they did would be very much examination and recitation driven. This was a time where pedagogy relied very heavily on shame. And so public exhibitions were a big way that evaluations happened. The most popular book at the time was the McGuffey Readers. They included famous political speeches. It collected up lots of anecdotes. Under a great tree in the woods, two boys saw a fine, large nut. Very folklore-driven curriculum. It is mine, said John, for I was the first to see it.

No, it is mine, said James, for I was the first to pick it up. A lot of what students were learning in school was not just the ABCs and the basics of mathematics. They called an older boy and asked him. This was about trying to cultivate a sort of civic culture. He took the nut and broke the shell. This half of the shell, said he, belongs to the boy who first saw the nut. And this half belongs to the boy who picked it up. There was a sense of this is about training people to be good people.

It was about moral inculcation. But this kind of education wasn't happening everywhere. Depending on where you were in the country, a one-room schoolhouse could be a law cabin. The McGuffey reader might be accompanied by a Bible. That was the situation that a lot of the reformers like Henry Barnard were responding to at the time was a sense of fragmentation. Before he was a reformer, Henry Barnard was a kid who hated the little red schoolhouse he attended in Hartford, Connecticut.

He said he was a victim of a miserable district school. Henry's father once brought him back an orange after being away at sea. An orange from a strange distant land that brought him wonder. Out there was a whole world to be discovered if he wasn't in school. When Henry was 12 in the 1820s, he hated school so much that he decided to run away with a friend. Alright, let's go. They planned to leave the following night, go to a seaport and find work as sailors.

Henry's father, having overheard their plan through an open window, told Henry the next day that he could transfer out of his school. And he did. In his new school, Henry Barnard excelled. He went to Yale at just 15 years old, was near the top of his class, and he went on a mission to change the entire education system in America. Ever since I was conscious of any purpose, the aim of my life has been to gather and disseminate knowledge.

Useful knowledge, knowledge not always available by the many, but useful to all. What happened in the antebellum era, starting in the 1830s, is figures like Horace Mann and Henry Barnard started to advocate for something called a common school system. This became known as the Common School Movement, basically free public schools in every state. Which is what today we would call a state school system. This is Jonathan Zimmerman. He teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. That is something that would bind these small little schools, mostly one room, into a system that had, for example, a shared curriculum.

Shared textbooks. A shared duration of school year. Shared requirements for teachers. into a system that had, for example, a shared curriculum, shared textbooks, a shared duration of school year, shared requirements for teachers. The idea was to create something that was common that would bind together all these disparate schools. The common school will no longer be regarded as common because it is cheap, inferior, and patronized only by the poor. Henry Barnard was in his mid-twenties when he became a state lawmaker in Connecticut in 1837. The following year, he gave a speech in support of a bill to establish a new state board for common schools. Common as the light and the air, because its blessings are open to all and enjoyed by all. There were a lot of people that said, why, why should this be a state concern at all?

This is a waste of money or, you know, it's unfairly impinging on local control. Why do we need a state system at all? But the common school movement had momentum and the bill passed. And he eventually became the secretary of their new state board of Education which of course he had advocated for. What was his basic philosophy for why these all these specific changes were necessary? What was the underlying belief that fueled him? The underlying motivation was civic. The idea was we're gonna be a republic of self-governing people, and the only way we're going to do that well or competently is if we get the skills of citizenship.

So that was the motivation. But Barnard didn't just set his sights on Connecticut. An important thing to know about Henry Barnard is that he was a Whig politician. And Whig politicians were very concerned about what they perceived as the fragmentation of American society. In the 1830s, there was growing industrialization, a growing divide between rich and poor, and more and more immigration. It's not a coincidence that the common school movement emerged in Connecticut and Massachusetts

and New England where there was a huge population of Irish immigrants coming to the United States. A degree of nativism informed this movement. They were worried about people coming to the United States that did not share the same political views, did not share the same religious beliefs because so many people coming to the country were Catholic. These were people that were in many ways anxious about democracy and about the implications of what full democracy and the enfranchisement of lots of people really meant. Education they thought was a way to unify the country.

Since Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, the country had been splitting further apart. In the north, calls for abolition were growing louder. In the south, defenders of slavery were digging in and passing laws aimed at preventing Black people from gathering or learning. But that didn't stop them. Many people would sneak out at night. They would learn from this kind of self-taught teacher, someone who was already literate in the slave community. And then they would go ahead and resume their activities in the daylight hours as if nothing

would have happened. Frederick Douglass, he learned from the mistress of his slave holder. This is Christopher Spann. I'm a historian of American education, specialized in African-American education in the 19th century. He's currently the dean of the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. So as he shares in his autobiography, there was a woman by the name of Mrs. Auld.

A white face beaming with the most kindly emotions. When Frederick Douglass was a child, she began to teach him to read. And she, deeply religious, commenced to teach me the ABC. She assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. And when Mr. Ault saw Mrs. Ault teaching Frederick Douglass how to read, he just became furious at the process and really forbade her from teaching him to read any further. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable and of no value to his master.

As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy." These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. Douglas took this as a sign that he was doing something very good for himself. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty, to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. Anything that would make a slave holder this mad

must be very good for him and must be very bad for the slave holder. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. So Douglas was determined to learn to read regardless. Knowing that he couldn't go to Mrs. Auld anymore, the wide school children who had access to school, he would follow those kids to school and ask them questions or he would meet them on their way kids to school and ask them questions or he

would meet them on their way home from school and ask them questions. Almost little challenge games. I bet I could read this passage better than you. I bet I could write this letter better than you. I bet I could spell this word better than you. And so the side of a barn became the chalkboard. A stick in the dirt became a pencil. And rote memorization and competition tests allowed him to gain the acquisitions of reading and writing in ways that others simply would not. Douglass became so literate that he literally wrote his own path to freedom, that when he stepped on the train to escape from slavery, he wrote

himself a path that allowed him to escape. And that's how he made his way out of Maryland and into the Northeast and eventually landing in a place like Massachusetts. Douglas got to Massachusetts in 1838, the same year that Northern school reformer Henry Barnard was appointed to lead the brand new school board in neighboring Connecticut. And soon, Barnard and Douglas would both be advocating for more federal involvement in education. Now, as the nation was beginning to develop these more structural ways for people to become knowledgeable and to become schooled in this sense, it coincided with a nation also challenging whether slavery should exist by law or not.

People like Frederick Douglass and others immediately equated knowledge and literacy and schooling with freedom and emancipation and social mobility and the very essence of what it would mean to become a citizen in society. And so they only had to look around them to see that a literate person could read contracts. A literate person could ensure that they would not only do manual labor, but they would be able to do the other kinds of labor that required a little bit more to mind than the hands. Reading was a gateway to freedom, education a way to enlighten and influence.

And when Northern troops began arriving in Alexandria, Virginia in 1861, the Black community began opening up schools there. By the time he is witnessing the Civil War, Frederick Douglass becomes one of the chief advocates for this push for education as a means of social mobility because he's living proof of it himself. The first Congress debate The first Congress debate Coming up, Congress debates the very first

Department of Education. Department of Education Department of Education Department of Education Department of Education Department of Education Department of Education You're listening to ThruLine. My name is Deborah. I'm calling from Honolulu, Hawaii, and I am totally delighted by your coverage of the

Constitutional Amendment. I'm a political scientist, and you are doing a terrific job. Thank you. Before talking to computational social scientist Sandra Matz, I asked her to spy on me. I did some snooping around your online life yesterday night, which was extremely fun to do. Our lack of digital privacy, especially in the age of AI and what we can do about it. I'm Manusha Zomorodi.

That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. The best kind of celebrity interview is one where you find out that the person who made a thing you love also thinks in a way that you love. Nothing is more foreign than when Ariel says in The Little Mermaid, I want to be where the people are. I don I want to be where the people are. I don't want to be where the people are. I just don't. I'm Rachel Martin. Listen to the Wild Card Podcast only from NPR. Part two. Shame, shame, shame.

I will not insult the intelligence of this house by waiting to prove that money paid for education is the most economical of all expenditure. It is cheaper to reduce crime than to build jails. On June 8, 1866, James Garfield, a representative from Ohio, takes the floor to make the case for something that the nation had never seen before. A national department of education. Schoolhouses are less expensive than rebellions. A tenth of our national debt expended in public education fifty years ago would have saved

us the blood and treasure of the late war. A far less sum may save our children from still greater calamity. Garfield was speaking to a congress that looked very different than it had just a few years prior. The civil war had just ended. Reconstruction had begun. Even the building was undergoing a renovation. At this point, many southern lawmakers had left or had been expelled by Congress during the Civil War and were not even in the room when Garfield spoke.

The hard work of rebuilding the country was beginning. Garfield and others argued that teachers should lead the way. School teachers are going to be the ones that are able to rebuild southern culture and rebuild our society in a way that is more cohesive. Basically, where soldiers set down their arms, school teachers need to pick up their books. And the need was urgent. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery

had just been ratified in 1865, and the 14th Amendment granting equal protection was on its way. And the greatest clamor coming from 4 million people who were enslaved in the South is this demand that they be properly educated to become citizens of this country. And it's amazing because it's not just the 4 million newly freed people that they're working with. Many white people in the South also had no schooling.

So the federal government knew they had to address this, and they did so by establishing the Freedmen's Bureau. The Bureau supported newly freed African Americans, as well as Southern white refugees who were formerly in the Confederacy. Particularly poor Southern whites, so people that did not have plantations, did not have slaves, did not have access to the money and wealth. The Bureau provided food, shelter, clothing, medical aid,

and schooling. As part of that effort, the Bureau also offered military protection against people who opposed Black education. It was always this very fine line that Congress had to walk. They wanted to say that we're promoting the cause of education. But whenever they made the case that they were directly promoting black education in schools, then it created all of these anxieties about,

oh, are you indoctrinating them? Oh, are the federal schools going to be used to train this political force in the South? At this point, the South had virtually no schools compared to the North. And James Garfield saw this as an opportunity. Since he was a teenager, he'd been deeply interested in education. So by the time he took his seat in Congress after fighting for the union in the Civil War, he was ready to take action. Congress reconvened after the Civil War, and there was a sort of flurry of proposals that it was like everybody was ready with all these plans

for like, how are we gonna do reconstruction? Let's go. Education was important for cultural reasons, and also for very practical ones. Any hope they had of a meaningful political coalition in the South depended on Black people having the right to vote and the right to participate in politics. And the radical Republicans had every intention of enfranchising Southern Black people. So things that we might consider very basic education today, knowing how to count, being

able to read and write were essential. That you can read the ballot and be able to vote for the candidate that you want to because you have enough literacy to be able to select that correctly. And so that's where Garfield steps in. Which brings us back to that June day in 1866. Garfield opens up the debate in the House by describing his vision for a federal Department

of Education. That there shall be established at the City of Washington a Department of Education for the purpose of collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several states and territories. The original goal was to try to collect information about different state systems and local ones. Garfield is basically saying that the department

would keep track of how schools were being managed and what teaching methods they were using. Then the department would present that information to every state in the union. But going into the debate, Garfield knows that he has to tread carefully. Because remember, up until this point, local communities handled their own education systems. So his position was, if we come out with a Bureau of Education that tries to impose upon the country its will, that tries to say to states, here's how you're going to educate,

people will reject that. That was his opinion. But he had a plan for that. The department would gather statistics. At this time, statistics was an emerging science But he had a plan for that. The department would gather statistics. At this time, statistics was an emerging science that Garfield fully embraced. In his view, statistics were basically like interpreting God's word in a sense. This is revealing the shape of the social world to us so that we can make very wise

political decisions. So he had a ton of faith in what could happen if schools were approached in a way that emphasized statistics. According to the census of 1860, there were 1,200,000 inhabitants in the United States over 21 years of age who could not read nor write. And 800,000 of those were American-born citizens. So his opinion was that this bureau would have the ability to create a fairly uniform national system enough to prevent future civil war and future tensions and so forth, purely

by sharing information, by making it visible what is going on in states that don't have school commitments. Garfield had a lot of faith in what this department could achieve, especially when it came to bringing Southerners back into the Union. We must pour upon them all the light of our public schools. We must make them intelligent, industrious, patriotic citizens, or they will drag us and our children down to their level.

Garfield and the radical Republicans could take a patronizing tone when it came to the South. Because this population was so uneducated, they did not share the common feelings that Northernness held, and they also lacked the intelligence to be able to discern wise political messages. And so they followed the plantation leaders into the war because they were susceptible to demagoguery. One by one, the Republicans step onto the floor to make their case for the Department of Education. Civilization is nothing more than education. Civilization is nothing more than education.

So one figure that is an interesting part of this debate is a Minnesota representative named Ignatius Donnelly. We excel the past because we have slept a wider field of observation. We possess the accumulations of a greater number of generations of workers. We are ourselves happier, wiser, better, because we know more. At this point, he is just a zealous advocate for schools. We thus strike out at one blow a large proportion of the ignorance of the South. We shame the whites into an effort to educate themselves, and we prepare, thus both classes,

for the proper exercise of the right of suffrage. In order to make education universal, what do we want? What is the crying necessity of this nation today? Another figure in the house was a man named Samuel Moulton from Illinois. Why sir? We want a head. We want a pure fountain from which a pure stream can be poured upon all the states. The kind of thrust of his argument was that we're basically proposing to do for the nation what we already did in the state of Illinois.

The very object of establishing a Bureau of Education is that these different systems may be brought together. And that is created, he argues, a sort of more cohesive culture in the state of Illinois. And it's made for a better, more effective system. We want all these school systems, all over over the land brought under one head so that they may be nationalized, vitalized, and made uniform and harmonious as far as possible. But not everyone was on board with these ideas. I am content, sir, to leave this matter of education where our fathers left it, where the history of this country has left it, to the school systems of the different towns,

cities and states. Andrew Rogers, a Democrat from New Jersey, was against creating a Department of Education. He argued that states and local jurisdictions should handle their own business. Let them carry out and regulate the system of education without interference. Remember, Southern Democrats weren't present. So it was Northerners like Rogers who were making these comments. And many of them come from school communities where local control is the ultimate form of control.

The Democrats that were left in the room pointed out that a federal education department was never written into the Constitution. And after hearing all the radical Republicans talk about just how much this new department would do to change the country, well, they didn't like the idea of handing the federal government so much power. And so they feared what the radical Republicans would end up doing if the Department of Education was established. This was going to empower the federal government to have an undue influence on what children

learned in the classroom. There is no reason or necessity for this bill at all because the education of the people will be attended to and it always has been attended to. So on one side of the issue you have people that are challenging this bureau because it's not going to do anything. They're like what are you talking about? That's not enough. On the other hand you had people that condemned this bureau for being this centralizing force that was going to make everything all,

you know, make all the schools the same and take away all of the local schools' power and so forth. The debate goes on for two days, and Garfield, the person who presented this bill, is taking the hits. And so he kind of gets attacked in two completely contradictory ways for his proposal because he's promising that it will do so much and yet what it will actually do on paper is not

a lot. But Garfield doesn't back down. The general government has no compulsory control over this matter and we propose none in this bill but we do propose this that we shall use that power propose none in this bill. But we do propose this, that we shall use that power so effective in this country, the power of letting in light on subjects and holding them up to the verdict of public opinion. Garfield is basically saying,

we're not going to force education on anyone, but we are going to shame states into doing better. force education on anyone, but we are going to shame states into doing better. We can pit different groups, different states, different populations against each other if we show them where they stand, and that will motivate them to try to do better for themselves. It would shame out of their delinquency all the delinquent states of this country. In the end, the radical Republicans prevail. Congress votes to create the Department of Education. Now the question was, was President Andrew Johnson going to sign this? He was not someone who was really friendly to the idea of public schooling as a national institution

and certainly not the education of black people in the South. But he was persuaded by people that this bureau would basically have no meaningful power. They're going to gather up facts, they're going to send them out. No meaningful influence over what schools are actually doing. It's fine. The following year, Johnson signs the bill. The first Department of Education comes into existence on March 2nd, 1867. It would be made up of one commissioner, three clerks, and a small budget of $15,000, roughly $300,000 today. Now all that was left to do

was to find the department a leader. I watched the progress of the bill through the House and Senate with the deepest interest. All the more from a presentiment that if it became a law, that you would be placed at the head of the department. I have faith that the acorn will become a thriving plant and grow into a sturdy oak under your skillful nurture.

That's coming up. That's coming up. Hi, I'm Angel from Bayonia, Colorado, and I listen to ThruLine from NPR when I'm painting houses and it makes it feel like I'm not even working at all. Part 3. A Collection of Floating Matter. I have no prejudices of my own to impose on the country. It's been my aim to bring to bear the light of past and present experience. My belief is that anything worth preserving has its roots in the past, and to make us grow, we need all the light which can be

brought to bear from every country. It made complete sense for the administration to choose Henry Barnard. After President Andrew Johnson signed the bill creating the Department of Education in March of 1867, appointing the well-known Northern school reformer Henry Barnard as commissioner made sense. By this time he was the most prominent school leader in the United States. Barnard's dream of uniting the country through education was coming true.

And he wrote to James Garfield, May you live a thousand years, and your shadow and that of your wife, never be less. But I don't believe you will ever do a work more beneficial and fruitful. And it wasn't just Barnard. His friends and colleagues wrote him, full of optimism. A new educational era has opened upon us. Pride in your promotion and confidence in

your success. It is an appointment eminently fit to be made. So much needed to give efficiency to an appropriate system of measures for the intellectual regeneration of the South. They'd promised a lot. James Garfield and Henry Barnard had essentially argued that the Department of Education would do everything from unifying the morals and citizenry of the country to encouraging the development of new schools. But Barnard had been thinking about this moment

for the last 30 years and writing about it for the last decade in his independent American Journal of Education. And he goes into it and basically he sees this role as kind of what he'd already been doing. And so Barnard continues putting out his journal. In it was everything from notes about school architecture and teacher training programs,

to information about schools in Europe and women's education. It was his entire vision for education in America. A vision that some lawmakers didn't ask for. And this becomes a point of controversy because they're like, why is he making the office's focus the aggregation and continued publication of this independently published education journal? That's a peculiar choice.

And that wasn't the only issue. We're talking about one dude, Henry Barnard, and three clerks. He didn't have a lot of help. This was not like a lucrative role by any stretch. He asked for more money. He was still paying a lot of money out of pocket. But Congress wouldn't give it to him, and he was complaining about it. One of the controversies was Barnard asked for another clerk.

Yeah, not in the budget. But there's another problem. A lot of people criticize that he was out of town a lot. He was back in Connecticut at home a lot. No one can seem to find Barnard when they need him. He did receive office space, but he was shuffled around DC from office to office to where you would have people making jokes about it. You said he occupied an office over a restaurant.

Well, is that anything against him? It is very convenient. And so there was this sense of like, what is Barnard doing? He's out of town a lot. There were a lot of concerns that he was just kind of continuing to do his own independent work and not really promote the cause of education. And James Garfield, whose bill created the Department of Education, was forced to defend it. I am not one of those who seek to pluck out the eyes of the nation.

But the pressure was mounting. What was Barnard even doing other than using the department as his own personal publishing house? And soon Garfield writes to Barnard, you've got to help me out here. An early presentation to Congress of the valuable reports, which you have so nearly ready, will enable the Friends of Education of the Department to save it from abolition. He starts preparing his report. [♪ music playing, heart beating fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, beat fast, A lot of what he included in that report was information that was sort of pulled from this journal of education he'd been publishing for the past decade or so. It was a lot.

And it was kind of random. It's mainly bizarre in how much ground it covers. More than 800 pages. I have it pulled up here. I can read like some of the topics. European observations on American schools and education. Art, education, arts, education in the District of Columbia. It's just not focused. Let me share a description from one

of the critics of the bureau that was trying to get rid of it. So a senator named Thomas Hendricks from Indiana. It is a compilation and collection together of scraps. I will not say scraps. I take that back because there's a speech in there from a member of Congress, and of course that is not scraps, but it is a collection together of floating matter. Wow. Remember, this was pitched to Congress

as we're going to gather statistics, and we're going to use these statistics to reveal what's going on. And so people were looking at this and they're just like what? Is it supposed to do exactly that will help some kids in a school somewhere? Garfield was disappointed. It was not what he had envisioned And it gave opponents of the department and even some some of its former supporters, more reason to attack it. There are several criticisms of the reports when they come out that suggest that these reports are inadequate,

that they're not covering the things that this department was charged to cover, and that it was kind of failing to meet those responsibilities. What was happening was that in many ways, they created this office as window dressing because they couldn't really do much without employees. And it was shortly after that that the whole thing comes unglued. This is but a glass eye. It has no sight in it.

It has no power. It cannot inspect the system of education anywhere in the United States. What is the Bureau of Education? It is the gathering up of these facts by a worn out man who embodies them in his report. In July of 1868, about one year after it was created, Congress demoted the Department of Education,

making it an office within the Department of Interior. Ultimately, it just sort of remains this small office to collect stats. Henry Barnard retired in 1870. He felt burned, and it was the end of his life in public service. and it was the end of his life in public service. All my experiences with wild beasts and stolid asses in an experience of 30 years did not lead me to expect what I am now receiving. But what Henry Barnard and the Department of Education had established was a federal foothold in education that never went away. As part of Southern states' readmission into the Union, they guaranteed education in their

new state constitutions. But it kicked off another era, a new battle for education in the United States. The year Barnard retired, the 15th Amendment was ratified, giving black men the right to vote. But once Reconstruction ended in 1877 and the federal troops departed the South, many southern states started enacting new laws enforcing segregation and limiting voting and access to education. Here's another sad irony. I mean the Civil War is the engine of the creation of the state school system in the south. But the end of Reconstruction is also the beginning of this massive, deeply inscribed inequality between what black and white kids receive from these school systems.

Wow. So it's like the introduction of the free public school system, but then the slow separation of the quality of that education. Precisely. Which, let's remember, lasts for a century. But even though that Department of Education was essentially reduced to just collecting stats, those stats were and are still important to understanding how well we're doing at providing education across the country and how far we've come. For example, before the Civil War, about 1 in 10 enslaved people were literate.

If you get to 1900, roughly 40 years later, we're talking about seven in ten formerly enslaved people are now illiterate. That is massive. So as a historian, I'm deeply appreciative of all the statistics that have been gathered because it allows me to tell a fuller, richer narrative as to what actually happened in that region.

As the federal government's role in education grew in the 20th and 21st centuries, so have the arguments over the role it plays in schools. A lot of this anxiety over the role of the federal government in education is there regardless of what the agency is doing. This debate speaks to something about the structure of our government and our federalist system that we have in the United States that makes the idea of a national spokesperson for education particularly controversial in ways that it has not been in other countries. Still today, I don't think it is as powerful as people ascribe it to be. Despite that, though, it is such a lightning rod. I mean, the same thing that happened in 1867 when you created

this institution. A year later, you had people trying to get rid of it. Another year later, you had people trying to get rid of it. All of these anxieties, anxieties about coming into the local classroom and usurping the parents' role. You know, all of that was there from the beginning, and now we're having the exact same debates. I think that early version of the Bureau that we saw in the 1800s is foreshadowing everything that we saw that came after. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. I'm Ramtin Adabluy. And you've been listening to Thru Line from NPR.

This episode was produced by me. And me and. Laurence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Kadiyama. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim.

Devin Kadiyama. Irene Noguchi. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Thanks to DL Blair, Luther Pearson, Justin Hicks, Cody Klasna, Ryan Muzzy, Paul Langkor, Amber Tse, Eli Blonde, Jonathan Bastion, Alison Grant, Bowie Alexander, Jason Divina-Gracia, Blaze Adler Ivanbrook, and Shonari J. Edwards for their voiceover work. Thanks also to the New York University Archives. Thank you to Johannes Durgi, Jessica Payne, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

This episode was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara. If you get a chance, check out Michael Studeman's book that's coming out soon, called Absence of National Feeling, Education Debates in the Reconstruction Congress. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org and make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify or the NPR app. That way you'll never miss an episode.

Thanks for listening.