Daniel J. Flynn, writing in National Review, assures readers that the Trump administration is right to dismember the Department of Education — that an unconstitutional bureaucracy built to pay off a teachers’ union has only ever produced illiteracy and intrusion, that the New York Times itself once opposed it on bedrock principles of local control and subsidiarity, so we should all rejoice as the wrecking ball swings.

Flynn has the story nearly right on the facts and wrong on everything that matters, which is the fusionist habit after a half century of comfort with the wreckage. The Department of Education is a bloated, feckless, meddlesome machine that has presided over a forty-year stagnation in American learning while spending a quarter-trillion dollars a year, and tearing it down is overdue — and if you think that will bring back the schoolhouse your grandparents walked to, you have not been paying attention to what your own movement dissolved while you were watching the bureaucracy grow.

Flynn’s strongest, most honest point is the one he borrows from those old Times editorials: education belongs where it is seen and touched — the town, the parish, the parent who knows the child’s name. The school board is the one institution in American life where a parent with no money and no connections can walk into a public meeting and carry the same voice as the richest man in town, and it is the first mediating institution the school-choice movement dissolved in the name of freedom. The federal department was always a vote-buy from Carter to the NEA, and it substituted a regulatory compliance apparatus for the actual work of teaching. Even the figures Flynn marshals are true enough — adult illiteracy climbing from fewer than one in a hundred to more than one in five, real per-pupil spending tripling. If the question is whether the federal department can be credited with any improvement in American education, the answer is no. Lay that concrete at the front of the argument, as the old-timers used to say, and let it set.

Now look at what the argument leaves uncounted. The movement Flynn writes for has not spent the last forty-seven years restoring local schools to local control. It has been dismantling the school board as a governing institution and replacing it with a marketplace, and it has called the transaction liberty.

A farm cooperative runs on the principle that the people who live with the consequences should govern the institution — one member, one vote. The old school board operated on the same logic. You lived in the district. Your children sat in those classrooms, or your neighbors’ children did, and you elected the board. The budget was printed in the county paper. The superintendent attended the same church. I am not describing a fantasy. I am describing the institution that once existed in nearly every county in this country, including the one I live in, and that the movement now calling for “local control” spent a generation hollowing.

What replaced it? In state after state, the school-choice agenda drained enrollment and money from the local district and redirected both to charter networks, voucher programs, and education savings accounts administered by vendors the parents will never meet. The charter board sits in a corporate office in another city. The curriculum comes from a national provider. The teacher is at-will, younger than the building, and gone by winter. The parent who once sat in the gymnasium and voted on the bus routes now walks into a website and selects, which is the verb for what you do at a store, not at a town meeting.

I traded agricultural futures for a living once, and I know what happens when you replace a visible local governance structure with a market mechanism and call it choice. The farmer went from dealing with the grain elevator down the road — owned by his neighbors, governed by a board he could see — to dealing with a terminal pricing algorithm run by a multinational that has never sent a representative to a county it could not find on a map. The price might have been better for a season. The leverage was not. The school board goes the same way: not in a single abolition, but hollowed until the institution has nothing left to govern.

And while the fusionist coalition was fighting skirmishes over federal funding and busing orders — worthy skirmishes, many of them — the actual local community that a good education requires was being hollowed from underneath by the economic orthodoxy that same coalition calls freedom. The small farmer who served on the school board lost the farm to consolidation and a commodity price set in Chicago; the factory worker who coached Little League lost the mill. The family dinner table, where a child first learns words and the discipline of listening, gave way to the second shift, the third job, the screen in every bedroom. The parish school that taught Latin and the Baltimore Catechism for a hundred years — the diocese closed it in the consolidation wave that started in the 1990s, the same wave that emptied the parish on West Street — that school wasn’t killed by the Department of Education. It was killed by a demography of extract-and-leave, by the young families who couldn’t afford to stay because the good work had gone elsewhere, by a conservatism that defended the “right to work” but never defended the right of a town to keep its children.1

This is the move the fusionists have perfected across every institution they claim to conserve. Fight the federal overreach — genuinely, sometimes courageously — while the economic order you bless as natural dissolves the local life that was supposed to fill the space once the overreach was rolled back. When you abolish the Department of Education, what gets restored is not the one-room schoolhouse run by the farmers’ cooperative; it’s a vacuum into which a different kind of abstraction rushes. Without the parish, without the stable family with the time to read, without the town that can hire a teacher and pay her in something more than well-wishes, “local control” becomes a charter chain run by a foundation in Seattle, or a curriculum sold by a Pearson subsidiary, or a YouTube playlist curated by no one. You dismantled the mediating institution and then discovered, a generation later, that all that was left between the child and the state was the market. That is not an accident of history. It is what your fusion cost.

The deepest irony is that the party calling for this conversion is the party that once meant something by local conservatism. Local conservatism at its honest best meant the school board and the county fair and the Sunday school and the VFW — the mediating institutions between the family and the state, the institutions that taught a child what a community was by making her live inside one. The school board was among those institutions. It answered to the people on the block. The voucher answers to the market, and the market does not know your child’s name.

Let me be plain, because my own side needs to hear it: the Department of Education was never the cause of what went wrong; it was the symptom that rushed in when the underlying tissue had already torn. The Carter-era liberals built the department because the local community that used to educate was coming apart, and they mistook the federal treasury for a replacement — a liberal error I will correct another day, and have, because it is the mirror image of the same failure to see that a community cannot be replaced by a check. But the movement that now congratulates itself for killing the department is the movement that helped tear the tissue in the first place, and that has spent the decades since pretending the tear was someone else’s fault.

Flynn cites Roger Williams’s 1978 NR article, with its catalogue of HEW overreach — the father-son bans, the busing orders — and those intrusions were real and meddlesome. But notice what Williams himself concedes: the truly transformative and damaging changes were “not spectacular” enough to make the papers. He meant the quiet shift of authority from local administration to Washington. I mean the quieter shift, the one the movement still won’t name: the shift of a community’s economic life from many hands to a few distant balance sheets, which hollowed the local administration long before Washington laid a finger on it. You can’t hand the town over to the rentier and then complain that the town no longer runs its own school.

I used to trade these commodities. I know what happens when the price of corn falls below the cost of production for five years running. You lose the family farm, you lose the young family, you lose the school board member, you lose the parent who has the margin to read The Wind in the Willows at bedtime because she isn’t working the overnight shift at the gas station to cover the mortgage. That is not a story about a federal bureaucracy. It is a story about what the conservative movement decided to conserve and what it decided, by studied indifference, to let go.

Subsidiarity does not mean the federal government gets out and the market moves in. It means decisions stay where the consequences fall. A school board meets in the gymnasium. A charter network’s approval office meets in a conference room three states away. One of those is the principle Flynn invokes. The other is the same distance in a different suit.

Here in Adams County, the school district was sited deliberately halfway between Friendship and Adams — one community, two rival towns, and the compromise was negotiated locally, by people who would live with the result. The electric cooperative up the road runs on the same principle: the people who use the power elect the people who govern it. That is what a mediating institution looks like when it is working. The school-choice agenda has no answer for it, because the answer it offers does not require the gymnasium, the argument among neighbors, or the vote.

The counter-model is not a federal department, and it is not the market. It is the same answer it has always been in this column: the cooperative, the mutual, subsidiarity with an actual local institution ready to do the work. Think of the one-room schoolhouse not as a piece of nostalgia but as a legal and economic form — a school governed by a board of parents and local business owners, financed through a credit union that reinvests in the town’s infrastructure, accountable to a charter that requires all teachers to live within walking distance of the school, the same form that electrified rural America through member-owned cooperatives when the for-profit utilities said it couldn’t be done. We can educate it that way too, if we are willing to rebuild the economic foundation that lets a family stay put. That is the distributed answer that centralizes nothing: not the Department of Education, not the hedge-fund charter network, not the state curriculum mandate — a thousand small schools governed by the people who sit in their pews and their union halls, paid for by an economy that keeps the parents home at night.

You cannot abolish the Department of Education and call it a restoration. There is nothing left to restore until you restore the community that the department was a poor replacement for. The conservative movement spent fifty years dismantling that community for quarterly returns and called it liberty. The empty school on West Street is the bill, and it came due long before the bureaucrats started packing their boxes.

Footnotes

  1. The parish school closed in the Diocese of La Crosse’s consolidation; the small frame St. Leo’s parish in Friendship, founded in 1884, was itself later merged into a larger regional parish as part of that same thinning. ↩