Education reform will fail without tackling ‘bloated’ National Education Association, warns teacher

Despite praise for the Trump administration’s goal to dismantle the Department of Education, at least one analyst is warning a more powerful adversary to educational reform still lurks uncontested.

“The Department of Education was already dismantled once before, but through the efforts of the National Education Association (NEA) it returned,” writes Daniel B. Murphy, a teacher at Western Academy, a private school for boys in Houston.

In a commentary for The Public Discourse, Murphy traces the NEA’s history from its 1857 origins to today’s “bloated” union wielding tremendous political power.

“Trump’s executive order is a step in the right direction, certainly improving government efficiency, but it is not enough. … Organizations like the NEA do not want it to happen. Even if it does happen, they will lobby it back into existence just as they did before.” 

‘Badly managed, depraved by abuses’ 

At the time of the nation’s founding, educational authority belonged only at the state level without federal oversight, historians note. 

“Since the Constitution does not delegate power over education to the federal government, this power is reserved to the States or to the people,” Murphy writes, citing the Tenth Amendment. “States and individual people are free to decide how to handle education.” 

Thomas Jefferson is frequently “misrepresented as one of the early pioneers of the public school system” although his writing indicates a strong distrust of state-regulated educational funding, according to Murphy. 

“In an 1817 bill proposed by Jefferson, he encourages local control of public school funds and warns that with control at the level of state government, ‘they would be badly managed, depraved by abuses, and would exhaust the whole literary fund.’” 

Today’s federal Department of Education suffers from many of the same criticisms, Murphy writes, adding “federal spending on education … has dramatically increased without improving student outcomes.” 

Two examples include the National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) and Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). 

“Despite an increasing Department of Education budget, reading scores on the NAEP have hardly budged for fifty years,” Murphy notes. 

Meanwhile, U.S. students are falling behind those in other countries regarding their literacy performance despite higher spending. 

“In 2019, the United States spent 38 percent more per student than the average of other participating countries, yet PISA reading scores for the US are very similar to the average of other countries and have not changed significantly since 2000. In 2022, the United States spent roughly twice the amount per student compared to Japan, yet Japan’s PISA results far surpass our own. The percentage of our government spending dedicated to education is also roughly twice that of Japan’s.” 

Budget growth ‘by a factor of 40,000’ 

The first federal department of education was established in 1867 after extensive lobbying from NEA’s predecessor, the National Teachers Association (NTA). 

“The following year, however, Congress abolished the department and replaced it with an ‘Office of Education,’ due to questions about its constitutionality and fears that a federal department might exert too much control over local education policies in the states,” Murphy writes. “Nevertheless, the Office of Education remained part of the federal government, a long-term victory for NTA.” 

Over time, the department’s budget ballooned from $15,000 in the 1860s to $1.5 billion by 1965, and $60 billion by mid-2010, after it became the Department of Education in 1979. 

“How did the ‘Office of Education’ grow its budget so much from 1867 to 1965?” Murphy quips. “Even considering inflation, the education budget grew by a factor of 40,000. From 1965 until 2024, the growth in budget was not nearly as significant, only growing by a factor of between seven and eight.” 

Longterm reform requires breaking the NEA’s “lobbying powerhouse,” according to Murphy, who suggests a grassroots effort such as a “decertification election” to remove the union’s power as the “exclusive representative” of teachers. 

“With the NEA Legislative Program, the political influence that this organization wields will pose a challenge to the free education of American citizens, even if the federal Department of Education is dismantled.”