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Notes -
What does the DoEd do in practice?
By dollar, the DoEd's main job (185b in 2024) is offering scholarships, grants, loan guarantees, and other higher education funding. It directly measures students. Measurements of school and program value overwhelmingly come through college accreditation, which is kinda a clusterfuck: the DoEd establishes reporting requirements and rules for accrediting bodies to follow, but those accrediting organizations themselves are technically 'private' organizations and have only begun acting against the worst-performing colleges in very recent years, and the threshold is both staggeringly low and readily gamed.
Charitably, these groups focus on process; less charitably, they're a deniable way to mandate a variety of rules that are politically costly or legally impermissible otherwise. Either way, they're not doing the job, and the DoEd isn't even the ones not doing it, just telling people to do other stuff instead.
((Colleges do not technically need accreditation to operate, but a college without accreditation is unable to receive most federal or federally-guaranteed funds and has very wide restrictions on its ability to transfer credit hours.))
For primary education, the DoEd has significant expenditures and grants (40b in 2024), but this is largely focused on perceived deserts, not on local funding availability. In some rare cases these overlap -- the Office of Indian Education has a bad reputation for other reasons than having difficulty finding poor kids -- but it's at least part of the reason that all the stories about racial education spending has a big asterisk about 'before public funding', and, more critically those schools still suck even as they often vastly outspend far better schools.
For curriculum, it's mostly just a mess. The DoEd sets up grants for individual assessments and projects, but it's neither a major focus nor really done at larger scale, for better or worse (eg, CommonCore is technically a National Governor's Association baby).
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Attach strings to accepting federal student loans.
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