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The department of Education established in 1867 was a minuscule department, which both links you provided freely admit to. Its primary purpose was to provide access to books and learning materials to all schools. It was shrunk to a single office by 1870. It had nothing to do with the actual school budgets.
Carter reinvented it in 1979 to force desegregation. Since then the quality of public education has been in a persistent state of decline.
That's not the case with private schools, whose teachers generally don't receive the same pay or benefits as public school teachers, and whose level of education has actually increased over the decades.
The idea is that because the quality of public education was so much better prior to Carter's New Dept of Education, if it were returned back to the states it would gradually return to its pre-Carter level of quality.
The FG doesn't set the curriculum, it just takes money from "richer" districts to pour over poorer districts, forcing a more level playing field. Where is the logic in lowering the standards of one district in order to raise them in another?
So if the federal government is so great at handling the department, why is public education on a continual downward slope since its inception, while the cost of public education has skyrocketed? If you don't like the idea of states taking back control of it, how else can it be fixed?
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