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Jimmy Carter’s Education Legacy Stretched From the School Board to the White House

By Mark Walsh — December 29, 2024 19 min read
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter waves to the congregation after teaching Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia on April 28, 2019. Carter, 94, has taught Sunday school at the church on a regular basis since leaving the White House in 1981, drawing hundreds of visitors who arrive hours before the 10:00 am lesson in order to get a seat and have a photograph taken with the former President and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
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Jimmy Carter campaigned for president on a promise of establishing a federal department of education and, after some hedging on his part and multiple internal and external political battles, finally delivered on that pledge late in his one term in office. The creation of the Cabinet-level agency elevated the federal government’s role in education for decades to come.

Carter, the 39th chief executive and the longest-living former president, died Dec. 29 in Plains, Ga., at age 100, some 19 months after going into hospice care. Carter, the first former U.S. president to reach age 100, passed away just over a year after his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, died at age 96 in the couple’s longtime home in Plains.

“I don’t know what history will show, but my guess is that the best move for the quality of life in America in the future might very well be this establishment of this new Department of Education, because it will open up for the first time some very substantial benefits for our country,” Carter said on Oct. 17, 1979, in the East Room of the White House in signing the bill that carved the new Cabinet agency out of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

The achievement was arguably the high point on education in a long public career in which Carter served as a local school board member, a Georgia state legislator interested in school reform, and a governor who delivered an overhaul of his state’s education system.

As a presidential candidate in 1976, Carter promised the National Education Association that he would push for a separate education department, a goal the NEA had sought for a century. In return, the nation’s largest teachers’ union made the first presidential endorsement in its then-117-year history.

When Carter took office, he adopted a go-slow approach toward the goal that included multiple internal studies, while various crises as well as fierce opposition from some quarters threatened to derail the idea.

In particular, Joseph A. Califano Jr., Carter’s secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, opposed removing one-third of his department’s portfolio. A view among White House aides that Califano had worked to undermine the effort contributed to his being fired by the president soon after the bill creating an education department passed key votes in Congress in 1979.

Carter nominated Shirley M. Hufstedler, a federal appeals court judge in California with little education policy experience, as the first secretary of education. And on May 7, 1980, the U.S. Department of Education came into existence.

Speaking on the South Lawn of the White House that day before a crowd of Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, educational leaders (including NEA officials), parents, and others, Carter said: “Because of you ... the voice of education, the concerns of education, the needs of education will now be more clearly heard and more clearly represented at the highest possible level of our government.”

Forged by a farm country background

James Earl Carter Jr. was born Oct. 1, 1924, at the Wise Sanitarium in Plains, Ga., where his mother, Lillian, worked as a nurse.

While Carter was known as the peanut farmer from Plains, the family farm run by his father, James Earl Carter Sr., was three miles west in an unincorporated hamlet called Archery. The senior Carter was also a businessman who ran a general store in Plains and would become active in local and state politics. Jimmy Carter was the oldest of four children.

Carter recalled in multiple books he wrote that he worked hard on the family farm during his early years, toting water to workers in the field, trimming watermelon vines, gathering eggs, and carrying slop to the hogs. As a youngster, Carter also played with the children of Black tenant farmers on his father’s land.

“We ran, swam, rode horses, drove wagons and floated on rafts together,” Carter wrote in his 1975 autobiography, Why Not the Best? “We misbehaved together and shared the same punishments. We built and lived in the same tree houses and played cards and ate at the same table.

“But we never went to the same church or school,” Carter wrote—racially segregated schools were the norm during Carter’s childhood.

In a later memoir of his childhood, An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood, Carter recalled that by age 14, he had developed close ties with white classmates from Plains High School, while his Black friends on the farm began to treat him with deference, which Carter acknowledged he was not reluctant to take advantage of.

“I guess all of us just assumed that this was one more step toward maturity and that we were settling into our adult roles in an unquestioned segregated society,” Carter wrote in the 2001 book.

Plains High School served all grades, with an enrollment of some 300 students in Carter’s years there. The school superintendent, Julia Coleman, was also one of his earliest teachers, and she assigned Carter to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace in 5th grade. He was disappointed to find out it was not about cowboys and Indians, but it turned out to be one of his favorite books, and he took lessons from it about how the destiny of nations should be controlled by their people. (During his 1981 inaugural address as president, Carter quoted “Miss Coleman” on the need to “adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.” It was the first-ever mention of a teacher in a presidential inaugural address.)

In high school, where Carter made the varsity basketball team his final two years, he also participated in Future Farmers of America, where he not only refined skills he used regularly on the family farm, but also typing, shorthand, and something that would prove useful for his political career—public speaking.

From the Navy and then back to Plains, Ga.

Of the 26 members of his graduating class in 1941, Carter wrote that he was the only one who went on to get a college degree. After enrolling at Georgia Southwestern College in Americus and studying engineering for a year at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Carter, who since childhood had wanted to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., was finally offered an appointment in 1943.

Then-Georgia State Sen. Jimmy Carter hugs his wife, Rosalynn, at his Atlanta campaign headquarters after making a strong primary showing in the September 1966 Democratic primary for governor of Georgia, where he came in third.

Carter graduated from the Naval Academy in 1946, and a month later married Rosalynn Smith, who was three years his junior at Plains High School and a friend of his sister Ruth. He embarked on a career as a U.S. Navy officer, living in Virginia, Hawaii, Connecticut, New York, and California, eventually with a focus on submarines and nuclear power.

In 1953, Carter’s father died of pancreatic cancer, and Carter faced a choice of continuing his naval career or returning to Plains. To his wife’s dismay, he decided on Plains, though he soon learned that farming had changed dramatically since he left.

The Carters were still getting used to being back in Plains when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which struck down racial segregation in the schools.

“Jimmy was listening to the radio when the boys and I walked into the office the day of the decision,” Rosalynn Carter wrote in her 1984 memoir, First Lady From Plains, referring to their three young sons, Jack, Chip, and Jeff. “He worried about the reaction among our neighbors.”

In 1955, Carter was appointed by the governing body of Sumter County to a vacancy on the county board of education, where his father had served for more than 10 years. Despite the Brown decision, there was virtually no momentum to desegregate the county’s schools.

“It seems hard to believe now, but I was actually a member of the county school board for several months before it dawned on me that white children rode buses to their schools and black students still walked to theirs!” Carter wrote in Why Not the Best?

Carter long maintained that he favored desegregation in that era but that his views were at odds with those of most of his neighbors.

In a 2020 biography titled His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, author Jonathan Alter says that Carter and Rosalynn “considered themselves realists about the inevitability of integration, which they quietly favored.” But that realism “extended to their assessment of how far they could stick their necks out,” Alter writes.

Carter and his fellow board members did little to implement the Brown decision, which Alter writes was “a course of action (or inaction) that was so obvious that it required little discussion” during that era of Southern resistance to desegregation.

By 1960, Carter had become president of the school board, and he read reports by the likes of John Gardner of the Carnegie Corporation and James B. Conant of Harvard University about the need for more equity and excellence in education and for larger, comprehensive high schools.

In 1961, Carter led a campaign to consolidate the rural Sumter County school system with the city school district of Americus, which would aid in the construction of new schools, including improved but still separate schools for Black students, and bring greater state aid.

Carter’s cousin Hugh Carter led the opposition that ran a newspaper advertisement arguing that consolidation would create a heavier tax burden, lead to an appointed instead of elected school superintendent, and increase the possibility of desegregation. The consolidation measure went down in defeat.

“It was my first real venture into election politics and campaigning, and the failure of my effort was a stinging disappointment,” Carter wrote in his 1976 book.

A substantial focus on education as Georgia governor

Still, Carter was invigorated by campaign politics, and in 1962, he ran for the Georgia state Senate and won.

Carter sought a seat on the Senate education committee, for which he faced little competition. Carter favored a repeal of a state law providing tuition grants for private schools, which like many education-related policies of that era were tied to the debate over desegregation, as they were often used at white-only segregation academies. Carter supported a compromise that gave the power to approve tuition grants to local school boards, which resulted in a de facto repeal since few boards approved them.

Alabama Governor George Wallace, left, and his Georgia counterpart, Jimmy Carter, participate in the opening of the National Governors' Conference in Washington, Feb. 23, 1971.

Carter served on a gubernatorial Commission to Improve Education, which in 1963 issued a report that called for a raft of improvements to the state’s schools but sidestepped the question of desegregation.

In 1966, Carter ran for governor stressing education issues, but he came in third in the Democratic primary. Lester Maddox, a Democrat who had gained national attention for refusing to serve Black customers in his Atlanta restaurant, was elected governor.

Carter bided his time and ran again in 1970. “His loss in 1966 taught him to be vague on controversial issues and stronger in his attacks on his opponents,” wrote Deanna L. Michael, a professor at the College of Education at the University of South Florida, in her book Jimmy Carter As Educational Policymaker.

He won the election and soon shifted from the conservative tone he had taken during his campaign. At his 1971 inaugural address in Atlanta, Carter said “the time for racial discrimination is over.”

“No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice,” the new governor said.

Alter wrote in his 2020 biography that “polite applause masked a moment of disbelief,” and some conservative state senators who had supported Carter’s campaign walked out of his speech.

Carter’s election as governor came at a time when court cases were pushing desegregation closer to reality for several of Georgia’s school districts. After the Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to integrate schools in a 1971 decision, a federal district judge ordered that remedy for the Richmond County, Ga., school system. Desegregation opponents threatened both a local and a statewide boycott of public schools.

As governor, Carter sought to defuse the situation by sympathizing with parents’ desires for their children to attend neighborhood schools, Michael wrote, and he called for a federal constitutional amendment against busing.

Carter advocated for a statewide kindergarten program, which was adopted. In 1974, the legislature passed the Adequate Program for Education in Georgia, a law that shifted state education funding from an allocation based on the number of teachers to instructional units. The law also established Georgia’s first forms of performance standards and statewide testing, and contained improvements in special education and other areas.

Georgia had a one-term limit on the governor’s office at that time, so Carter left office in early 1975 and turned to his next goal.

“Once his educational reform package passed in 1974, Jimmy Carter began his campaign for the presidency,” Michael wrote.

Supporting a stronger federal role in education

As a candidate for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, Carter often met with groups of teachers in primary states, emphasizing his experience with education policy in Georgia.

In response to a National Education Association questionnaire, Carter wrote that he agreed with the union’s goal for a separate Cabinet-level education department.

“Generally, I am opposed to the proliferation of federal agencies,” he wrote. “But the Department of Education would consolidate the grant programs, job training, early childhood education, literacy training, and many other functions scattered throughout the government. The result would be a stronger voice for education at the federal level.”

Carter selected as his running mate Sen. Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, whose brother William had been president of the NEA’s Minnesota affiliate. The NEA endorsed Carter in September 1976 and turned out its 1.8 million members in support of him.

President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd while walking with his wife, Rosalynn, and their daughter, Amy, along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House following his inauguration in Washington, Jan. 20, 1977.

When Carter narrowly defeated incumbent President Gerald R. Ford, with 50.1 percent to 48 percent of the popular vote, the NEA was able to plausibly claim credit for helping to put him over the top.

After the election, a number of other educational issues and concerns took precedence over the goal of a separate education department, starting right with his own family.

The Carters’ three sons were grown by then, but their daughter, Amy, was 9 years old and in the 4th grade in Plains when her father was elected to the White House.

In his speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, Carter had criticized “exclusive private schools” that allow the children of the “political and economic elite” to avoid public schools that are considered dangerous or inferior.

That put some pressure on the Carters to choose a public school for their daughter, though they explored a number of elite private schools in and around the nation’s capital as well.

Amy Carter attended Thaddeus Stevens School, six blocks from the White House and one of the District of Columbia’s oldest public schools, having been built in 1868 to educate the children of recently freed slaves. She was the first child of a president to attend public school in Washington since Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin. (Amy moved on to Rose L. Hardy Middle School before the family left Washington in 1981.)

“It has not been a sacrifice,” Carter said at a White House reception for NEA leaders in 1978. “I think Amy has benefited greatly from what she has derived in the public school system in the District. And I hope that our own involvement in it now and in the future will help to strengthen the interest of parents in the public school system throughout the country.”

In subsequent presidential administrations, the Clintons, Obamas, and Trumps all chose private schools for their elementary and secondary school-aged children.

President Jimmy Carter gets a round applause as he passes out pens at the White House in Washington, Oct. 17, 1979 following the signing legislation establishing a Department of Education. From left are: Dr. Benjamin Mays former president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Rep. Jack Brooke (D-Texas), Carter, Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (D-Connecticut).

A lengthy battle led to creation of the Education Department

The Carter administration oversaw a relatively noncontroversial reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, albeit one that enacted a variety of pet programs, such as population education and teaching about the metric system. The administration also dealt with issues such as tuition tax credits and affirmative action in college admissions.

When it came to the signature education achievement of his presidency, Carter and one of his Cabinet members offered dramatically different perspectives on the creation of the federal education department.

Carter, who wrote multiple memoirs and other books examining all aspects of his life and public service, devoted a mere two pages to education in Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, his 600-page memoir of his White House years. Of that, barely three paragraphs discuss the fight to establish the separate education department.

Califano, in contrast, devoted 20 pages out of a 50-page chapter on education policy in his 1981 memoir to the behind-the-scenes battles over the proposal to remove education from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which he oversaw as secretary from 1977 until his firing by Carter in 1979.

“A separate department would not help solve any deficiencies of our education system,” Califano wrote in Governing America: An Insider’s Report from the White House and the Cabinet.

The HEW secretary’s stance prompted NEA leaders to seek an audience with the president in 1977. The White House agreed to a meeting, at which Carter, Mondale, and Califano sat on one side of the table in the Cabinet Room, while three NEA leaders sat on the other side.

“To my surprise and satisfaction, Carter hedged” on the idea, Califano wrote. One NEA leader’s “cheeks flushed” and he struggled for words, Califano observed.

Carter’s personal diary reflects that he was not as unshakably committed to the goal as his campaign promise suggested.

“Met with the leaders of the NEA,” he wrote in his personal diary on April 27, 1977. “They are quite interested in having a separate education department formed. If we can work out some independent agency just for education where the teachers don’t dominate it, then I would favor the idea.”

Califano consulted with Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the NEA’s rival union. Shanker was opposed to a federal department because he believed it would be dominated by the NEA and there were strong political reasons for keeping education in HEW.

The nation’s Catholic bishops would also join the opposition, as would key members of Congress, including Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat.

But key members of Carter’s administration would keep up support for the idea. And except for the AFT, most other major education groups supported a separate department, including the National PTA, the National School Boards Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the Education Commission of the States.

Carter also had a key ally in Congress: Sen. Abraham A. Ribicoff, a Connecticut Democrat who had served as President John F. Kennedy’s first HEW secretary. According to Christopher T. Cross, the author of Political Education: National Policy Comes of Age, and a longtime federal education policy hand, Ribicoff had found HEW too big and difficult to manage, and as a senator he had introduced several bills to create a federal education department, which went nowhere until Carter came along.

Meanwhile, the administration studied just what would be included in a federal department of education. There were some 267 education-related programs across 24 federal agencies. Would the new department merely move the current education functions out of HEW, or try to pull in programs such as Head Start, school lunch, Indian education, and the school system run for the dependents of the U.S. military?

By late 1977, Carter came to a conclusion in favor of the separate department, and one that would be broad, though he left some of the particulars undefined. In his State of the Union address in January 1978, the president said: “Now it’s time to take another major step by creating a separate Department of Education.”

President Jimmy Carter listens to Sen. Joseph R. Biden, D-Del., as they wait to speak at fund raising reception at Padua Academy in Wilmington, Del., on Feb. 20, 1978.

The Senate passed a measure doing just that in 1978, but legislation to create the department stalled in the House in that election year. Though efforts were renewed in 1979, under the next Congress, there was still opposition.

In the Senate, Moynihan “set out to kill the bill with kindness,” wrote Chester E. Finn Jr., who was then an aide to Moynihan and later a prominent education policymaker and analyst, in his memoir, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik.

Moynihan introduced amendments to add as many education-related programs as possible to the proposed department, thinking that would lead the measure to failure. The amendments were defeated, and the Senate approved the bill to create the new department, 72-21.

The House finally passed its version in July, and after a contentious conference process to reconcile the House and Senate versions, a bill was sent to the president for his signature. He signed the bill on Oct. 17.

“Today’s signing fulfills a longstanding personal commitment on my part,” Carter said at the White House ceremony. “My first public office was as a county school board member. As a state senator and governor I devoted much of my time to education issues. I remain convinced that education is one of the noblest enterprises a person or a society can undertake.”

In the meantime, Carter fired Califano in July, as he carried out a shakeup of his Cabinet that also saw three other department leaders leave or forced out. Califano’s maneuverings against the separate education department were considered part of the motivation.

‘First (and only) choice’ for education secretary

For the first secretary of education, Carter settled on Hufstedler, a liberal member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco. She was already on the administration’s list of possible candidates for the U.S. Supreme Court should a vacancy arise, which did not happen during Carter’s term.

“The selection of the first secretary was very important to me, and after thorough consideration, my first (and only) choice” was Hufstedler, Carter wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2017 after Hufstedler died that year. Carter said that as a judge Hufstedler had written “brilliant opinions protecting civil rights, civil liberties, and equal justice.”

(Despite Carter’s statement that Hufstedler was his only choice, Alter wrote in his 2020 biography that the first preference among some in the White House was Bill Moyers, the former press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson and then a TV journalist. Moyers wasn’t interested.)

Shirley M. Hufstedler is sworn in as the nation’s first Secretary of Education by Chief Justice Warren Burger, right, while her husband Seth, holds a Bible in Washington on Dec. 6, 1979. President Jimmy Carter, left, who chose her, oversaw creation of the U.S. Department of Education.

Hufstedler’s tenure from Dec. 6, 1979, through the end of Carter’s term in January 1981 was not flashy. She spent much of her time organizing the new Education Department to begin operations, a task made more challenging by a federal hiring freeze. She also worked to ensure a strong office for civil rights.

Carter was defeated for reelection in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, who early in his term would seek to downgrade the new department into a sub-Cabinet-level federal foundation. And while that effort fizzled, there has long been a desire, particularly among Republicans, including President-elect Donald Trump, to eliminate the Cabinet-level Education Department.

Carter was 56 when he left the White House, and he was well-known for his active post-presidency, with international peace efforts, prolific writing, building houses for Habitat for Humanity, and religious life. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 in recognition of his efforts to advance democracy and human rights.

He spent some of his retirement on education-related efforts, such as the Atlanta Project, a broad effort aimed at fighting poverty and its effects in housing, education, health and other areas in the capital of his home state.

Carter had the longest post-presidency in U.S. history and in March 2019 became the longest-living former president.

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