Former President Jimmy Carter, who died Dec. 29 at 100, is best known in education for overseeing the creation of a federal department of education. But his long life was full of intersections with education policy and a personal history with the nation’s struggles over race and schools.
These are highlights of Carter’s life and record of public service with respect to education. They are drawn from Education Week’s longer obituary of Carter, which among other things details his efforts, and some of the drama, behind the creation of the U.S. Department of Education.
Carter grew up on his father’s farm, where he played with the Black children of tenant farmers on the property. But he never went to school with those children because of segregation.
In his presidential campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, published in 1975, Carter wrote about growing up around the Black children whose parents worked on the Carter family farm (which grew more than just peanuts).
“We ran, swam, rode horses, drove wagons and floated on rafts together,” Carter wrote of the Black children he grew up with. “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.”
Racially segregated schools were the norm during Carter’s childhood.
Carter was the first president to mention one of his teachers in a presidential inaugural address.
At his 1977 inauguration, Carter quoted Julia Coleman, the superintendent of the Plains, Ga., school system and also his favorite teacher at Plains High School, which actually served all grades.
Coleman had assigned Carter to read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in 5th grade. The young student was disappointed to find out the novel 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.
Carter returned to Plains from the U.S. Navy after his father’s death in 1953, and as a school board member soon faced the question of desegregation.
Carter was appointed to a vacancy on the Sumter County board of education in 1955, just one year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s schools.
Biographers of Carter accept that he and his wife, Rosalynn (also a graduate of Plains High School), were personally opposed to longstanding racial segregation in Southern communities like theirs. But they realized that most of their white neighbors did not share that view, and Carter did little on the school board to advance desegregation.
After a political defeat over school consolidation, Carter soon saw electoral victories in state offices where he was involved in education reform.
As president of the local school board by 1960, Carter read educational theorists who called for more equity in schools and larger, comprehensive high schools. That led Carter to push a ballot measure to consolidate the rural county school system with that of the city of Americus. Carter’s cousin Hugh Carter led the opposition, in part playing on fears that the merger would lead to desegregation. The measure was defeated, but Carter’s taste for politics was not.
He was elected to the Georgia state Senate in 1962, where he took a seat on the education committee. He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1966, losing to segregationist Lester Maddox. But Carter was elected governor in 1970 after tempering some of his views in favor of racial equity in education.
As governor, he brought about statewide kindergarten and implemented state performance standards. He continued to walk a fine line on desegregation, supporting some court-ordered plans but also backing a federal measure that would have prohibited busing for desegregation.
As a presidential candidate in 1976, Carter famously supported the creation of a federal education department. But once in office, he adopted a go-slow approach.
In response to a National Education Association questionnaire, Carter wrote that he agreed with the teachers’ union’s century-old goal of a separate Cabinet-level education department.
“Generally, I am opposed to the proliferation of federal agencies,” Carter 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.”
NEA’s endorsement helped put Carter in the White House. But the new president quickly hedged on the idea, and his administration was soon consumed by other matters. Meanwhile, opponents of the idea worked to kill it. Among them was Joseph A. Califano Jr., Carter’s secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, who did not want to lose one-third of his department’s portfolio. Other key opponents included the American Federation of Teachers, U.S. Catholic bishops, and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat.
But other education groups joined the NEA in supporting the idea, and some in Congress and within the administration quietly worked for the separate department. After much internal study, Carter renewed his push for the idea in his 1978 State of the Union address. The next year, Congress passed the measure creating the U.S. Department of Education, which Carter signed on Oct. 17, 1979. He soon nominated Shirley M. Hufstedler, a federal appeals court judge based in Los Angeles 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.
Carter was the longest-living former president.
He passed that milestone in 2019 after more than 38 years of an active post-presidency that included international peace efforts, prolific writing, building houses for Habitat for Humanity, and teaching Sunday school. Carter never had much to say during that time about his creation of the Education Department. He devoted only three paragraphs in his 600-page memoir of his White House years to the battle.
