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The Once and Future K-12

We cannot afford decades of waiting to recognize that America's children are the nation's future and a national responsibility, Ms. Hufstedler points out. While the whole village may be all that is needed to rear a single child, the whole nation is needed to educate all our children. WHEN I WAS appointed the nation's first secretary of education by President Carter, I did not know what would be entailed by my moving from the cloister of the federal appellate court to the maelstrom of Washington, D.C. I quickly found out. The immediate tasks were formidable. Despite chronic shortages of office space in the District, room for the department had to be found. More than a hundred educational programs had to be moved from other departments and agencies, together with some of the program staff members. Fewer employees were to be transferred to the new department than had managed the programs in their original homes, and, because a federal hiring freeze was in place, intense negotiations were required to obtain existing employee vacancies from other departments and agencies. Those vacancies were necessary to staff the essential offices for any Cabinet-level department. Simultaneously, potential candidates for Presidential appointments had to be identified and interviewed for each of the offices and program areas established by the legislation that created the department. Every nominee had to be first-rate; collectively, the nominees had to reflect the diversity of America as far as practicable. It was necessary to call upon the good offices of seasoned public servants to assist in the transition. The department received help from the personnel office of the White House and from temporary staff members from other departments. But we needed even more assistance, so I turned to those outside of Washington who had long experience with the federal government and a deep commitment to public service. Former secretaries of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and former commissioners of education gave very helpful information and suggestions. They also described a number of the pitfalls -- pit by pit. Richard Beattie, former general counsel for HEW, was persuaded to return to Washington from New York to be a key leader in the transition process, despite disruptions to his family life and his career. Richard Gilman, president of Occidental College, took a leave of absence to become my interim special assistant. Liz Carpenter, formerly Lady Bird Johnson's press secretary and a 30-year veteran of the Washington press corps, left the Johnson library and returned to Washington to take on the public affairs tasks for the department. (Thereafter she received a Presidential appointment to undertake those and other broader duties for the department.) Even while the department was being formed, all the education programs and the other tasks allotted to it still had to be managed, even before the nominees for Presidential appointments had been confirmed and before personnel from other departments could be transferred. The budgetary issues had to be addressed immediately because the organization of the department had occurred at the "pass back," i.e., the time in the federal budget cycle when the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) gives each department and agency the budget targets that OMB recommends to the President. Those budget recommendations were very detailed, encompassing each program and office under the department's jurisdiction. If a department head wanted to change some of the recommended targets, he or she had to appeal through the OMB hierarchy to revise the targets. Any subsequent dissatisfaction with the outcome of the appeals to OMB had to be addressed by further appeals to the President and Vice President. Because the department was still being formed, it was incumbent on me to carry those appeals through OMB and to the President and Vice President. …