[Jabanga]

From a quick reading, it seems like the Office of Education was a small statistics gathering department with a very limited budget and role. The redistributive aspect of government education spending has increased substantially over the last century and a half. This goes back to the debate over whether society benefits if it guarantees equality of opportunity, and whether history vindicates the claim. Education outcomes have been stagnant for the past 40 years, during the era with the greatest amount of government spending and redistributive spending.

Whether it's a small community, with high levels of income homogeneity, funding the public education, or the federal government, is not orthogonal to the debate on guaranteeing equality of opportunity. The massive increase in government spending (at all levels, federal, state and local) on education is also not orthogonal to the debate.

Several economists have looked at the history of education and concluded that we would have been better off if we never transitioned from nongovernment to government education. The trends in place before public education was created were toward greater literacy and education.