This report was published by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a nonpartisan thinktank inside the Library of Congress. I worked at the agency for 11 years, and I can attest that Congress relies on CRS as a source for institutional memory. Why? Because policy history is complex and often long, and elected officials —who comes and go from Congress— rarely know that history.

This report was published shortly after Congress recreated the Department of Education in 1979. (You can see the law here.) I say recreated as Congress first established a department of education in 1867, a topic I essayed upon in Politico and which this CRS report also discusses.

This report was written for the Congress as a whole, and its is valuable. Not only does it provide a hsitory of the department of education, bureau of education, and the like, it also contains a list of related statutes and executive orders and annual appropirations figures.

Copies of it are hard to locate unless one visits a federal depository library, which holds copies of some CRS reports. It is a pity that CRS as a matter of policy does not make its old reports publicly available. They were published with taxpayer dollars, and are a source of trustworthy facts, figures, and analyses. Hopefully, Congress will soon direct CRS to release these older reports to the public just as it did some years back when it made CRS put its current reports online.