Historian David Tyack breaks educational progressives into two types: pedagogical and administrative (Tyack 1974). The former are champions of “child-centered” instruction in the classroom, while the latter want centralized, government control of the schools.
Only a dozen years ago, the Republican Party platform called for abolition of the U.S. Department of Education. Perhaps a holdover from what many thought would be a government-leveling tidal wave when the GOP won control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in 1994, the 1996 platform declared that “the federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula. . . . That is why we will abolish the Department of Education, end federal meddling in our schools, and promote family choice at all levels of learning.”