Last week, the House of Representatives approved legislation establishing a separate Department of Education, virtually guaranteeing the birth of the 13th Cabinet department. While the new department may sound like a radical innovation, all it really does is move the Office of Education from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) into its own private home.

Of the 152 programs the new agency will oversee, 131 of them come from the Office of Education. Just establishing the new department will eat up more than $14 billion of federal funds--a large and misdirected sum for a goal as vague as increasing the "visibility" of educational issues. And as the floundering Department of Energy has shown, such agencies don't have much luck in getting off the ground.

The Department of Education, moreover, is a political payoff from President Carter to the National Education Association (NEA), a group mostly concerned with primary and secondary education. It is no secret that Carter traded his influence for the NEA's first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate. For a man who came to Washington promising to trim down the federal bureaucracy, Carter hasn't done a very good job. We can only hope that the new department does not become a mouthpiece for the interest groups that rallied for its establishment--and that issues of post-secondary education are not buried in the new bureaucracy.