The Commissioner of Education was the title given to the head of the federal Office of Education, which was historically a unit within and originally assigned to the Department of the Interior in the United States. The position was created on March 2, 1867, when an act to establish the Office of Education took effect under the influence of the more Radical Republican Party. They were influential mostly in the Northern states and New England, which were much more progressive in the fields of education and had already established many state departments of education. They also had a large number of public schools and systems in cities, towns and counties, both at the elementary (grammar) school and high school levels, in which the South had lagged behind.[1]
The commissioner was the U.S. government's highest education official from after the Civil War and its reforming period of Reconstruction in 1867, until 1972, when the office of Assistant Secretary for Education was established within the independent Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The H.E.W. department had been earlier created as a cabinet-level department in April 1953, under President Harry Truman, continuing the previous advances created by the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and instigated under Dwight D. Eisenhower.[1] Ultimately, the head of the federal government's nationwide educational efforts was reorganized with the separation and division of old H.E.W. into the new United States Department of Education in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, with its own Cabinet-level position of the U.S. Secretary of Education.