In the summer of 1744, Indian chiefs from the six Iroquois nations came to Lancaster to meet with representatives of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to resolve land disputes.
The primary functions of the Department of Education are to establish policy for, administer and coordinate most federal assistance to education, collect data on US schools, and to enforce federal educational laws regarding privacy and civil rights..
The Department of Education is only a small part of education in the US and they mostly just distribute some money. The potential for a federal department to add value based on research and economies of scale are great. The first step to that is data collection.