The Brown Decision has received a great deal of journalistic and scholarly attention as we have been celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. Much of the writing about the decision has either celebrated the decision as a great advance in civil rights, or lamented the nation’s failure to achieve full school desegregation in the years that followed it. Here, we want to raise a different perspective, by suggesting that the Brown Decision, although a landmark in the struggle for racial equality, resulted in at least one great negative unintended consequence for American public schools. Specifically, it began the historical trend of removing control over schools from locally elected officials to non-elected officials of the federal government. Historically, the educational system of the United States has been highly localized in character. Schools have been regarded as community institutions, controlled by locally elected school boards, and funded largely by taxes raised within school districts. Interestingly, there is no mention of schools or education in the U.S. Constitution. The tenth Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Since the founding of the republic this clause has been interpreted to give to states, and not the federal government, ultimate power over how to educate the citizens within their respective borders. This is why California’s department of education in Sacramento employs more than half as many bureaucrats as the national education bureaucracy in Washington, DC. Indeed, the modern era cabinet-level Secretary of Education dates only to Jimmy Carter’s presidency, in 1979.