In 1977, Karen Hawley Miles’ family left Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for Washington, D.C. She was a junior in high school, a particularly rough time to be uprooted from her friends and neighborhood.
Still, she appreciated the reason the Carter administration summoned her father to the nation’s capital. Willis Hawley, a prominent researcher who focused on school integration, was part of a team tasked with creating a new cabinet-level education agency.
The goal was to bring all of the various education programs scattered across multiple departments under one roof.