Conservatives have talked wistfully for years about eliminating the Education Department, but a host of Republican "tea party" candidates this election year are saying it's time to move beyond talk and force Congress to vote.

From West Virginia to Kentucky to Nevada, GOP Senate candidates have said they favor elimination of the Cabinet office, created as a separate department by President Carter in 1979 to elevate the federal government's profile on what had been considered a primarily local concern.

Senate candidate Rand Paul, in his Republican primary campaign in Kentucky, was among the first tea-party-backed candidates to revive the idea that the 30-year-old agency had failed students and that the states could do a better job...