9 Thoughts on Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education
With only a few wresting metaphors!
As I alluded to in my post last week, the job of U.S. Secretary of Education is more about leadership and management than it is about education per se. So I’m not overly bothered that Linda McMahon, President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, doesn’t have an extensive education background.
What I’m most interested in is what she plans to do with her time at the Department. I have zero connections into Mar-a-Lago, so take my predictions with a grain of salt. But given her leadership of the America First Policy Institute and their stated policy priorities on education, I can point to a few things she might try:
I do NOT think she’ll spend much political capital trying to kill the Department of Education. There’s a chart going around on social media this week courtesy of James S. Murphy that makes it clear that Republicans would have to be willing to take money away from Red states in order to do it.
I think McMahon, like Betsy DeVos before her, will use her bully pulpit to talk a lot about states that are pursuing their own school choice programs. But I don’t see a path for federal legislation to encourage more states to adopt those programs. The Trump Administration will likely support bills that would turn Title I or IDEA into voucher-like programs, but per my first point about where the federal money flows now, I’m skeptical that would pass.
Instead, I think the Trump Administration will try to embed a federal scholarship program into the tax code. The Trump tax cuts expire at the end of 2025, and you should be watching the tax bill for details on what a new bill might include. Right now Republicans can’t decide on how much red ink they’re willing to tolerate, and there will be intra-party squabbling on things like the SALT tax cap and what gets prioritized. If the economy turns south, that would also affect their willingness to load up the bill with lots of giveaways. School choice is certainly on their list, but it’s not as high as other things.
Under the last Trump Administration, they did not get a major school choice provision into their big tax bill. Instead, they got more modest things like allowing 529 plans to be used for private school tuition at K-12 schools.
Will they try and fail again this time? I don’t know! But that’s where the action will be over the course of 2025.
The child tax credit is also part of the same tax bill and is set to revert back to lower levels. This would be a place for Democrats to get a win!
It won’t be their first priority, but over the course of the Trump Administration, they may also champion school choice provisions in other federally controlled areas. Project 2025, for example, called for expanding the existing D.C. Opportunity Scholarship and making it universal, and creating an education savings account program for students on tribal lands and students whose parents are on active military duty.
The America First Agenda has an entire plank on allowing parents the right to see all of their child’s curriculum materials. There have already been bills like this floating around Capitol Hill, and I suspect the Trump Administration would support them. I don’t know enough about the relevant privacy laws or legal technicalities of making them happen. But if I had to bet I’d put my chips on more smoke than actual policy here.
McMahon is a strong supporter of the short-term Pell Grant idea that I wrote about earlier this week. So far that hasn’t garnered enough congressional support, but I don’t think the evidence will be enough to kill it. The for-profit colleges love this idea, and they now have a champion in the Administration.
I think McMahon will happily use her bully pulpit to target any policies, books, training, or curriculum that feed the culture wars. With 14,000 districts, 100,000 public schools, and 8 million public school employees, I suspect some of them have endorsed some wacky policies. McMahon’s team will not shy away from airing the progressive left’s dirty laundry.
What this means practically is less certain. The Department does have authority to investigate civil rights complaints. So, could it file an injunction against a district on the grounds that the district was somehow discriminating against its White students, or its straight students? I don’t know? Maybe? I’ll leave that for lawyers to argue over.
But I do know that the federal government has long had a prohibition against federal control of education. It reads:
No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, or to require the assignment or transportation of students or teachers in order to overcome racial imbalance. {emphasis added}
Everyone at USED is aware of this language; it came up regularly during my tenure there. So ultimately my guess is that McMahon’s team could make a lot of noise about investigating complaints. That could make trouble for a school or district and have a chilling effect on others, but I don’t think USED would win a protracted legal fight. (I’d welcome a lawyer out there telling me what I’m missing.)
There will also be some surprises that no one can predict yet. Could McMahon’s backing for apprenticeship programs find bi-partisan support and take off? Could McMahon steer her support for parental transparency toward making states release their test results quicker? Could McMahon use next year’s NAEP results to browbeat states to focus more on reading and math and other basic skills?
It’s far too early to know. But I for one wouldn’t mind if McMahon played the heel and tried to embarrass districts or states where kids weren’t learning very much.
