Jan Resseger has done some reading up on the presumptive secretary of education and has some insights on what we can expect. Reposted with permission.
Last week President-elect Donald Trump announced that he will nominate Linda McMahon to serve as the U.S. Secretary of Education.
Linda McMahon formerly served as an executive of World Wrestling Entertainment; led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term; and took a job in 2919 leading the America First Action PAC to support Trump’s candidacy for President. Beginning in 2009, McMahon served part of a term on Connecticut’s state board of education, and once upon a time, after majoring in French in college, the now 76-year-old McMahon secured a teaching certificate in her home state of North Carolina. Currently she chairs the board of the America First Policy Institute, a think tank competitor to the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. Both think tanks have been drawing up a policy agenda to drive Trump’s second term.
Good wishes for Thanksgiving! This blog will take the holiday and weekend off. Look for a new post on Thursday, December 5, 2024.
There is some agreement that McMahon is not as likely to shut down the U.S. Department of Education as many feared Trump’s appointment would be charged to do. The National Education Policy Center’s Kevin Welner believes the complexity of the history and needs served by that federal department would make its closure unlikely: “By the time Congress established the department in 1979, the federal government was already an established player in education policy and funding. For instance, the Higher Education Act of 1965 began the federal student loan program. In 1972, Congress created the basic Educational Opportunity Grant, the predecessor program to today’s Pell Grants. The G.I Bill of 1944, which, among other things, funded higher education for World War II veterans, preceded them both. At the K-12 level, federal involvement in vocational education began with the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. Federal attention to math, science and foreign language education began in 1958 with the National Defense Education Act. Two laws passed during the Lyndon Johnson administration then gave the federal government its modern foothold in education: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The 1964 law provided antidiscrimination protections enforced by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. The 1965 law… includes Title I, which sends extra funding to schools with high populations of low-income students. In 1975, Congress added the law currently known as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, or IDEA… To dissolve the Education department, both houses of Congress would have to agree, which is unlikely.”
Assuming the U.S. Department of Education will survive a second Trump administration, it is worth comparing the policy agendas both think tanks—the Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025, and the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) where Linda McMahon has been chair of the board—have prepared for the incoming Trump administration’s Department of Education.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 suggests systematically dismantling or relocating to other departments the institutions that were originally pulled together in 1979 to be managed by one federal agency. According to a concise report in August from the Brookings Brown Center on Education Policy, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 prescribes tearing apart the Department’s structure and functions: “dismantle the U.S. Department of Education; eliminate the Head Start program for young children in poverty; discontinue the Title I program that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children; rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students; undercut federal capacity to enforce civil rights law; reduce federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools; promote universal private school choice; and privatize the federal student loan portfolio.” Project 2025 would, first, end or reduce specific federal funding streams enacted by Congress to serve vulnerable groups of students, and second, disrupt or undermine the specific agency prepared to enforce laws and regulations that protect the civil rights of groups which have experienced discrimination and unequal access to opportunity in the past.
The America First Policy Institute’s agenda is far more focused on what have been called culture war issues, while both think tanks do make universal school choice—the diversion of public dollars for school privatization—a priority. The agenda of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) features four pillars, each one described in a two page brief:
First — “Give Parents Control by Allowing Them to Select the School Their Child Attends.” AFPI’s brief on school privatization is piece of classic pro-privatization ideology. Ignoring the fact that two weeks ago in three states, voters rejected ballot measures which would have expanded tuition vouchers for private schools and further, that every single time voters have been presented with voucher initiatives in previous years, voters have flatly rejected school vouchers, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) tells a lie: “Just 18% of Americans are opposed to school choice. Support for school choice in America has increased from 64% to 72% since April 2020.” And despite Josh Cowen’s research that demonstrates lower academic achievement when students use vouchers at private schools, AFPI declares: “Standardized test scores significantly improve for students who exercised school choice.” AFPI endorses charter schools and criticizes the Biden administration’s efforts to strengthen regulation of the federal Charter Schools Program, which the Network for Public Education has repeatedly shown suffers from poor oversight. AFPI writes: “(R)egulations would severely limit the types of schools that could apply for funding and would restrict any potential expansion of charter school programs.” AFPI concludes mistakenly: “Educational freedom is a tool that has a proven record of putting students and families first, and parents need to be given the power to choose the best educational opportunities for their children.”
Education Week‘s Brooke Shultz directly quotes Linda McMahon in 2016 strongly supporting charter schools : “One of the issues most important to me is the question of school choice.” Shultz also quotes McMahon in 2015: “I don’t believe charter schools take anything away from traditional public schools; rather I think they can be centers for innovation and models for best practices.”
Second —“Give Every Parent the Right to See All Curriculum Materials in Every Class their Child Attends.” AFPI endorses parents’ individualist right to insulate and shield their children from programs and ideas that the parents consider offensive. However dangerous it may be for a school district to privilege individual parents with the power to set the curriculum according to the biases of the most powerful parents, and however impractical it may be for parents to review and debate each classroom’s lessons in advance, that is the policy AFPI endorses: “The formal authority to approve curriculum for public schools rests with states and local school boards. However, the authority for educating children rests with parents. As such, they should be involved early in the approval process in determining what qualifies as appropriate content for curriculum and lesson plans.” The bias here is clear: “Many children are being taught to see white supremacy everywhere, indoctrinated to believe America’s foundation was built on racism, talked to about sex and gender identity in developmentally inappropriate ways, and presented with other questionable curriculum… Officials that have the authority to make and approve curriculum do so as stewards of the public’s trust. The taxpayers and parents who schools ultimately answer to deserve to know what schools are teaching and how tax dollars are being spent.”
Third — “Encourage Schools to Teach Basic Skills that Prepare Students for Life As An Adult.” AFPI emphasizes basic skills: “Parents and teachers should partner as they work to prepare students for their future lives as adults. The important life skills… include communication skills, goal setting, budgeting,, physical fitness and time management.” It is refreshing to discover that AFPI does not support the kind of test-based school accountability we have been watching for two decades: “(E)ducation systems today are focused on checking boxes, teaching scripted curriculum and administrating standardized tests.”
There is a career-tech focus in the education ideas of AFPI. In an additional brief, “Fight for American Workers and Their Wages,” AFPI emphasizes the need for better career and workforce preparation as part of higher education: “Traditional workforce development policies fail by being reactive and backward-looking—responding to the economy of yesterday…. Destigmatize vocational education and level the playing field by diversifying higher education and job training funding.”
The NY Times’ Sharon Otterman raises some concerns, however, about ideas Linda McMahon has personally shared about needed changes to support career preparation. Otterman quotes McMahon, formerly head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, praising apprenticeship programs: “Our educational system must offer clear and viable pathways to the American Dream aside from four-year degrees.” Otterman’s worry is about McMahon’s support for a House bill that would have made “federal Pell grants available for those pursuing skills training programs and technical education.” Otterman describes concerns about awarding federal Pell grants to unregulated, private, for-profit training programs which, “Many Democrats say… have taken advantage of students and of federal money, often posting poor outcomes compared with many of their nonprofit peers.” The Obama administration imposed the Gainful Employment Rule to curb such abuses, when students used federal grants and loans to enroll and subsequently discovered that many private, for-profit programs failed to provide adequate training to qualify them for jobs.
Fourth — “Advocate for Teaching the Truth about America History.” AFPI’s fourth educational policy pillar, like its second pillar, addresses the culture wars. But here there seems to be some nuance and room for debate about the American story. AFPI would ban the 1619 Project, “One example of activist, inaccurate teaching is the New York times 1619 Project. This project is radical political advocacy masquerading as ‘journalism’ with the goals of reframing American history.” However, it is not quite clear exactly what would be off limits and what should be introduced and discussed by students. Unlike many far-right demands to avoid critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion, AFPI affirms: “(W)e need to teach the accurate history of America, including our country’s struggles, faults, and missteps. America is not perfect, but we have long strived to live up to the founding ideals that make this country the most free and prosperous in the world. Only by teaching the honest American story can we learn from our past faults and failures and rally behind the noble ideas our Nation was founded on.” The problem here is that the brief on American history seems to conflict with the second pillar—which advocates for parents to review and determine the curriculum and lessons. Some of the examples in the second brief critique the honest teaching of history.
In a short fact sheet, the America First Policy Institute summarizes its priorities in education policy:
- reduce unnecessary federal oversight of public schools and give more power to local board of education;
- reduce federal funding for public schools and redirect resources to school choice;
- emphasize parental rights;
- emphasize career-technical and apprenticeship investments with measurable results;
- improve school performance in math, reading, and U.S. history; and
- hold teachers unions accountable and reduce union influence.
If we compare the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025’s agenda for the Department of Education with the America First Policy Institute’s agenda , we discover that Project 2025’s plan involves a massive attack on the structure of the federal role in public education while the AFPI’s ideas involve reducing the federal role along with emphasizing parental rights, expanding the federal promotion and maybe the funding of career tech programs, and strengthening (and perhaps adjusting) curriculum according to AFPI’s priorities.
Both plans lead with a priority for expanding parental choice through school privatization. Betsy DeVos introduced such a plan as a $5 billion federal tuition tax credit proposal in every one of her federal budget proposals during Trump’s first term. The NY Times‘ Erica Green described the plan as providing “individual and corporate donors dollar-for-dollar tax credits for contributing to scholarship programs that help families pay private-school tuition and other educational expenses.” But year after year, Congress ensured that this plan did not make it into the federal budget.
While we can only speculate about where Linda McMahon will lead the U.S. Department of Education if she is confirmed, it is important to consider where she’s coming from as a leader of the America First Policy Initiative.
It is also helpful to consider what educational experts are thinking about as they consider her nomination. In a fascinating reflection, Adam Laats, an education historian at the State University of New York at Binghamton, examines the nomination of Linda McMahon in the context of the history of public education beginning in the 19th century. He worries about what may be her priority for reducing oversight and regulation—particularly in private job training programs and private apprenticeship programs. But most particularly he worries about the danger of expanding the privatization of public education:
“Americans of all political beliefs rely on our public schools. It took many years, and the process was scarred by generations of trial and error, but we Americans learned two fundamental lessons about those schools. First, only pubic schools with pubic funding can provide education for all. Offering ‘choice’ is an empty promise if parents can’t find or afford a private school. And second, counting on employers to educate children leads to brutal inequality. Some children might indeed get a leg up on an exciting and rewarding career, but too often, employers will prioritize profits over pedagogy. A McMahon-led Education Department threatens to ignore those lessons—at great cost to us all.”
