President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Linda McMahon, the co-chairwoman of his transition team, for education secretary. If the Senate confirms her, she could be one of the president-elect’s most important Cabinet appointments.
McMahon’s resume is impressive. She worked in Trump’s first term as the administrator of the Small Business Administration, founded World Wrestling Entertainment with her husband, Vince McMahon, and served on the Connecticut Board of Education and the Sacred Heart University Board of Trustees.
But running the Education Department will be perhaps her most difficult task yet. The agency is a bureaucratic albatross around the neck of the taxpayer that does nothing to serve the well-being and interests of students. And during the Biden administration, the agency has become a rubber stamp for far-left social policies championed by the Democratic Party’s activist base.
In her new position, McMahon will be charged with undoing four years of reckless liberal policymaking and advancing a new policymaking agenda that prioritizes student success and parental rights, while freeing the nation’s education system from the boot of a liberal bureaucracy intent on imposing its will.
It’s a gargantuan task. The Education Department’s budget exceeds $200 billion, a large portion of which is disbursed to state and local education agencies through grants. Grants are also distributed to institutions of higher education, which accept funding at the cost of increased oversight from the Washington-based agency.
If McMahon is successful in reforming these programs and enforcement mechanisms within the department so that public and private education options prosper at the K-12 level and taxpayers are not forced to fund radical left-wing ideas at the college level, she could be the most consequential education secretary the agency has had since it was established in 1980.
Trump campaigned on a promise to eliminate the Education Department, and while many conservatives still want this, the odds of securing the necessary support in Congress for such a bill are slim. That means McMahon must instead embrace her role atop this bloated Cabinet agency and focus on enacting a vision of good conservative governance in education.
After years of allowing the Democratic Party to dominate education politics, Republicans articulated a new policy vision for education in the past few years that has given them the right to brand themselves as the party of parents.
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Instead of folding in the face of aggressive opposition, Republicans in numerous states pressed forward to enact universal school choice programs, preventing schools from exposing young students to pornography and aggressively setting new curriculum standards that prevented political agendas from taking over the classroom.
The McMahon-led Trump Education Department should not forget that local control of education must be the goal of any policymaking, but the steely resolve that the leaders in these states displayed as they embraced groundbreaking reforms is one that she must emulate with bold conviction. Doing so will change public and private education from preschool to postgraduate school for the better, and set the Education Department on a needed path of reform that will not be easily reversed.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
