Education Secretary Nominee Linda McMahon Is a Threat to Leftist Pundits
It’s crunch time in the swamp to vet and vote on President Trump’s incoming cabinet picks. And while it’s natural to expect an onslaught of noise from the pundits and the corporate media hacks posing as journalists, some of the criticisms when it comes to the incoming Secretary of Education are reaffirming exactly why she was picked.
The loudest critics of Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon are currently turning on her supposed lack of expertise when it comes to education. Here’s the real question, what has all the so-called “expertise" gotten us in the past few decades? Our test scores are in the gutter. Many students don’t know what it means to be American, and in many cases they’re being actively taught to hate their own country. America let the so-called experts run things and expected things to get better under their administration. We were very wrong.
What we need are leaders with principles and values that align with the American people. That is the most important expertise there is. And this is where McMahon’s background fits this new role like a glove.
We need McMahon’s experience as a successful business executive and a former Administrator of the Small Business Administration. The simple fact of the matter is that we need more free market principles applied to our education system. Education is at its core a service that we provide to parents and communities at taxpayer expense. And the returns on everyone’s investment have not been great.
We already know what kind of education system that we want and need. We need one that isn’t concentrated in Washington, DC and run by a bunch of faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats from thousands of miles away. No education credential will ever make someone more qualified to determine a child’s education than that child’s parent. Parents know their kids better than anyone else. Further, we are endowed with inalienable rights and responsibilities over those children that the government simply does not and never will. We need a system that puts parents and teachers back in charge.
If we want to put America first again, then we need to start putting the needs and rights of parents and students first. The benefits will naturally flow from doing that. If we want to see better results, give parents more say. Nobody wants their child to succeed as much as a parent. If we want patriotic future citizens, then we need to put the American people back in control of what their state and local schools are teaching. Because out in the real world, the people who still love this country and its principles far outnumber the number of bureaucrats and politicians who don’t.
Further, we need parents to be able to make decisions not only about what their kids are taught but how and where. A zip code should not determine the quality of a child’s education. Unfortunately, it too often does. Federal education dollars should fund students instead of systems.
This is where McMahon’s private sector experience comes in. We haven’t gotten anywhere with decades of throwing more and more money at failing school systems. We were never going to; that’s not the way human nature works. What we should have been doing is fostering an environment of innovation and improvement through healthy competition. If schools had to work for their enrollment numbers, they would. They’d seek out the talented teachers necessary, they would improve educational approaches that yield results and they would discard the ones that don’t.
While we’re at it, here’s what the unions don’t want you to know: This also benefits the teachers because successful schools are the ones that secure the best talent by attraction. When hiring, firing, and promotion are driven by merit and results, it turns out that the results are better.
Finally, we need an education system that is focused on fundamentals. We need public school graduates who can read, write, do math, go to work, and know what it means to be American. We don’t need them indoctrinated with whatever latest fad ideologies that the university faculties have become momentarily obsessed with. We need to get back to basics. That’s what we’ve done in Oklahoma and it has been a rousing success. We need to see it replicated nationwide. McMahon fundamentally gets this because she knows what it takes to succeed in the real world — something many so-called education “experts” cannot and will never comprehend.
In America, we don’t place our trust in bureaucrats and their supposed expertise. We didn’t write a constitution to trust unaccountable people with power. We place our trust in principles and we charge public officials with turning those principles into policies that guide their actions. I’ve spent my career in education and that’s why the federal Department of Education needs Secretary McMahon and why the Senate should confirm her without delay.
