Linda McMahon and the Deregulation of Education
A sophisticated 76-year-old with short blonde hair and a genuine smile, you might assume that Linda McMahon the kind of person you’d meet demurely hosting the church potluck.
You’d be wrong.
If you’ve seen the viral videos of her getting body slammed back in her World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) days, you quickly realize McMahon is more than meets the eye.
Since being nominated by Trump as the Secretary for the Department of Education, the Left has been noticeably concerned. They’ve taken to calling McMahon an “unqualified billionaire,” despite her impressive resume.
Rick Hess, Senior Fellow and Director of Education Policy Studies at AEI, has admirably defended McMahon, adding that she is perfect for the job because the Secretary role is about business management. She will be overseeing a “department of 4,000 federal bureaucrats who hand out money, manage forms, collect data, and write rules.”
In other words, Linda McMahon is a businesswoman and a good one.
Which is precisely why we need her.
In 1955, Milton Friedman explained that the ideal American education system is one in which “education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families.” The Constitution gives the federal government “no authority to exercise control over elementary and secondary education, including by spending money and attaching conditions to the funds, the primary mode by which Washington has influenced education,” which is exactly what the Department of Education does.
So, how did we get here?
Historically, schools were primarily community or benefactor-funded. Wealthy or religious Americans privately educated their children - the creation of public schools was intended for poorer families. The federal government had very little involvement until stepping in to address segregation during the Civil Rights movement.
But, in 1957, the Soviet Union sent the Sputnik satellite into Earth’s orbit, and America began to worry about what kids were learning in school. Enter the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), encouraging students to study and attain higher degrees in fields such as math, science, and foreign languages.
We were investing in American competitiveness.
While the NDEA skirted around the fact that the Constitution “does not grant the federal government any authority to govern education,” it was deemed lawful because it involved the “constitutionally explicit federal responsibility” of national defense.
Unfortunately, if you give a government mouse an NDEA cookie in 1958, it’s going to want an Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) glass of milk in 1965 – a complete break with precedent that was purely about providing educational financial assistance.
In 1979, President Carter officially created a Cabinet-level Department of Education, despite the criticisms from Republicans that it would “encroach upon the rights of the states and localities to provide education and would not guarantee more efficiency or quality.”
Fast forward to 1988, which saw the reauthorization of ESEA while requiring proof of student’s academic achievements. This led to the era of “Standards and Accountability,” aka standardized testing.
By 2002, the ESEA reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) began steadily consuming all control of K–12 education, requiring “that all schools adhere to uniform state standards, be held accountable by aligned standardized tests…” Education was no longer about real learning, but rather the ability to pass a certain test with proficiency – while letting education leaders check the boxes of “educational equity.” Unsurprisingly, decades of studies have proved that the ESEA didn’t make any improvement in educational outcomes and that money has continually been wasted on the “largely ineffectual” federal K–12 interventions.
As of 2023, the Department of Education had 4,400 employees and a budget totaling $268.35 billion, making it the sixth highest-funded federal agency.
In total, federal, state, and local governments combined give $878.2 billion or $17,700 per pupil to fund K-12 public education.
The scary part? We have no idea where much of that money is going.
The 2015 federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was supposed to increase transparency about school spending, but, nearly a decade later, we still lack accountability over how money is spent, including missing billions in COVID-19 funding.
However, we do know that one school used federal stimulus money to buy an ice cream truck.
It’s time to put The Department of Education on a serious diet, perhaps throw in some Ozempic for good measure. It has become an insatiable monster – and not the cute, cookie-eating kind.
The average test scores for 13-year-olds in the U.S. have declined in both reading and math since 2020. Dozens of countries outperform us in math and science. Working-age American millennials also tied for last in problem-solving when compared to other industrialized countries. We now have “the worst-educated workforce in the industrialized world,” but we spend more on educating students than anywhere else on the planet except Luxembourg.
Forever throwing money at problems instead of solving them, Democrats continually blame the lack of federal funding on the failure of public schools despite over 400 studies in the 1990s proving more funding doesn’t equate to better educational outcomes. Enrollment in public schools has fallen nationwide, but building usage and administration costs don’t reflect this.
Meanwhile, less-funded and deregulated charter schools with voucher programs perform far better than their public counterparts, including with black and Hispanic students. Thomas Sowell’s Charter Schools and Their Enemies was a wake-up call for many, showing that while 68% of charter school students passed at “proficient” levels on math exams, only 10% of public school students did. The English exam was similar, with 65% of charter students passing compared to 14% of public students. In fact, in states such as Arizona, charter schools cost $2,000 less per student annually while outperforming public schools at a rate of 3 to 1. Charter schools simply function better.
This is why President Trump just signed a “sweeping executive order” prioritizing and redirecting federal funding to school choice programs. Parents have the option of applying their children’s portion of education funding through an Education Savings Account (ESA) to a school of their choice. This restores parental authority over education and allows the family to choose the school or program best for their child, returning to Milton Friedman’s 1955 ideal.
The positive effects of the deregulation of education are undeniable.
Throwing money at the problem of failing schools won’t work. Ironically, some of America’s worst school districts spend the most money. Baltimore spends over $21,000 per student and Chicago nearly $30,000. Yet they have "at least a dozen schools each where not a single student is proficient in either math or reading.”
While a public school remains open regardless of how well it’s educating kids, charter schools operate on the inverse – completely dependent on people wanting to enroll their children, thus needing to constantly perform well in order to grow and survive.
And there’s the secret - charter schools are accountable to the American people.
The stark reality is that the current Department of Education promotes the antithesis of the American intellectualism that the NDEA was created to promote in 1958.
Biden’s man at the Department of Education, Secretary Miguel Cardona, tried to cut funding for charters “while denouncing Republican efforts to expand school choice as an effort to “attack our schools” and “privatize education,” and mainly focused on “equity” and “representation” along with various student loan forgiveness programs – including the one recently struck down by the Supreme Court. Cardona said that his goal was making “equity the core of everything we do at the Education Department…”
He was also just really bad at running a department, as proven by his disastrous FAFSA rollout and the subsequent backlog of millions of new FAFSA forms.
Yet, Cardona was confirmed by the Senate with a Yea-Nay Vote of 64-33.
Will Linda McMahon — who has the business skills Cardona lacked — be able to say the same?
At the end of the day, the Left doesn’t like Linda because won’t tolerate the waste and mediocrity that have plagued our education system for so long.
Harkening back to her time in the WWE ring, she's capable of removing the suffocating chokehold the government has on education, releasing authority back where it belongs - to parents.
Under McMahon there will be no more rewards for subpar test scores or increased funding despite failing grades. No more valuing of equity over academics, or administrators over students.
School's back in session, kids.
And no, you can’t buy another ice cream truck.
