By conventional standards wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon’s qualifications to become the next U.S. education secretary are a bit thin.
She has had two years on Connecticut’s feckless State Board of Education, many years on the Board of Trustees of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, and two years as chief of the U.S. Small Business Administration, and has run two spectacularly expensive but also spectacularly unsuccessful campaigns for U.S. senator during which she proved embarrassingly ignorant of government. She won’t be mistaken for a great educator.
Her real qualification has been the great wealth she amassed from adding grotesque crudity to the old fakery of professional wrestling. That wealth brought her close to once and future president Donald Trump.
But then almost anyone might elevate the U.S. Education Department more than has been done by its current secretary, Miguel Cardona, who was briefly Connecticut’s education commissioner before President Biden made him a national figure. Whereupon Cardona antagonized Congress with a disastrous and belated reformatting of the federal government’s application form for student financial aid, presided merrily over the Biden administration’s illegal forgiveness of college student loans, and pandered constantly to the teacher unions.
McMahon will have to work hard to be more of an embarrassment than Cardona, whose main qualification for the president’s cabinet was just as political as McMahon’s wealth is: his Puerto Rican ancestry in an administration obsessed with identity politics.
But McMahon does have one genuine qualification for education secretary: the shrieking of the teacher unions against her.
The president-elect would like to eliminate the Education Department, since it mainly constitutes patronage for the unions and the Democratic Party, whose army the unions provide. Since Congress is unlikely to permit eliminating the department, Trump and McMahon at least will get the department to reverse its “woke” initiatives and mandates on states and to promote school choice. That is, the new administration may break the monopoly of public education, which these days, especially in Connecticut, is hardly public at all. In Connecticut teachers are the only government employees whose job evaluations are exempt from disclosure under freedom-of-information law.
Since the Education Department is an annex of the Democratic Party, Republicans aim to find more ways of subsidizing private, church, or “charter” schools, schools beyond union control. The unions and the Democrats charge that this will divert money from public schools, but the charge is misleading, since greater government financial support for nonpublic schools will divert students as well, reducing public school expense.
In any case Connecticut’s “minimum budget requirement” law for public schools already makes it almost impossible for school systems to reduce spending even amid declining student enrollment, another law enacted to serve teachers and their unions, not students.
The trend away from public schools is not entirely to be celebrated. For many years the public schools were the great democratizers, institutions through which most children passed and met people different from them. But as the expanded welfare system of the “Great Society” began destroying the families of the poor, causing child neglect and demoralization and dragging down city schools, middle- and upper-class families realized that decent education required getting away from the underclass kids, and so the democratizing influence of the public schools diminished sharply.
More government support for nonpublic schools will weaken low-performing public schools by drawing away their better students. Connecticut’s regional “magnet” schools have already done this to Hartford’s schools while failing to integrate them racially. But at least nonpublic schools may improve education for the students who use them to escape hopeless public schools, and this may be better than nothing.
Student performance in the United States long has been declining despite the U.S. Department of Education, even before the recent virus epidemic, on which educators seem likely to blame educational failure for the next century or two. While the teacher unions love the department for its patronage, the country easily could do without it, and who better than Linda McMahon to make it even more ridiculous than Cardona did and then body-slam it into oblivion?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
