Editor’s Note: This statement was originally published by the National Association of Scholars on November 20, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) welcomes the nomination of Linda McMahon to serve as the next Secretary of Education. Her character, her experience, and her commitment to reform make her an excellent choice to lead the coming era of educational renaissance. We urge the Senate to confirm her in this position.
McMahon is best known in education policy as a champion of school choice. School choice is a powerful step in the right direction, though it will not by itself cure the grievous deficiencies in American education. We can say that because “school choice” has long been the policy in higher education. Students can apply to admission and attend college at any among several thousand colleges and universities. And yet the vast majority of these colleges and universities provide the same level of mediocre and politicized education.
The system of free choice in higher education, however, has allowed a small number of truly excellent colleges to flourish. Likewise school choice applied to K-12 education will allow more and more high quality alternatives to establish themselves.
Secretary McMahon will face the challenge of helping these high quality alternative schools and colleges thrive in the face of fierce resistance by the educational establishment. She is up to that challenge as shown by her personal and professional history as an advocate of ideas opposed by entrenched bureaucracies.
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The guiding ideal of reform supported by NAS is to restore liberty in education. We are confident that Secretary McMahon will guide the Education Department through detailed, thoroughgoing reform. The Education Department as it stands is the greatest impediment in the country to liberty and excellence in both K-12 and postsecondary education.
We urge Secretary McMahon to transform the Education Department into a body that steadfastly upholds student and faculty rights to free speech and due process. In recent years ED has promoted censorship, intimidation, and the crushing of educational initiative. Comprised of myriad programs and offices, each with its own illiberal agenda. The Education Department, with its many lifetime bureaucrats, has become a Hydra that enforces conformity to rules that obstruct free inquiry, the pursuit of truth, due process, and justice.
Among the needed reforms are a sweeping review of the accreditation system which, as it currently stands, shelters mediocrity while encouraging aggressive ideological imposition. The Education Department must remove its own administrative and regulatory structure that promote the radical politicization of schools and colleges. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) under whatever names it chooses to disguise itself must be eradicated.
Reforming education will, of course, require finding ways to attract teachers who know their subjects and who also know and value liberty. Teachers who enter the field as graduates of teachers colleges, or who remain in the field by gaining credentials from such colleges, are often profoundly damaged by the miseducation they receive. These programs are often saturated with anti-American bias and obsessions with pedagogical approaches rooted in ideologies hostile to our civilization. The graduates of such programs are left with little but the shibboleths of the radical activists and have faint knowledge of how to cultivate in their students a love of knowledge and love of their own country.
The Education Department must reform higher education to ensure that America’s K-12 schools will have a cadre of teachers and administrators raised in a culture of liberty.
NAS also recommends substantial reforms to the finances of higher education. America must change the financial system’s economic incentives: above all, colleges should assume partial responsibility for student loans. We urge Secretary McMahon to ask Congress to reform the Higher Education Act, to make this reform possible. She also should ask Congress to pass ironclad laws that prohibit the Education Department from “forgiving” student loans on its own authority. Secretary McMahon will make a very great contribution to education policy by ensuring that the Education Department never repeats the lawless actions it conducted during the Biden administration.
NAS then recommends thorough overhaul of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which has been used to impose discriminatory race and sex policies on education institutions. OCR’s staff should be reduced by four-fifths, and OCR should formally rescind “disparate impact” theory (especially with regards to school discipline), the redefinition of “sex” to include “gender,” “gender identity,” and “gender expression,” and the redefinition of “sex discrimination” to include the far more serious charges of “sexual harassment” and “sexual violence.” OCR should recommit itself to equal opportunity and equal standards for all individuals and for due process rights.
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More generally, we urge McMahon to secure Congressional cooperation in a vast simplification of the Education Department. The Education Department’s core functions are to disburse Title I funds to support poorer school districts, to disburse Special Education funds for handicapped children, to provide Pell Grants for poorer college students, and to provide college loans for most American college students. Virtually everything else the Education Department does should either be relocated to other Departments or eliminated—including virtually all “discretionary” programs, which allow Education Department funds to be directed at the discretion of its radical permanent bureaucracy. We urge Secretary McMahon then to provide rigorous accountability checks on the Education Department’s core programs, including efficiency measures applied to the Education Department’s own employees and Return on Investment measures of the actual improvement to students’ educational attainment per federal taxpayer dollar expended.
The amounts spent on poor school districts and handicapped children should be rigorously audited. No one begrudges the money spent to help students in need, but Americans are increasingly aware that these channels of funding often disguise a vast set aside for educational bureaucrats who do very little to assist actual students. The funding lines support sinecures for people whose principal occupation is to advocate for more public spending.
We know that some supporters of the Trump administration urge the entire elimination of the Education Department. We do not know McMahon’s own intentions, but we suspect that she would like to begin by reforming the Education Department thoroughly, so as to allow President Trump to decide whether a slimmed down and depoliticized Education Department can serve the public welfare.
To that end, we plan to provide Secretary Mahon with a roadmap to reform the Department. For the last year we have been researching and writing that roadmap, titled Waste Land: The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism. We look forward to handing Secretary McMahon the first printed copy upon her confirmation as Secretary.
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Image of Linda McMahon by Gage Skidmore on Flickr
“Teachers who enter the field as graduates of teachers colleges, or who remain in the field by gaining credentials from such colleges, are often profoundly damaged by the miseducation they receive.”
The alternative is worse — that being union-sponsored workshops instead of actual college courses at the teacher’s colleges.
This is already happening in Massachusetts — instead of teachers taking college courses for recertification, they instead are getting CEUs via seminars and webinars sponsored by the Massachusetts Teacher’s Association (NEA) — I learned about this last March when the bleep hit the fan after one of these webinars wound up being rather antisemitic.
See: https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/massachusetts-teachers-association-accused-of-antisemitism/
As bad as a teacher’s college may be, there still is a syllabus and a dean — and with public institutions, which most of them are, eventually the Governor and Legislature come into play. It’s not a perfect system but there is some level of accountability — which does not exist when the union itself does it. And Lord only knows what the MTA has taught in some of its other courses…
As to OCR, the biggest problem (of many) is that the field offices are completely independent of headquarters and not only can do whatever they damn well please but do so with impunity. They’re not even consistent with each other, so much so that college administrators are told that there are different sets of rules depending on which region you are in.
For example, ADA means one thing in Massachusetts (Region 1), the exact opposite in Connecticut (Region 2), and yet something else in the rest of the country. This has been openly known for at least 15 years now, it’s taught in training seminars.
Back after the Republicans took Congress in 1995, I was openly told that OCR had shifted a lot of policy documents out of the regulations and into the regional field manuals so that the Congressional staffers couldn’t find them. So this is a problem that has existed for 30 years now, and the solution is to pull these decisions back to DC where ED/OCR could at least be consistent with itself.