- Linda McMahon was confirmed as Trump’s education secretary on Monday night.
- Shortly after her confirmation, she released a memo outlining her goals for the Department of Education.
- They include prioritizing private school voucher programs and getting rid of “divisive DEI” curricula.
President Donald Trump’s newly confirmed education secretary is ready to carry out her boss’ vision of eliminating her own department.
After being confirmed on Monday night, Education Secretary Linda McMahon published a memo outlining her goals for the Department of Education. She framed her goals as the department’s “final mission” to reshape education in the US, saying that coming changes will “profoundly impact” the agency’s operations.
“Removing red tape and bureaucratic barriers will empower parents to make the best educational choices for their children,” McMahon said. “An effective transfer of educational oversight to the states will mean more autonomy for local communities. Teachers, too, will benefit from less micromanagement in the classroom—enabling them to get back to basics.”
McMahon highlighted three goals on which to center the Department of Education’s restructuring:
- Ensure parents are the “primary decision makers” in their kids’ education
- Focus public education on math, reading, science, and history, and not “divisive DEI programs and gender ideology”
- Establish postsecondary education as a path to well-paying careers that meet the demands of the workforce.
These follow Trump’s executive orders related to education in January. One focused on expanding school voucher programs, partly by redirecting federal funds from public to private schools, while the other prioritized “patriotic education” in public classrooms to eliminate curriculum that doesn’t align with the president’s politics.
McMahon’s first goal is about expanding parents’ roles in their children’s education by providing them with publicly funded vouchers to use at private institutions. It has long been a priority for Trump and Republican lawmakers. Trump’s plan to take it a step further by considering reallocating federal block grants meant to boost underfunded schools to private school vouchers would be an escalation, education policy experts previously told BI. The administration would likely have to go through Congress to implement those changes.
McMahon’s focus on math, reading, science, and history is also in alignment with Trump’s executive orders. One of them proposed diverting funding away from public schools that teach “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” The Trump administration recently cut $900 million in research contracts at the Education Department, and some department employees and experts said that the cuts could hinder data collection on kids’ math and reading progress.
McMahon did not elaborate further in her memo regarding her third goal for higher education. She said during her confirmation hearing that she would preserve programs enshrined in law, like the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. She also wrote a September opinion piece in The Hill expressing support for expanding Pell Grant eligibility to workforce training programs, not just college degree programs.
Trump and Republican lawmakers have criticized broad student-loan forgiveness and former President Joe Biden’s key repayment plan, which allowed for cheaper payments. Continuing those efforts is not likely to be prioritized under McMahon.
It’s still unclear how Trump’s executive orders will be carried out. The orders asked McMahon and other agency heads to prepare guidance on implementing changes to the school system, and it’s possible the guidance could end up being less impactful than Trump and McMahon’s stated aims.
Jon Valant, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at The Brookings Institution, previously told BI that even as schools await formal guidance from the department, it’s possible that some districts might prematurely take into account McMahon and Trump’s directives.
“People may interpret them as having more bite than they actually do,” he said.
McMahon’s new guidance comes as Trump has reiterated over the past few weeks that he wants to eliminate the Department of Education altogether. While McMahon said during her confirmation hearing that abolishing the agency would require an act of Congress, she told Democratic lawmakers in a recent letter that she “wholeheartedly” supports Trump’s mission that “the bureaucracy in Washington should be abolished so that we can return education to the states.”
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