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Erika Donalds is CEO of OptimaEd and a visiting fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Education is facing the usual attacks a conservative nominee with a deep business background could expect from Democrats and the legacy media.
But Linda McMahon is well suited to the task of serving as America’s last education secretary.
She strikes a much-needed contrast with her soon-to-be predecessor. Nearly four years ago, Joe Biden selected an education secretary with a resume that checked all the usual boxes.
Miguel Cardona was a former public-school teacher turned Connecticut education commissioner. Press coverage lauded his conventional credentials and extolled him as an “easy pick.”
But his tenure proved disastrous.
The Education Department failed three consecutive audits and presided over a financial aid debacle that depressed freshman enrollment at colleges across the country. It proposed crippling cuts to high-performing charter schools while shoveling billions out the door in unconstitutional student loan forgiveness schemes. Federal bureaucrats dragged their feet on school reopening during the pandemic, then sat on their hands after school closures advocated by national teachers unions erased two decades of learning improvement.
Cardona eagerly but selectively waded into culture wars. He openly feuded with conservative governors over parental rights and curriculum policies, but stood largely silent while antisemitism flared on college campuses.
This should serve as a cautionary tale. Conventional education experience provides no assurance that an education secretary will be effective.
In selecting McMahon as his nominee, Trump has shown he understands the assignment.
Education has been a lifelong passion for McMahon. She earned a teaching credential in college before choosing a different career path, helping build her family’s successful sports entertainment business empire. In addition to decades as a trustee of Sacred Heart University, she served on the Connecticut Board of Education.
As board chair for the America First Policy Institute, she has presided over an operation developing a conservative education agenda that would restore decision-making power to parents, take radical ideology out of schools, and remove barriers to middle-class careers. She is a champion of high-quality school options and training programs that could allow millions of American students to secure stable employment.
Most importantly, McMahon will bring a badly needed skill set to a position that is largely managerial and administrative.
As head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, she showed how much difference a capable businesswoman can make in government.
During her first year in the job, three major hurricanes struck Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida. She retooled the agency to prioritize disaster relief, repurposing part of the agency’s Washington office into a call center for families and business owners trying to get back on their feet. The agency promptly processed more than 96,000 emergency loans.
That’s the kind of nimble leadership that will be required to repurpose, and shrink, a federal education apparatus that many believe has long outlived its usefulness.
The Education Department made a hash of its largest function: serving as a bank for billions in federally backed student loans. The department is still in the process of fixing a botched overhaul of financial aid applications that created roadblocks for would-be college goers across the country.
In K-12, the department’s largest function is serving as a funding conduit for low-income students and students with disabilities.
Once Trump takes office with a goal to restore power to the states, the department’s defenders need to answer a simple question: What value do the American people get from inserting a federal middleman between students and taxpayers?
Based on the department’s performance over the past four years, I think the answer is: not much.
What it needs is a competent executive who can clean up the mess, return power and funding where it belongs, and then turn out the lights. Linda McMahon is the ideal candidate for the job.
