Senators Asked Linda McMahon the Right Questions Yesterday. They Just Didn't Get Answers.
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In her Thursday Senate confirmation hearing to be education secretary, Linda McMahon seemed to make some promising basic commitments. Notably, when pressed on whether she would support the dismantling of the Department of Education by the Department of Government Efficiency or whether she would tie up funding for programs that had been allocated through Congress, she in both instances insisted that she would defer to Congress' decisions, and that the lawmakers were in control. (She also asserted that 'the president will not ask me to do anything that will break the law.') McMahon, at least, didn't seem to want to throw the nation's entire education system into lawless chaos.
But with any deeper digging, Democratic senators on the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions ran into a more troubling sign of what McMahon's agenda could mean for students who wouldn't necessarily benefit from school choice.
McMahon is a prominent defender of 'parental rights,' including school choice, and she has advocated for publicly funded vouchers that students can use for education outside the public school system. In the hearing, McMahon stressed that school choice helps poor and Black students by giving them the opportunity for better education; she did not address what this meant for the children who would be left in the public schools.
The moment that clarified the implications of the federal government fully throwing its support behind private and religious schools came in an exchange with Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Democrat from Delaware. Already in the hearing, senators had discussed the importance of a federal education department in ensuring that students with disabilities are accommodated by local schools. Blunt Rochester took that a step further.
Blunt Rochester: Do you believe that any school benefiting from taxpayer dollars should be required to follow federal civil rights laws?
McMahon: Schools should be required to follow the laws.
Blunt Rochester: Anybody getting taxpayer dollars. That's good. So private schools shouldn't be able to turn away a student with a disability? Or a student based on their religion, or their ethnicity or race?
McMahon: Well, private schools aren't taking federal dollars. So they have the ability to say that if they do not believe—
Blunt Rochester: They do receive them. They should not.
McMahon: Well, if they believe that they cannot best serve that student, and they are not taking federal dollars, then they have the right not to accept that student.
Blunt Rochester: But I'm speaking specifically, when we talk about—there's a lot of conversation about vouchers. If private schools take federal dollars, can they turn away a child based on a disability or religion or race?
McMahon: Well I think that there are also some public schools who are saying that they don't have the—
Blunt Rochester: It's really just a yes or no.
McMahon: No it's not. It really isn't.
Unfortunately, Blunt Rochester, rather than pressing McMahon, asked the nominee to follow up with her privately, noting her limited time for questioning. But this was one of the most pointed moments of the day, and it got to a very urgent question in education: How can a government claim to represent all its citizens if the private schools it sends money to turn out to be discriminatory, or to teach damaging or anti-scientific curricula? How can it fund schools freed from federal oversight and still protect the rights of vulnerable children who won't be naturally welcomed into those alternate institutions? Whether it is because the senators rushed through this line of questioning or because McMahon stonewalled successfully, we never got an answer.
McMahon faced other moments of pressure over the Trump education agenda, and was obligated to defend, with some discomfort, the administration's stances, including its assault on anything that appeared to promote diversity. As a result, when Sen. Chris Murphy asked if there was a 'possibility that if a school has a club for Vietnamese American students, or Black students, where they meet after school, that they could be potentially in jeopardy of receiving federal funding,' McMahon equivocated. 'Again, I would like to fully look into what the [executive] order is and what those clubs are doing.'
Those moments highlighted the threats of disruptive, sweeping changes that have caused experts who focus on civil rights and inequality in education to worry about a Trump Department of Education. But the strange thing about those threats is that they imagine a functioning Department of Education at all.
And that is not a given. President Donald Trump has said he wants the department gone, and Republican members of Congress periodically introduce bills to eliminate it. In this second Trump era, the momentum to abolish the department seems more real than ever. So during the hearing, a bizarre fact hung over the entire event: Trump might shut down the very department McMahon is nominated to lead. As Sen. Maggie Hassan put it: 'The whole hearing right now feels kind of surreal to me. It's almost like we're being subjected to a very elegant gaslighting.'
For McMahon, caught between the actual obligations of the department and these Republican ambitions, this meant she had to both promise to fight cultural battles and emphasize the superfluousness of her department.
You could see this in her response to Republican questions. To Sen. Josh Hawley, she vowed to enforce the interpretation of Title IX as protecting women 'in their spaces' by banning transgender women from sports teams and female dorms; to pull funding from universities that tolerated 'antisemitism' (whether this term meant simply violence against Jewish students or, more broadly, anti-Israel protests was unclear); and to revoke the visas of international students 'who have supported terrorist organizations by trespassing or vandalism or acts of violence.' To Sen. Jim Banks, she promised to 'take the ideology out of education' by cracking down on DEI programs and to force universities to be more transparent about donations from China and other 'anti-American influences.' To Sen. Ashley Moody, she promised to look into the accreditation process for higher education, considering complaints that the independent accreditation agencies had been overly critical of conservative curricula and programming.
These were promises McMahon made under the assumption that she would have the power to exert any control over the nation's education system. In those answers, she didn't mention the possibility she would have none.
At other times, she worked to explain how her department's absence would be just fine. The federal programs would still function, just under other departments. Grants and other funding would still go out. Health and Human Services could look after students with disabilities and the Department of Justice could police civil rights violations in schools. 'I am all for the president's mission, which is to return education to the states,' she said.
But anyone watching could tell that she was in a bind. Republicans were asking her to disappear, to let the states take charge. But they also wanted a ruthless, firm hand to guide the country's education toward their conservative vision. To do both is impossible, but if McMahon holds off the calls for her department's elimination, she has shown, at least in her nonanswer to Blunt Rochester, that her concern is for a certain type of imagined student—the child of heavily involved parents; a bright, able-bodied kid, one without any difficulties in their home life, learning differences or disabilities, or any other complicating factors—and not of the millions of children who fall outside that vision.
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