Linda McMahon’s rise to the nation’s top education job is set to come as the political stars align for some of the incoming president’s more ambitious education policy proposals: cuts to the federal education budget if not the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education, and a dramatic expansion of private school choice.
That backdrop has advocates for low-income students and teachers concerned about her lack of experience in education. At the same time, supporters of McMahon point to her background running a multibillion-dollar business enterprise as an asset in steering a giant federal bureaucracy with a roughly $80 billion budget.
McMahon, 76, was not the most outspoken candidate in contention for the education secretary’s job. But she’s been a part of Trump’s orbit for decades, most recently serving as co-chair of his transition team and as the chair of an organization that’s laid much of the groundwork for the president-elect’s second term. And the former pro-wrestling executive has long shown an interest in education.
“It’s definitely a pick out of the normal, and that is intentional,” said Casey Cobb, an educational policy professor at the University of Connecticut in McMahon’s home state. “It’s not inconsistent with his approach in 2016 in hiring an education outsider.”
McMahon lacks formal education experience, but has shown an interest in kids
By her own account, McMahon thought she would become a classroom teacher, and she graduated with a French degree and a teaching certificate, according to her alma mater, East Carolina University. Instead, she went on to co-found and lead World Wrestling Entertainment, where she grew the brand for years into a multibillion-dollar enterprise.
Her interest in education did appear through her work at WWE. In 2000, she launched “GET REAL,” a campaign aimed at delivering positive messages about education and literacy to young adults through public service announcements, posters, and bookmarks featuring WWE stars.
Still, when she was eventually appointed to serve on the Connecticut state school board, the lawmakers charged with vetting her nomination were apprehensive about her knowledge of education. She went on to serve for a year on the board before stepping down to run for Senate in 2010.
One of her former colleagues on the board, Theresa Hopkins-Staten, said McMahon came to meetings prepared and engaged, and ready to ask questions.
“I always found her comments and discussion to be insightful and focused on the issues of learning and the children of Connecticut,” Hopkins-Staten said in a phone interview.
Years later, McMahon is also facing questions about whether she’s qualified to serve in an education leadership role.
Becky Pringle, president of nation’s largest teachers’ union the National Education Association, called her “grossly unqualified.” In a statement, Robert Kim, executive director of the Education Law Center, which supports litigation aimed at ensuring adequate public school funding, urged the U.S. Senate to “fulfill its constitutional duty of ‘advice and consent’ by thoroughly investigating the nominee’s background and experience and determining her suitability for the very weighty role for which she is being proposed.”
“The Secretary must also champion educators and the teaching profession and protect the civil rights of students and families,” Kim’s statement said.
But McMahon’s reputation as a “no-nonsense, top-level” manager is more of an asset atop a big, federal bureaucracy like the U.S. Department of Education than decades spent in a classroom, said Jim Blew, who served as an assistant secretary under Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary in his first term.
“The department needs a highly skilled executive manager. Stop. Period,” said Blew, now the co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a nonprofit focused on conservative policy solutions. “You need someone with her skillset to come in and fix the multiple problems,” including the troubled rollout of a new Federal Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.
From Blew’s perspective, she has “the right values,” particularly in embracing school choice, and is “completely trusted by the president-elect.”
Plus, the Senate has confirmed her before. The chamber voted 81-19 in 2017 to greenlight her appointment as head of the Small Business Administration at the start of Trump’s first term.
Teachers’ unions worry about funding for public schools
Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, McMahon wrote that she was most concerned with what the next president would do with school choice—though, at that point, charter schools were top of mind for her. Nearly 10 years later, school choice policies that provide families with public resources to spend on private school are likely to be high on the list of priorities for her to tackle as education secretary.
Another of Trump’s primary education-related campaign pledges was to eliminate the agency he plans to nominate McMahon to lead.
“All this talk of dismantling the Department of Education, that’s a harder cast. It sounds easy but it’s probably not likely in the near term,” said Cobb, the University of Connecticut professor. “What is likely is more reducing its footprint and probably streamlining and targeting programming that supports the conservative agenda around school choice.”
That agenda prompted Pringle of the NEA to call on the Senate to reject McMahon’s nomination, saying in a statement that Trump “is showing that he could not care less about our students’ futures.”
The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers’ union, said it was open to working with her, as it did with DeVos.
AFT President Randi Weingarten said the union would “work with anyone who puts the aspirations of our students, families and communities first.”
“That means strengthening public education, not undermining it,” she said in a statement.
The senator who will need to steer McMahon’s nomination through the Senate praised her SBA experience
The senator who will be responsible for steering McMahon’s coming nomination through the chamber commended McMahon for her experience running the SBA in Trump’s first term while echoing the president-elect’s support for private school choice.
“I agree with President Trump’s statement that we need someone who is going to focus on parental choice in children’s education,” U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who is set to chair the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee in January, said in a statement. “Linda McMahon’s experience running the Small Business Administration can obviously help in running another agency. I look forward to meeting with her.”
Tiffany Justice, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, the conservative group that rose to national prominence over its opposition to COVID-19 precautions and what its members characterize as “woke” indoctrination in public schools, said she was proud to support McMahon.
“I will help the incoming secretary any way I can to ensure parents get back in the driver’s seat of their child’s education,” Justice, who was thought to be in the running for the secretary post, said in a statement.
The America First Policy Institute, which formed after Trump’s 2020 loss to advance the former president’s policy agenda and which McMahon co-chairs, has developed an education policy agenda that aligns closely with that of Moms for Liberty.
The organization has pushed for increased parental control over schools and the ability for parents to use public funds to enroll their children in private schools. It’s also taken aim at limiting lessons and curriculum that address with race, racism, gender, and sexuality. At the state level, the organization advocates for the end of school district boundaries so parents can enroll their children in any school in their state.
Cobb, the University of Connecticut policy professor, says he worries that Trump’s agenda for education could ultimately lead to more division.
“Education plays a role in educating our citizenry to have civic dialogue, to understand each other’s backgrounds, to respect each other’s backgrounds,” he said. “If we’re not going to be in the same schools together, which is ultimately a consequence of unfettered school choice, not to mention not discussing racism in American schools, or striking fear in teachers to not address racism at all—we’re missing tremendous opportunity to help bring the nation together.”
