President-elect Donald Trump wants to dismantle the Department of Education. American history shows that progress — and make no mistake, ending the department would be transformative, positive progress — comes in fits and starts.
Trump will face obstacles shutting down the DEI-obsessed DOE. Still, suppose someone can lead us closer to ending it.
In that case, WWE co-founder Linda McMahon is the woman for the job — because of her educational background and business acumen.
To understand McMahon, the businesswoman, you must grasp her family’s business history. Liberals may mock the WWE’s redneck audience and theatrical, heavy-metal-fueled fake fights. Still, McMahon and her husband transformed a regional family business into an international multi-billion-dollar conglomerate. And this took more than just putting on some gnarly staged combat.
The McMahons streamlined the operations and disrupted the status quo long before Silicon Valley made “disruption” a buzzword. They bought multiple regional leagues, streamlined them at one Connecticut-based headquarters and managed costs. Before the McMahons, wrestling was never the best business. Before the McMahons, it had never been streamlined as an operation. McMahon is an operations guru.
Our education system needs substantial operations and disruption. The Department of Education has only been around since 1979 and the majority of its budget is focused on managing the student loans system — a task that could be handled by other departments. Its grant structure can also be moved to different, existing sub-departments as well.
In all other metrics besides collecting statistical information about schools, the Department of Education has only muddled the lines of funding and control between the federal and local governments. Meanwhile, test scores have continued to fall, and school districts struggle with federal mandates that impose long-term costs they are not prepared to bear. The situation is entirely avoidable — and the solution would be common sense to anyone who is not a lifelong bureaucrat.
McMahon is far from a bureaucrat. She combines this business expertise with an educational background. She sat on the Connecticut School Board for two years; and even before her time on the school board, she had pushed for improving reading instruction. In the late 1990s, the WWE led a successful reading initiative. They paired a slew of WWE-branded books with a library campaign. In addition, McMahon donated to education campaigns and served as a trustee of Sacred Heart University.
McMahon centers education in her life, and, in line with the MAGA agenda, she focuses on bettering people’s lives. Just look at her education goals. She criticizes degree requirements and advocates for more technical education, including expanding Pell Grants for workforce programs. She wants to better the working class, not just American elites or a slew of students who look good in a DEI photo shoot.
McMahon is open to giving students another way to get credentialed and break the hold of universities over our system. She knows how DOE funding strings can impact programs and twist their purpose.
On Sept. 30, 2024, a new rule change by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona went into effect; the Department of Education now ties grant selection to “the applicant’s dedication to hiring ‘personnel who are members of groups that have historically encountered barriers’ due to their ‘gender; race; ethnicity; color; national origin; disability; age; language; migration; … sexual orientation,’ among other factors.” This affects not only specific programs carried out by the department, but the quality of the vendors it selects (and funds) to create results.
Critics, mainly on the left, will claim McMahon and her ilk politicize education. Throughout the 2024 campaign, they complained that conservatives made it political or partisan despite the fact that the “apple ballot” candidates raked in money and endorsements from teachers’ unions. Keep in mind that since 1990, over 94% of campaign contributions from national teachers’ unions have gone to Democratic Party candidates.
Both the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers spent millions of dollars in 2024 alone. Teachers’ unions are the single biggest source of campaign contributions and spending for school board races and often outspend every individual candidate combined. How is that not politicizing education?
The truth is education has long been political, and political parties have the right to debate education. Linda McMahon is not new to this debate. She is a response to how Democrats have misled the American education system.
Aiden Buzzetti is the President of the 1776 Project Foundation. He was previously the Director of Coalitions for the 1776 Project PAC and can be found on X at @AidenBuzzetti.
Linda McMahon is the Chairman of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Advisory Council.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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