Today, Explained - Wrestling with the Education Department

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Trump has named wrestling tycoon Linda McMahon to be his secretary of education. She’ll be tasked with his campaign promise of … closing the department she’ll run. Is it a good idea? This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn and Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, Kim Eggleston, and Anouck Dussaud, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Linda McMahon speaking on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention. Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Senator Mike Rounds, Republican, South Dakota, remember the name, just introduced a bill that would abolish the Department of Education. States, for the most part, prefer to make their decisions on how they educate the children on their own. They really don't need a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. sending out a one-size-fits-all policy in order to receive federal funding in a particular way. It matters because Rounds has a powerful ally on this one. We're going to end education coming out of Washington, D.C. We're going to close it up, all those buildings all over the place.

Can it be done? It would require an act of Congress to get rid of the Department of Education. I don't know that there's enough support among Republicans. There's certainly not 60 votes in the Senate to do it. So as long as we have a filibuster, I think it's probably not happening. Then why has this idea held such appeal for 40 years? On Today Explained. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Bet MGM.

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What do you think today explained us? I don't know. So I'm Erica Meltzer and I'm the national editor at Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a non-profit news organization dedicated to education coverage. Perfect. All right. For those of us in the back of the classroom, what is the Department of Education and what does it do? So the Department of Education is a cabinet-level federal agency that provides support to schools. They oversee Title I funding, which provides billions of dollars to high-poverty schools. They provide information about best practices and a certain amount of oversight of low-performing schools. They also run financial

aid programs for higher education, and they're responsible for civil rights enforcement, which I think is something that we'll probably talk about later in the show. So Linda McMahon is Donald Trump's pick for education secretary. What do we know about her? What are her qualifications? Well, she doesn't have a lot of education experience. She did serve briefly on the Connecticut State Board of Education in 2009 and 2010, and she served on the board of Sacred Heart University, which is a private Roman Catholic university. But she's primarily known as one of the founders of WWE, the wrestling entertainment empire that she founded with her husband, Vince McMahon.

On behalf of the entire McMahon family, you're fired. My wife, Linda McMahon! Still called Linda. And she has been very much in the Trump orbit. Trump made some appearances in professional wrestling. What's going on over here? Donald Trump is in a world he is not familiar with.

They've known each other for decades. We had had a couple of business interactions with WWE and a couple of the properties that then Donald Trump, Mr. Trump, owned and that WWE promoted in those facilities and it was a very good working relationship. She served in its first administration at the head of the Small Business Administration. As an entrepreneur myself, I have shared the experiences of our nation's small business owners.

We are more than our products and services. We are people. We are families. And she's involved in both a think tank and a super pack that spent a lot of money to help get Donald Trump elected. And she co-chairs his transition team. So she's very much a pick that comes from this sort of inner orbit of Trump loyalists. He has the heart of a lion and the soul of a warrior. And I believe that if necessary, he would stand at the gates of hell to defend our country. Okay, so not a ton of experience in education, some but not a ton, a lot more experience in wrestling. Still cold, Linda.

And with small business. What are Donald Trump's priorities when it comes to education? It's worth kind of saying at the outset that education has not actually been a huge part of his campaign. You know, he has talked a lot about abolishing the Department of Education. And sending all education and education worker needs back to the states. And he's talked a lot about getting quote-unquote woke out of education. It's not entirely clear what that means or what that would look like. I have concepts of a plan.

He's talked about promoting a more patriotic civics education. Teach students to love their country, not to hate their country like they're taught right now. He's talked about a very stripped-down federal role, and he's also talked a lot about getting rid of woke and DEI practices in higher education and using the accreditation process to push changes in higher education. These standards will include defending the American tradition and Western civilization,

protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats, offering options... So the Department of Education is responsible for ensuring that students' civil rights are protected at school. So under the Biden administration, Title IX protections on the basis of gender identity were made clearer and more explicit. And a lot of Republicans and conservatives have reacted to that as an example of government overreach that they believe would endanger cisgender girls who might have to share a restroom with a transgender classmate or that it might impede the free speech of a teacher who doesn't believe that transgender identity is a thing and that teacher wants to keep using the previous names and pronouns of a student. And Republicans have said that they are going to roll these back. And then if you have a school where, you know, black boys make up 10% of the student body,

but they make up half of the kids being suspended, things like that might be scrutinized as potential civil rights violations. Republicans have wanted to treat civil rights as a much more individualized type of concern, like was someone being called a slur and the school didn't do anything about it. Okay, so there's stuff that Donald Trump has said, and there's stuff that Linda McMahon has said. What has she said? Linda McMahon, through this America First Policy Institute, has been an advocate for school choice. The organization's education goals include more vouchers for school choice and giving parents more say over curriculum.

Parents deserve the chance to send their children to the school that best meets each child's needs. What I think we're really seeing is we're seeing a push from the Republican Party and from the Trump administration away from public schools and into private schools, whether they're religious or not. Recently, we've seen a big expansion of private school choice in which families can get vouchers that they can either apply against tuition or in some cases, an education savings account that they can apply against homeschool expenses. And so families are getting public money that would have otherwise gone to presumably a public school that their child would have been attending, but now they can take that money and use it elsewhere. And this has been a really big priority for Republicans. And in about a dozen states in the last couple of years, we've seen a major expansion of private school choice that used

to be primarily for kids who were sort of seen as poorly served by public schools. And now we're getting into a situation where in some states, just about any family at any income level is eligible. And the fear is that this is taking money out of public school systems that really can't afford it and need all the resources that they can. What proponents would say back is, well, you haven't done a good job controlling the quality of public schools. And if my child is not going there, there's no reason to expect that my tax dollars would go to that school. But I think there's a concern that we're moving from public education as a collective good to something that's where the parental choice is sort of the supreme

driving factor. Tell me how likely it is she can get some of these priorities accomplished. So I think there's a few things that could be done. I mean, I think sort of the big things that Trump talked about on the campaign trail, some of those things like changes in civil rights enforcement could happen at a much more administrative level. Getting rid of the Department of Education would require an act of Congress and I think would be controversial, and I'm not sure that all Republicans even agree with that. So I think that's seen as less likely.

And I think some of the stuff around like getting woke out of education, sort of what the actual mechanics of that would be, are a little hard to imagine. But the actual sort of mechanisms of controlling things at the classroom level are a little less clear. All right, so Linda McMahon will also have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate if she's going to get the job. What can we expect to hear during her Senate confirmation? Yeah, I mean, I expect that we'll hear a lot of questions about her experience or lack thereof. I think that she'll be pressed on whether she supports this goal of getting rid of the Department of Education. She's also named in

a lawsuit against WWE, against her wrestling company, that these teenage boys who were recruited to work as ring boys experienced sexual abuse. Five men who were between 13 and 15 years old at the time say they were taken advantage of. McMahon denies the claims, but the lawsuit says she failed to protect the kids. I do expect that that will come up in her confirmation hearing. How much of an issue that is, I would say,

I think we're still learning what the bar is for this set of cabinet picks. Like, obviously, Matt Gaetz is out. That's kind of a more extreme example. There are other allegations against some of his other cabinet picks. I think we're sort of in a process of learning what kind of standard his picks will be held to. I would be surprised if people really want to go to the mat

to try and block this nomination unless something more significant comes out between now and January or February. Erica Meltzer of Chalkbeat. Coming up, the long history of trying to kill the DOE. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. If you're a finance manager, you're probably used to having to toggle between multiple disjointed tools just to keep track of everything. And sometimes that means there's limited visibility on business spend. I don't know what any of that means, but Ramp might be able to help. Ramp is a corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your back pocket. Ramp's accounting software automatically collects receipts, categorizes your

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who reminds us that the Department of Education was founded following a campaign promise to a big teachers union by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. We move into the 1980s with confidence and hope and a bright vision of the America we want. An America with jobs and good health and good education for every citizen. And the hope there was that by having a standalone federal department, that you would get more money and more attention on public education. But we have had public education for at least 100 years before that, and we would continue to have public education after that. Most funding for public education comes from state and local sources. That said, the federal government

provides 8% to 10% of funding, and this money is particularly important in high-poverty schools where Title I funds help them do things like hire more social workers, keep class sizes small, hire classroom aides, provide tutoring and reading

and math. And I think schools would definitely notice the lack of this funding if it went away. Depending on your political view, I think there's other things that the Department of Education does that people find valuable and that would be missed. The other thing that's important to discuss is that it's really unclear what would come after getting rid of the Department of Education. So for example, there's sort of different levels of detail and different plans.

So if you look at Project 2025, they go sort of function by function by function of the Department of Education. And they say, this function should go to the Department of Education. And they say, this function should go to the Department of Justice, like civil rights enforcement. This function should go to the Department of Labor. This function should go to Department of Health and Human Services. And this function should go away entirely. If we start to talk about Republicans in Congress,

I think you will find a range of views and not everyone will agree that we should get rid of the Department of Education and not everyone will agree what that should look like. All right. So, Erica, what you're telling us is that Donald Trump is not the first conservative to say the Department of Education is a problem and we want to shut it down. When the Department of Education was first created and in the ensuing years, what has the Republican argument against it looked like and sounded like? So Ronald Reagan is elected basically right after the department is created, and he had promised that he was going to get rid of it. He thought it was this bad idea. Better education doesn't mean a bigger department of education.

In fact, that department should be abolished. Instead, we must do a better job teaching the basics. And then his first education secretary commissions this report, A Nation at Risk, that outlines all these problems in education and how the United States is going to be at a disadvantage on the world stage because our students aren't graduating knowing enough.

And that makes it really hard to get rid of the Department of Education because clearly we need to fix this problem. For the sake of all our children, our country, and our future, we must join together in a national campaign to restore excellence in American education. And so that was, you know, more than 40 years ago, and we still have a Department of Education. Under George W. Bush, you saw this articulation of a somewhat conservative, but also bipartisan idea of the role of the federal government, where there was supposed to be a lot of accountability for schools based on their test scores. If students weren't making progress, there was going to be consequences for those schools.

This is no child left behind. As of this hour, America's schools will be on a new path of reform and a new path of results. There turned out to be a fair number of challenges with implementation and actually making progress under this. I don't think there's really any defenders of No Child Left Behind anymore. Everyone says they would have, I think, done it differently if they could do it again. But that is sort of the beginning of this enhanced federal role in school accountability that takes a new form under Obama. And here's how Race to the Top works. First, we encourage states to adopt more challenging

standards that will actually prepare our kids for college and their careers. We also encourage schools to adopt better assessments. There's actually a huge Republican backlash to this, and I think to some degree, sort of the most current iteration of Republican ideas around education, I think to some degree, still tied to this backlash to the Obama policies. People say, like, you're not going to tell us what to do. The question is whether we believe Congress ought to write the laws or the United States Department of Education ought to write the laws. Article 1 of the United States Constitution says that the United States Congress, we should write the laws.

So there's a couple different issues in play. Some of this is just philosophical, ideological. We favor smaller government. We favor a more constrained federal role. And education is primarily a local issue, so we shouldn't have a federal department of education. 90, 95% of your education dollars are state and local. That $100 billion gets swirled around in a big bureaucracy up there.

They send rules down that don't help education. They hinder innovation. I would cut them out of the loop. I don't think you'd notice if the whole department were gone tomorrow. We might have a disagreement on that. And then some of it has to do with specific things that the department has done. So, for example, a lot of conservatives really disagree with the approach to civil rights enforcement under democratic administrations. And of course, when they take control, they can change how civil rights enforcement is handled. But then if the Democrats come back in, then you get the democratic

approach again. And so let's just, you know, get rid of the department. And then I think, you know, people will point to the fact that many of the problems in education are very persistent and haven't necessarily improved a lot, like things like gaps between racial and ethnic groups in test scores and graduation rates, that these things have been very stubborn, probably because they're closely tied to socioeconomic issues. I mean, child poverty is a huge predictor of how kids do in school, and we have not solved child poverty. But what conservatives will say is like, look, we're spending all this money and we're not getting anything for it, so let's get rid of the department. But what kind of counters that is that if you're saying that education is very

important and schools aren't doing a good job, then that also kind of calls out for a federal role to fix it. And so I think that's why it's been a little bit hard to let go of the Department of Education, sort of regardless of your political perspective. When you talk about the Department of Education screwing things up, one of the things that even if you don't have kids, even if you're not paying very careful attention, one of the things I think you may know about is the mess up with FAFSA. This is the time of the year when many high school seniors choose their college, but millions are in limbo, still waiting to hear how much financial

aid they can expect. This year, frustration as improvements to the application caused a slew of technical glitches and processing delays. Yeah, so the FAFSA is the Federal Financial Aid Form. It's pretty much the prerequisite to qualify for any kind of aid. It was notoriously complicated. It made people cry and feel very upset. And so they decided to simplify it. But in the process of simplifying it, they also decided we need to update all these computer systems, some of which are 40 and 50 years old. But this whole kind of massive IT update was not doable in the timeframe. And so the new FAFSA launched and people encountered a lot of technical problems. I mean, I had a senior in high school filling out the form. And for like a minor technical issue, our form got held up for months and months and months.

The normal decision date for college passed, and we didn't know what our financial aid package was going to be because our form had not been processed. Without these award packages, I can't make my final decision, which is ultimately delaying me getting to the finish line. Whoever modified or adjusted the fast food process for this year, no ma'am, no sir. What in the world were you thinking? It was something that touched a lot of families, including, you know, a lot of sort of middle-class families that don't necessarily otherwise have a lot of dissatisfaction. And I think it just fueled this idea that it's a bureaucratic mess, that people don't really know what they're doing over there. This should not be partisan. It is about the students. It is about the parents. It is about the integrity of a process that the Department of Education has

totally failed at. Erica, let me run a thought past you. Clearly, as you've laid out, people have been talking about big changes to the Department of Education for years, and not that much has actually changed. Why are we still entertaining the idea that a new president could come in, appoint a secretary, and blow the whole thing up? I mean, Donald Trump is not someone who kind of plays by the normal rules of government or buys by the traditional norms. And we also have the role of Project 2025, which was written by the Heritage Foundation, by a lot of the authors were people who worked in his first administration. And so I think to some degree, the aftermath of the pandemic, where we see these really heated fights at school boards and just sort of this general dissatisfaction with education. And we have this really strong conservative parents' rights movement.

And so I think for people who have wanted this for a long time, you know, for decades, it was just a line in a platform that no one really thought about. And now it feels like there's some energy around the idea that people are talking about it in a new way. And I actually feel like since the election, I've even noticed a slight shift in the language that people use. Conservatives, I mean. So it used to be we're going to dismantle the Department of Education. And now I sometimes hear people say we're going to dismantle or diminish the Department of Education. And now I sometimes hear people say, we're going to dismantle or diminish the Department of Education. And so you could, I think it might be more likely

that we keep the Department of Education, but that some of its functions are stripped away, that it has a more diminished role. And I think that would be more politically achievable as well. Erica Meltzer of Chalkbeat. Amanda Llewellyn and Peter Balanon-Rosen produced today's show. We were edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard,

Kim Eggleston, and Anouk Douceau. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's daughter are our engineers. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. explained.