President Donald Trump, the winner of the billionaire battle at Wrestlemania 23, has been in close ties with former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment for decades. During her first term as president, she served as Director of Small Business Administration for two years, before resigning in 2019 to lead Pro Trump’s super PAC America First Action. McMahon is currently a Trump candidate to run the U.S. Department of Education, but it may seem like she is not in her traditional duties. (She spent a year with the Connecticut State Board of Education, but it was later revealed that she didn’t have an education degree, as she claimed.)
If McMahon is confirmed by the Senate, her strange challenge is to take charge of the agency to euthanize it. “I told Linda, ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job and get out of your job,'” Trump said on February 4th. His administration wants to abolish the Department of Education, which requires Congressional acts, or at least reduce its authority, including federal student loan programs, funding for low-income districts, and special education services for students. I’m here. Disability, citizenship complaints, etc.
In fact, this demolition work is progressing smoothly. Members of Elon Musk’s Slash and Burn Doge Squad were inside the agency last week, placing staff on paid leave, and, according to the Washington Post, “invested sensitive data from the entire education sector in artificial intelligence software.” To investigate the agency’s program and spending. ” AI may have notified the agency’s decision to cancel existing contracts worth $900 million related to educational research. NBC News reported that it will conduct an internal review aimed at “ensure that agencies do not fund discriminatory practices, including the form of DEI.” On February 7, Congressional Democrats tried to enter the Department of Education building, but security guards blocked their paths. When one of the Congress representatives posted about the incident on X, Musk replied, “There is no such department in the federal government.”
The Ministry of Education has the smallest staff of Cabinet agencies, assuming it exists, and its obligations are not necessarily well understood by the public. The explanation of that mission tends to rely on words such as “management” and “surveillance.” It is not determined how K-12 students in public schools are taught and appreciated. This is primarily a range of individual states and local school districts. In most of these districts, the federal government changes state by state, but typically at 13% of ballparks, offering a relatively modest proportion of school budgets. While Trump often speaks of “send all education and education jobs and needs back to the state,” most of the public education jobs are already done at the state and local levels.
Still, attacking government agencies will hit public schools badly, especially in rural areas and high-density, low-income urban areas. Advocates also fear that dismantling the Ministry of Education will have an immediate, concrete impact on students with disabilities.
McMahon’s mission is consistent with the movement, against school choice (or education). Opponents say they are trying to erode people’s trust in public schools, and most notably through the support of charter schools and voucher programs. It fosters unstable debate over critical racial theories and gender ideology. The weapons that school choice movements will be used in attacks on public schools can be seen in two executive orders issued by President Trump on January 29th.
One of these orders directed states to use federal funds to see how they would “help families select educational alternatives for government agencies, including private and faith-based options.” In other words, the Trump administration wants to nationalize the already offered K-12 voucher program in 17 states. The state re-routs public funds to parents who want to earn tuition fees for private or parochial schools or homeschooling fees. Another executive order that addressed “radical indoctrination in K-12 school education” has led to “anti-American, destructive, harmful, false ideology regarding pilot students” from schools such as pilot students. He threatened to withhold federal funds. Towards surgical and chemical amputations” and “acceptance of “white privilege.” He also directed the heads of several institutions to devise plans to monitor and punish such schools.
Through these executive orders, “This administration is involved in education at the macro and macro level,” said Dan Stewart, a managing lawyer for education and employment at the National Disabled Rights Network, a legal administration group. . They look at the curriculum traditionally in local schools and state powers, and at the same time, they look at different ways to move public dollars out of the system.”
There is ample evidence that the voucher program has negative educational outcomes and places a heavy burden on the state budget. It’s not popular even in the ballot box. In its latest election cycle, Kentucky voted almost 2-1 against Amendment 2. This allowed state legislatures to tax charter schools and vouchers. Surprisingly, the measure received no majority in a single county across the state. Parent-elect voting measures also failed in Colorado and Nebraska.
Still, America First Policy Institute (AFPI), McMahon Chair Public Policy Think Tank, and the Heritage Foundation, which has germinated Project 2025, are supporting educational choices for children. Charitable donations to the voucher program. The AFPI estimated that the bill would allow 85-90% of students across the country to benefit from school choice via scholarships, singled the Arizona voucher program as a successful model. . ”
This is a heart-bending approval by McMahon think tanks. The state’s school selection program costs $900 million for the 2023-24 fiscal year, with more than $300 million in budget, according to the nonprofit Save Our Schools Arizona. It currently accounts for almost half of all budget shortages in Arizona. Most of the families who enrolled in the program did not oust their children from public schools. Instead, the voucher serves as a discount on private tuition fees you have already paid. state. ”
Even as aside the harsh financial burdens imposed by the voucher program, there are many families whose educational freedoms don’t offer much in the way of school choice. Some of these families live in rural (and often Republican-controlled) communities where private school options are limited or nonexistent, with public schools being the main local employer. The voucher program simply bleeds the budget. Other families cannot afford to make up for the difference between the “scholarships” that their children receive through the state voucher program and the actual tuition fees they charge from local private schools. Additionally, others have children with physical, intellectual, or socially emotional disabilities. School rights are guaranteed by the Disabled Education Act or federal law known as the Idea.
“The majority of the right to ideas applies only to public school students,” Jessica Levin, litigation director at the Center for Nonprofit Education Law, told me. Idea requires certification requirements for special education teachers and is subject to students being punished for symptoms of disability. It also strengthens parents’ rights to be involved in developing children’s educational plans and advocate for more or different services, ranging from speech and occupational therapy to assistive technologies. “All of these rights are lost when students go to private school,” Levin said.
Project 2025 proposes federal Title I and special education funds to the Block Grant. “The state will no longer check how they comply with ideas and other federal laws,” Stewart said. He continues, the scenario for children with special needs is “less teachers, fewer funds, slower funds, less certainty.” Of course, according to the school choice movement, parents who are unhappy with public schools bound by their children’s cash should have the opportunity to choose private schools in a thriving educational market. In reality, Levin states: “Private schools are legally permitted to accept students with disabilities and provide appropriate services, so there is a concentration of higher needs students in schools with fewer resources. It will be.”
The tragic irony at the intersection of school choice and special education is that even the most intense public school supporters would not argue that the system is suitable for children with disabilities at present. Currently, the federal government only offers about 13% of the average cost per student for special education services under the idea. This has been removed from the first pledge half a century ago when the idea was first handed over to the law. The majority of states do not fully fund special education, leaving districts to cover gaps by immersing themselves in the general education budget. Or not, but in many cases they do not provide any legally mandated services at all.
Stewart said both public and private schools were encouraged to view students with disabilities as “resource drainage,” as they told me. Underfunded districts in Red, Blue and Purple states are illegally limiting the proportion of children who can receive services or keeping their parents in the dark about their constitutional rights, these students are I fail on a daily basis. The idea is probably a law that is so well named, as its protection often appears to be more theoretical than concrete.