Opinion - The fight against Linda McMahon is nothing new — we’ve seen this show before
After condemning President-elect Trump’s plans to dismantle the Department of Education, the teachers unions and mainstream media are once again unhappy with his education policy. This time, they are opposing Trump’s recently announced pick for secretary of Education, his transition team co-chair Linda McMahon.
The Washington Post, ABC and the New York Times all labeled McMahon a “Trump loyalist,” a rather loaded term for someone who has criticized Donald Trump in the past while also choosing to work with him. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, wrote in a statement that she expects to “disagree with Linda McMahon on many issues.”
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest union in the country, went one step further, stating: “By selecting Linda McMahon, Donald Trump is showing that he could not care less about our students’ futures.”
Compare this to the treatment received by Miguel Cardona, who has been secretary of Education since 2020 and has received very little attention. “If you can’t name Biden’s Education secretary,” Politico reported halfway through the Biden administration, “you probably aren’t alone.”
Despite Cardona’s relative anonymity, his record is abysmal. Early in his term, Cardona solicited a letter from the National School Board Association that called concerned parents “domestic terrorists” for seeking information about their children’s school curriculum. More recently, in a quest to simplify federal financial aid , Cardona rolled out a new application process that took 700 times longer than the original and led to delays in aid, disrupting the college plans of millions of students around the country.
Beyond that, Cardona has presided over a steady performance decline in American schools, with fewer and fewer students proficient in reading and math since the onset of the pandemic — that’s in spite of congressionally allocated emergency COVID-era federal funding that was supposed to address this. Cardona did not hold schools accountable for how this money was spent, leading to massive misuse of the funds.
Nevertheless, the unions have papered over Cardona’s record — which seems natural, seeing that he has supported them unsparingly: in an act of naked partisanship, while giving a speech to the AFT, he claimed that House Republicans “would destroy public schools.”
This is the typical treatment of conservatives. During the first Trump administration, the media and teachers unions maligned then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The Washington Post accused her of “trying to sweep rape back under the rug” for simply reinstating due process and cross-examination rights to those accused of sexual harassment in schools and on campuses. Meanwhile, because of her support for voucher programs, which are shown to disproportionately help lower and middle-income families, especially racial minorities, the NEA said she was on a “mission to destroy public education.” The AFT even brought her family into its attacks, claiming that “Betsy DeVos and her family have … [no] respect for civil rights.”
No matter how many students DeVos helped in her tenure, there was nothing she could do right in the eyes of the media and the unions, just as there has been nothing Miguel Cardona could, apparently, do wrong. The problem with DeVos for mainstream institutions is the same problem they have with McMahon. It has nothing to do with competence and everything to do with the fact that these women are Republicans instead of Democrats. No wonder union-boss Pringle has already pejoratively labeled McMahon “Betsy Devos 2.0.”
So what does this differential mainstream treatment imply for education policy in the second Trump administration? First, the media’s coverage of McMahon and her policies will, more likely than not, be consistently slanted and partisan. Second, unions will oppose anything a Republican administration does, not because the policies are bad for students but because Republican administrations undermine union bureaucrats.
Finally and most importantly, good policy is independent of politics. No matter how nasty media coverage or union attacks get, Linda McMahon can make a real positive difference, just as Betsy DeVos did.
The media and unions are going to wage a full-throated attack against McMahon no matter what she does. So she might as well go all in and rip away as much of the wasteful and destructive federal bureaucracy as possible.
Neeraja Deshpande is the Education Freedom Center engagement coordinator at Independent Women’s Forum.
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