Thank You, Secretary McMahon

By Roger Ruvolo and Rebecca Friedrichs

As we celebrate Thanksgiving this week, we’d like to share our thanks for a woman of courage and conviction – Education Secretary Linda McMahon. So much vitriol was hurled her way from the beginning days of the new Trump administration, you’d think Secretary McMahon would slink away and sulk. But you’d be wrong, very wrong.

McMahon has spearheaded a fundamental transformation of the federal involvement in public education in the country. Until 1980, education in the United States was under state jurisdiction. In 1980, it was federalized under President Jimmy Carter – mainly as a payoff to unions for helping him get elected.

The long-term effect was to add large sums of federal taxpayer money onto the spending that schools were already doing with help from state and local taxes. It’s all the same taxpayer, essentially – but the taxes collected go into different pots, such that, shazam, the taxpayer hardly knows he’s financing “education” on several levels.

The new federal layer added billions of dollars in spending at the district level each year. Scholarships and grants fed cash into the tuition increases that inevitably followed the new government involvement (read: taxpayer promise to pay).

Since her March confirmation, McMahon has roughly halved the number of department employees, closed several civil rights enforcement regional offices, and is seeking to move numerous administrative functions to partner agencies. She also forgot what one acronym stood for (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA), to the tsk-tsking of her betters.

But while critics were parsing her sentences, McMahon was working on a much-needed transformation and shrinking of the government goliath.

In May, she joined with Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer on a workforce development plan, streamlining management of two important programs. In one, Labor would have a larger managerial role in adult education and family literacy programs. In another, Labor would help administer career and technical education programs.

Last week, the departments implemented these changes.

McMahon is a popular target of the leftoid media, not least because she helped build what must, to them, be a disgusting World Wrestling Entertainment franchise into a winner – that, worse, was championed way back when by Donald Trump. Ewwwww.

If you are going to hang around with Trump, you are going to get smeared. Early and often. And McMahon and her husband were not spared.

In one telling, McMahon covered up WWE sexual misconduct, tipped off a doctor about a malpractice probe, and was involved in other scandals in the pro wrestling world. In another, she claimed she had an education degree and doesn’t. In a third, a stuffy online journal sneered that it didn’t much like McMahon’s word choices, syntactical usages, or grammar in her hot letter to Harvard.

If you had to generalize, you’d pretty much have to say the left can’t find anything positive to say about Linda McMahon.

And yet, in this public figure, we have someone who forthrightly states that she’s doing what the boss, Trump, publicly outlined numerous times during the campaign he wanted done.

McMahon also recently outlined views that probably have little support in the union offices that had been fattened by taxpayer infusions that came with the Education Department’s founding.

McMahon argued that universities have been overtaken by “administrative bloat” and only a lucky few have “true leaders” to return universities to their once-great promise as bastions of free inquiry and free speech. So very true.

Despite the roars of disapproval and an avalanche of personal attacks, McMahon’s views are not only embraced by a majority of Americans, but they’re not even especially radical.

College is too expensive, thanks in no small part to the left’s fixation with nationalizing everything in sight, making it less effective and impossibly expensive.

And the K-12 schools, sadly, are also in poor shape. It’s not so much because of a lack of funding – in many states, per-pupil spending is higher today than ever before – but because of the new political and cultural influence on curriculum.

Students from the earliest ages are being bombarded with endless woke-isms, but with very little reading and math, and it’s showing in tests of youngsters across the country.

But we have hope and many reasons to give thanks, since the courageous Linda McMahon stepped into the role of Secretary of Education. She’s a revolutionary. May she inspire a wave of adherents to carry on the task.

Roger Ruvolo is a longtime newspaper editor and a contributor to For Kids and Country.

Rebecca Friedrichs is the founder of For Kids and Country, the author of Standing Up to Goliath, and a 28-year public school teacher who was the lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.