McMahon's Three Convictions

Linda McMahon is now the latest in a long line of deeply unqualified Secretaries of Education, and she has hit the ground running with her memo about the department's Final Destination Solution Mission.

She's pro-disruption! Nobody is more qualified than parents to make educational decisions (so non-parents should not be allowed to serve on a school board?). She started out to be a teacher almost (which, tragically, puts her far ahead of many of her predecessors). Education shouldn't be plagued with corruption and unjust discrimination (but the department has already thrown out many complaints of what I guess was just discrimination). She is a font of privateer right wing talking points.

McMahon focuses on three convictions, which, if nothing else, may give a clue which of the administration's conflicting education goals (end federal meddling in education, and increase federal meddling in education) she is going to pursue. None of them are good news.

Parents are the primary decision makers in their children’s education.

Send education back to the states! Then the states can send it back to parents and voila-- government has sloughed off any involvement in or responsibility for public education.

We should not take seriously any parental rights declaration that does not include recognition and protection of students' rights. Both their rights to safety and their rights to make choices about their own lives.

It's also worth noting that this "empowerment" of parents is never accompanied by sources of information to help inform parental choices, nor regulation to assure parents that what they encounter on the free market is actually sound. Kind of like "We will abolish the FDA so that consumers are free to select from among a panoply of products that may or may include some which are poisonous, but we're sure the market will sort that out."

Taxpayer-funded education should refocus on meaningful learning in math, reading, science, and history—not divisive DEI programs and gender ideology.

The list of Things To Focus On is, of course, missing many items (art, music, writing, the ever-expanding list of "practical" items like filling out taxes and changing tires, etc etc etc). The "divisive DEI programs and gender ideology" portion is meaningless enough to be adapted to whatever grievance MAGA has decided to be outraged by.

Are schools meant to ignore diversity and pretend that all students are the same? If equity is bad, how does one propose that inequity be administered? If schools are opposed to inclusion, who is meant to be excluded, and how should that exclusion be managed? Serving the special needs of some students comes under DEI--should that be terminated?

The department has attempted to clarify its anti-diversity directive

"Schools may not operate policies or programs under any name that treat students differently based on race, engage in racial stereotyping, or create hostile environments for students of particular races," the letter reads. "For example, schools with programs focused on interests in particular cultures, heritages, and areas of the world would not in and of themselves violate Title VI, assuming they are open to all students regardless of race." The letter also clarified that identity-based observances like Black History Month are acceptable, as long as the events are open to all students.

Which comes awfully close to "you can't exclude white kids from anything." "Hostile environment" is a vague term that will depend entirely on how the folks in charge of enforcement care to interpret it. The language could certainly support a complaint about racism in a school, but the fact that the department has dropped a reported 10,000 complaints about disability access and sexual and racial harassment gives us a pretty good sense of which way the wind is blowing here.

"Gender ideology" is an even more mysterious term. As near as I can tell, "gender ideology" refers to anything that suggests that it's unremarkable that LGBTQ persons exist.

Postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs.

This administration is certainly not the first to want to apply return-on-investment analysis to higher education. The "aligned with workforce needs" is a popular standard for the business world; why train workers yourself if you can get post-high school institutions to create the pool of meat widgets you want (while getting the meat widgets themselves to pay for it).

Nobody has yet figured out how to actually do this, and I don't imagine the current brain trust has any better ideas.

So what do we have here

Instead of dismantling the department and thereby ending its access to any levers of power, McMahon appears to be going with increasing the levels of micro-management by the feds in order to score some culture panic victories.

"Final mission" tries to signal that they are absolutely going to dismantle the department just as soon as they clean up this culture panic stuff. However, the culture panic crowd is never done. I cannot imagine a universe in which McMahon says, "We have now wiped out all the terrible indoctrination and DEI/CRT/MOUSE in the education system, so we can shut down the department."

No, a culture panic movement is deeply in love with the problem, because the problem gives them license to do whatever they wish. To declare the problem solved is to give up the power they derive from continuously hammering the panic button. Like Betsy DeVos before her, McMahon may have been determined to dismantle the levers of power until she gets her hands on them and...well...maybe as long as it's for the right cause... Panic always craves power; I will put a small bet on the prediction that the department will not be tossed into the fires of Mount Doom any time soon.