A year ago today, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon came into office, determined to put herself out of a job by leading the closure of the department she had just been sworn in to lead. And twelve months later, the elimination of the U.S. Education Department remains her goal, McMahon told K-12 Dive Monday afternoon.
McMahon said that despite barriers via legal challenges to Education Department layoffs, she sees progress here as well as in other areas of the Trump administration's education agenda.
Over the course of our conversation, McMahon shared her thoughts on the agency's Title IX enforcement in girls’ and women’s sports, efforts to improve literacy, and what she considers the biggest obstacles and successes thus far.
Editor’s note: The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
K-12 DIVE: At this one-year anniversary as serving as education secretary, what is the single-most measurable accomplishment at the department, and what data do you have to show that it's working?
LINDA MCMAHON: I'm pleased with a lot of the projects that we've been working on. I don't know that I would just narrow it down and say, “Boy, this is the total standout above all else.”
But I have been very pleased with a lot of the work that we've been able to do with Title IX — and continuing to put forth the president's executive order about no men in women's sports. I think our very strong stance against that has been something that I'm very proud of.
One other thing that I've been really incredibly proud of: We inherited a broken FAFSA [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] system from the Biden administration. Parents couldn't get on. It was way behind schedule. We spent the first few months of my being part of this administration making sure that FAFSA was completely redone, up and running. We actually launched it not only on time, but a little bit early.
I really believe that was a major accomplishment for us — not only technologically, but just in service to our parents and our students.
What has been your biggest setback this year, or was there a policy you couldn't advance as expected?
MCMAHON: Anytime you come up against federal bureaucracy, it's always tough to navigate through that.
We were looking at some RIFs [reduction-in-force] in the department. We believe that we've made very good judgments about what those RIFs needed to be. But actually, it got held up in court.
The administration was challenged as to whether or not it actually had the lawful ability to direct the sizing of those departments.
So that was just a loss of time with everything we were trying to get accomplished. And I think it kept confusion here at the department for a while, and clearly that's not good. It was tough to navigate, but we made our way through.
You promised to put yourself out of a job by leading the closure of the Education Department, but there's been resistance to do so. Do you still believe the department is not needed?
MCMAHON: Well, I have to tell you, I never expected that it would go through without any resistance. That would be sort of Pollyanna-ish to think that there would not be those who were concerned about what that would mean.
Clearly it is still my mission, and I do believe it is the correct mission.
The Department of Education is a pass-through agency. And before 1980 [when the Education Department began operations], Title I monies got distributed, IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] monies got distributed, competitive grants were held.
I think that if we can get back to less bureaucracy, more money funneling into the states, into the hands of schools and students, that's where the money needs to get to. That is the ultimate goal with this.
If we can streamline this bureaucracy, take away the overhead that resides here in the Department of Education, and utilize other agencies with expertise to distribute this money through their systems, I think that's a win-win.
At a congressional budget hearing last year, you said literacy was your top priority. What concrete steps has the department taken in this area?
MCMAHON: The Department of Education doesn't really control curriculum at any state level, but what we are really trying to do as I tour the country is looking at, “What are the best practices?” When we see Harvard and other universities having to do remedial courses in math and sometimes for reading comprehension, we've failed our students in this regard. We have to do better than this.
My goal is to put together toolkits, and those are in the works now, to be suggestive to different states and say, “Look, here's what's working."
Louisiana — it took them six years, because they started in 2019. They have come from next to bottom in the pack to about the middle of the pack in states in terms of their reading proficiency levels. Look what happened in Mississippi. We've seen these programs be successful in Florida, in Iowa, in Texas, and in Tennessee, but these are states being innovative. This is not coming from the federal government.
So how do we access some of it? What are some of the programs? What are some of the teacher prep programs that we can offer information on through our toolkits?
The expansion of school choice was another priority area for the Education Department. What tangible expansion of school choice has occurred in the past year as a result of your leadership?
MCMAHON: We presented in our budget, which was accepted, an increase in the amount of charter school funding up to $500 million. So that was a $60 million increase that would be available to states for charter school expansion or improvement. That is an incredibly big initiative that's relatively new, but states are certainly taking advantage of that.
The first national school choice policy was put into effect. And the goal with that is to increase the amount of money from public-private partnerships. And then parents could move a child with a scholarship to a different school, or they could seek private tutoring or IDEA funding for special needs.
This is just a very welcome opportunity to increase funds going into the educational sector, rather than what some think, that this would be removing money out of the public sector.
What are your top priorities for this coming year, and what benchmark should the public use to judge the department's success by this time next year?
MCMAHON: Now, I would like to say that NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] scores, when they come out again in January 2027, are going to show marked improvement. I don't think they are, even though we're hopefully encouraging states to return to the science of reading and to programs that are clearly being shown to be successful.
As I mentioned before, Louisiana started in 2019, and it just takes a while for teachers to get educated on how to teach these programs, and for the proper measurements to be made so that we can start to see results.
But we can't wait a minute. Whether or not that's a measurable success in 2027, there'd be fingers pointed if we don't see any increase. I think we will see some improvements, because some states are already putting [initiatives] in place.
So regardless of whether you could look up and say, “Hey, wow. This graph is really going in the right direction,” it's going to take a minute for these plans to take effect. But we have to do everything we can to get them in place.
