Penna Dexter

Early in her tenure as U.S. Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon began working herself out of a job. Last week she got a boost from the Supreme Court.

The Wall Street Journal’s headline was “High Court Paves the Way to Weaken Education Department.” The Court lifted a lower court ruling that blocked staff layoffs at the Department as well as President Trump’s March Executive Order, significantly cutting the education bureaucracy. The Journal’s use of the term weaken sounds like a criticism. But that’s exactly the plan. The Education Secretary told Fox News, “This lifts the handcuffs off what we have been trying to do, which is really to get education back to the states where the president believes it does belong.” But the feds can only do so much. To eliminate the Department altogether would require an act of Congress.

Clearly, the nation’s public schools need improvement. In math, K-12 students lag behind their peers in other industrialized countries.  And, between 2019 and 2023, reading scores fell 18 points for 4^th graders and 27 points for 8^thgraders.

And yet, as Nicole Russell points out in USA Today, “many parents say their children have been indoctrinated with a liberal political bias.”

She highlights the partisanship of teachers’ unions: This year’s National Education Association Convention just wrapped up in Portland, Oregon. In a speech on the 4^th of July, the NEA’s 2025 Teacher of the Year, Ashlie Crosson, declared her job to be “deeply political.”

In a column for FOX News, Corey DeAngelis, a tireless advocate for school choice, says this year’s NEA convention “laid bare its transformation into a brazenly political organization.”

Agenda items included defending illegal immigrants and birthright citizenship, pushing radical gender ideology, and passing a resolution opposing President Trump’s supposed “authoritarianism and violations of human rights.”

Mr. DeAngelis says the NEA refuses “to prioritize student learning.”

It’s no wonder parents are “voting with their feet.”