Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

TERRY SCHILLING: America Can Finally Start To Break Radical Left’s Grip On Education

Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour

President Donald Trump laid out a bold vision for the future of education in our country in his joint address to Congress.

He called out the radical left’s ploy to indoctrinate our children with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and gender ideology in the very classrooms our tax dollars bought and made it clear that our girls will be protected against the transgender agenda in locker rooms and on the field across the nation.

Our newly confirmed Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, has been tasked with executing his vision. She is deeply experienced and a proven achiever committed to advancing President Trump’s agenda. She’s the right person for the job — because it will not be an easy one.

Over the previous four years, the Biden administration made a mess of America’s federal education policy, turning just about every law in their purview completely upside down.

For example, Title IX is supposed to protect the rights of women and girls in federally funded schools. But under Biden’s Education Department, the law was “reinterpreted” to force schools to put boys in girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, as well as on their sports teams.

Federal civil rights law also bans racial discrimination in college admissions. But when the Supreme Court reaffirmed that law, rather than enforcing it, the Biden Department of Education instead offered guidance to schools trying to circumvent it.

Another federal law requires schools to disclose a child’s education records to his or her parents. But as school districts around the country adopted policies to hide children’s “gender transitions,” the Department of Education under Biden did absolutely nothing to stop them.

In fact, about the only action the department took related to parents was to demonize them. When a father in Loudoun County, Virginia, alleged his local school board was covering up a sexual assault by a boy in a girls’ high school restroom, Biden’s Secretary of Education orchestrated a letter suggesting protesting parents like him should be labeled as domestic terrorists.

Even functions that ought to be totally apolitical on paper were “reformed” by Biden bureaucrats to enforce a woke agenda. Shortly after the Democrat took office in 2021, the Department of Education “restored” an “Office of Enforcement” within the Office of Federal Student Aid, tasked  with providing oversight for post-secndary schools and federal student aid programs.

However, instead of enforcing the rules impartially, this office disproportionately targeted prominent Christian colleges, slapping them with astronomical fines on dubious grounds. While less than 10% of students are enrolled at Christian colleges, religious schools were the target of nearly 60 percent of the Office of Enforcement’s fines.

The bias in these actions was egregious. Grand Canyon University — the nation’s largest Christian university — was hit with a record $37.7 million fine by the Biden administration for not “fully” informing students about the costs of their doctoral program. This was despite an independent accreditor finding the school’s marketing and recruitment materials were “clear and transparent.”

Liberty University, meanwhile, was penalized to the tune of $14 million for supposedly failing to comply with various crime-reporting requirements, a charge which Liberty denied. According to the school’s president, the allegations were leaked to the press by someone in the Department of Education early in the process in order to “poison the well.”

These two fines totaled more than all other penalties the Office of Enforcement had assessed over the past seven years combined. In comparison, Michigan State University was fined $4.5 million for failing to report sexual abuses by Larry Nassar, and Penn State was fined $2.4 million for their handling of Jerry Sandusky’s abuse.

All of this is to say that Secretary McMahon has her work cut out for her. Thanks to the widespread malfeasance of Democrats over the last few years, she will have to deeply reform and restructure the entire system in order to ensure it once again protects the rights of students and parents in American schools.

And of course, the legacy media will be eager to pounce as soon as any major change is attempted, especially those that involve reducing the bureaucracy. Already, the press has framed other attempts at reforming the executive branch in apocalyptic terms.

Addressing the corruption in the Department of Education will require immense courage if anything is to get done. Fortunately, if McMahon’s hearing in the Senate was any indication, she has that courage in spades.

As left-wing protesters and Senate Democrats screamed at her for hours, she handled herself with calm and conviction. Despite all the distractions thrown at her, she remained admirably focused on articulating her job: protecting the rights of students and parents throughout the country.

And now that McMahon has officially been confirmed as our next secretary of Education, that job can finally begin.

Terry Schilling is the president of American Principles Project. Follow him on X: @Schilling1776.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.