OPINION:
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated Linda McMahon as his choice for the next — possibly the last — secretary of education. Mrs. McMahon chairs the America First Policy Institute, advocating nationwide expansion of K-12 school choice and a rethinking of higher education.
That’s exactly what needs to happen. Mrs. McMahon has already been through the Senate confirmation process. In 2017, 28 Democrats joined all Republicans in approving her as head of the Small Business Administration. She’s a solid choice to run the organization.
But that’s not to say the Department of Education itself should exist.
Since President Jimmy Carter created the department in 1979, it has failed to deliver. Student performance declined as taxpayer resources were swallowed by a federal bureaucracy that has swelled to 4,400 employees and an $82 billion budget — almost half the amount we’ve shipped to Ukraine.
Outcomes could only improve if the incoming administration boards up the unsightly headquarters at 400 Maryland Ave. SW, or, as Elon Musk put it, “Just knock it down and pour holy water on the remains.”
Closing the department would be an uphill battle in Congress, but Mr. Trump has also laid out a vision for reviving higher education that gets to the heart of the matter.
“Tuition costs at colleges and universities have been exploding — and I mean, absolutely exploding — while academics have been obsessed with indoctrinating our youth,” he said. “The time has come to reclaim our once-great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that.”
He’s not wrong. Elite institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania ask students to pay over $60,000 a year to take courses such as “Witchcraft and the Occult” or “Queer Chinas: Sexuality and Politics in the Sinophone World.”
Before Uncle Sam began meddling in education, it cost $5,545 to attend Penn — $23,435 adjusted for inflation. Costs tripled as the number of administrators multiplied to comply with Washington red tape. Rather than focus on educating the next generation, nonfaculty staff learned how to pad their own salaries.
In 1976, the nation’s colleges employed 163,267 nonfaculty professional staff, according to National Center for Education Statistics data. By 2021, the number of nonteaching staff, excluding clerical and support staff, had grown to 1.2 million.
The president-elect is targeting misplaced priorities. “The accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally,” Mr. Trump said.
He proposes to replace the leftist accreditation bodies responsible for stacking the ivory tower with Marxist professors with organizations that focus on the rigorous educational standards that served our nation from its founding through the early half of the 20th century.
Mr. Trump also intends to go after the overpaid diversity, equity and inclusion czars at institutions of higher learning. “I will direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools … that persist in explicit, unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity.”
That’s bad news for schools such as the University of California, caught turning away high-performing Asian students based on racial quotas. Unless they change their ways, they face having their endowments seized and the money distributed to those affected by these unjust policies.
“We are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all,” Mr. Trump said.
Mrs. McMahon has what it takes to implement this bold agenda.
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