\n<\/p>\n
Education Secretary Linda McMahon told a conservative news outlet she wants to focus less on higher ed this year. The comment comes after the Trump administration\u2019s yearlong use of multiple federal departments to pressure universities and their employees and students to conform to the White House\u2019s desires.<\/p>\n
McMahon discussed her 2026 priorities in an interview with Breitbart<\/em> before Christmas. As the outlet put it, \u201cMcMahon said the new year is a chance to shift a little bit away from higher education and focus on elementary and secondary.\u201d (Education Department spokespeople didn\u2019t respond Monday to Inside Higher Ed<\/em>\u2019s requests for further information on what she meant.)<\/p>\n On social media, McMahon posted, \u201cIn 2026 we will empower parents, strengthen families, and end Washington\u2019s grip on education by returning it to the states.\u201d She also shared a video touting what she sees as the administration\u2019s many wins. Those included cutting deals with several universities to restore funding the administration froze, changes to the federal student aid application and steps toward dismantling the Education Department.<\/p>\n She told Breitbart<\/em> her top three priorities will be literacy, noting poor scores on a national K\u201312 test; school choice, which usually refers to providing public money for parents to send their children to K\u201312 charter or private schools or to homeschool them; and \u201creturning education to the states.\u201d <\/p>\n Regarding that last priority, McMahon told the outlet, \u201cThat\u2019s what we\u2019re really going to be working on, and that falls in line with the president\u2019s directive to eventually totally move education to the states and to make sure that the bureaucracy of the Department of Education doesn\u2019t exist in Washington anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n It remains unclear what \u201creturning education to the states\u201d would look like, even if Congress agrees to sign off on the Trump administration\u2019s push to close the Education Department. Other laws Congress has passed over the decades would still continue to require a significant federal role in education.<\/p>\n McMahon also touted what Breitbart <\/em>called her \u201cvictories,\u201d with the outlet writing that \u201cone of her favorite accomplishments is the department\u2019s Title IX work protecting women\u2019s sports.\u201d It wrote that McMahon \u201cspecifically pointed to an agreement reached with the University of Pennsylvania ordering awards to be taken\u201d from transgender former swimmer Lia Thomas \u201cand given to the [cisgender] female athletes who really deserved them.\u201d<\/p>\n In April, the department\u2019s Office for Civil Rights found that Penn violated Title IX by allowing a trans woman to compete on a women\u2019s sports team\u2014presumably referring to Thomas, who last competed on the swim team in 2022, in accord with NCAA policies at that time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Education Secretary Linda McMahon told a conservative news outlet she wants to focus less on higher ed this year. The comment comes after the Trump administration\u2019s yearlong use of multiple federal departments to pressure universities and their employees and students to conform to the White House\u2019s desires. McMahon discussed her 2026 priorities in an interview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[495,5810,573],"class_list":{"0":"post-40567","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-higher","9":"tag-mcmahon","10":"tag-shift"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}