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THESE ACTIVISTS WANT TO DISMANTLE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. NOW THEY RUN THE
EDUCATION DEPARTMENT.  
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Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards
October 8, 2025
ProPublica
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_ It could mean a new era of private and religious schools boosted by
tax dollars, and the end of public schools as we know them. _

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Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been clear about her desire to
shut down the agency she runs. She’s laid off half the staff and
joked about padlocking the door.

She calls it “the final mission.
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But the department is not behaving like an agency that is simply
winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education,
she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to
radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The
department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public
schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of
other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or
homeschooling.

Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500
million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that
often draws children from traditional public schools. They have
repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk
students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened
penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic
inequities for Black or Hispanic students.

McMahon has described her agency moving “at lightning rocket
speed,” and the department’s actions in just one week in September
reflect that urgency.

The agency publicly blasted four school districts it views as
insubordinate for refusing to adopt anti-trans policies and for not
eliminating special programs 
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Black students. It created a pot of funding dedicated to what it calls
“patriotic education,” which has been criticized for downplaying
some of the country’s most troubling episodes, including slavery.
And it formed a coalition with Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College,
PragerU and dozens of other conservative groups to disseminate
patriotic programming.

Officials at the Education Department declined to comment or answer
questions from ProPublica for this story.

At times, McMahon has voiced support for public schools. But more
often and more emphatically she has portrayed public schools as
unsuccessful and unsafe — and has said she is determined to give
parents other options
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To carry out her vision, McMahon has brought on at least 20 political
appointees from ultraconservative think tanks and advocacy groups
eager to de-emphasize public schools, which have educated students for
roughly 200 years.

Among them is top adviser Lindsey Burke, a longtime policy director at
The Heritage Foundation and the lead author of the education section
in Project 2025’s controversial agenda for the Trump administration.

In analyzing dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and
private speaking events for McMahon’s appointees, as well as their
writings, ProPublica found that a recurring theme is the desire to
enable more families to leave public schools. This includes expanding
programs that provide payment — in the form of debit cards, which
Burke has likened to an “Amazon gift card” — to parents to
cobble together customized educational plans for their children.
Instead of relying on public schools, parents would use their allotted
tax dollars on a range of costs: private school tuition, online
learning, tutors, transportation and music lessons.

More than 8 in 10 elementary and secondary students in the U.S. go to
a traditional public school. But Burke expects that public schools
will see dramatic enrollment declines
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by both demographic and policy changes.

Addressing an interviewer in an April podcast, she noted: “We’re
going to have a lot of empty school buildings.”

 And in a speech last year she declared: 

“I'm optimistic that, you know, five years from now a majority of
kids are going to be in a private school choice program.”

In a 2024 podcast, Noah Pollak, now a senior adviser in the Education
Department, bemoaned what he sees as progressive control of schools,
which he said has led to lessons he finds unacceptable, such as
teaching fourth graders about systemic racism.

“And so the work that I do is trying to come up with creative policy
ideas to stop that, to turn back the tide, to figure out ways that
conservatives can protect these institutions or build new
institutions,” said Pollak, who has been an adviser to conservative
groups.

As tax dollars are reallocated from public school districts and
families abandon those schools to learn at home or in private
settings, the new department officials see little need for oversight.
Instead, they would let the marketplace determine what’s working
using tools such as Yelp-like reviews from parents. Burke has said she
is against “any sort of regulation.”

President Donald Trump himself said in July that the federal
government needs only to provide “a little tiny bit of supervision
but very little, almost nothing,” over the nation’s education
system except to make sure students speak English.

Advocates for public schools consider them fundamental to American
democracy. Providing public schools is a requirement in every state
constitution.

Families in small and rural communities tend to rely more heavily on
public education. They are less likely than families in cities to have
private and charter schools nearby. And unlike private schools, public
school districts don’t charge tuition. Public schools enroll local
students regardless of academic or physical ability, race, gender or
family income; private schools can selectively admit students.

Karma Quick-Panwala, a leader at the Disability Rights Education and
Defense Fund, which advocates for disabled students, said she wants to
be optimistic. “But,” she added, “I’m very fearful that we are
headed towards a less inclusive, less diverse and more segregated
public school setting.”

Allison Rose Socol, a policy expert at EdTrust, an organization
focusing on civil rights in schools, decried what she called the
“demo crew” in McMahon’s office. Socol described McMahon’s
push to help grow private school enrollment through taxpayer-funded
vouchers and other means as a “great American heist” that will
funnel money away from the public system.

“It’s a strategic theft of the future of our country, our kids and
our democracy,” she said.

Attention on McMahon often focuses on her former role as CEO of World
Wrestling Entertainment. It was no different on the day of her Senate
confirmation hearing, when journalists and social media delighted in
noting that seated behind her was her son-in-law, the retired wrestler
known as Triple H.

Little attention was paid to the conservative education activists in
the front row from Moms for Liberty, which has protested school
curricula and orchestrated book bans nationwide; Defending Education
(formerly Parents Defending Education), which has sued districts to
fight what it calls liberal indoctrination; and the America First
Policy Institute, co-founded by McMahon after the first Trump
administration.

Now two people who once served at Defending Education have been named
to posts in the Education Department, and leaders from Moms for
Liberty have joined McMahon for roundtables and other official events.
In addition, at least nine people from the America First Policy
Institute have been hired in the department.

AFPI’s sweeping education priorities include advocating for school
vouchers and embedding biblical principles in schools. It released
a policy paper
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2023, titled “Biblical Foundations,” that sets out the
organization’s objective to end the separation of church and state
and “plant Jesus in every space.”

The paper rejects the idea that society has a collective
responsibility to educate all children equally and argues that “the
Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the
responsibility for their children.” It frames public schooling as
failing, with low test scores and “far-left social experiments, such
as gender fluidity.”

The first AFPI leader pictured in that report is McMahon.

Linda McMahon testifies at her Senate confirmation hearing for
secretary of education. Seated behind her are, from left to right, son
Shane McMahon, Defending Education’s Nicole Neily, the former
wrestler Paul Levesque (also known as Triple H), daughter Stephanie
McMahon, Erika Donalds of the America First Policy Institute, and Moms
for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice. Credit:Win McNamee/Getty
Images

AFPI and the other two nonprofit groups sprang up only after the 2020
election. Together they drew in tens of millions of dollars through a
well-coordinated right-wing network that had spent decades advocating
for school choice and injecting Christianity into schools.
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Ultrawealthy supporters include right-wing billionaire Richard
Uihlein, who, through a super PAC, gave $336,000 to Moms for
Liberty’s super PAC from October 2023 through July 2024.

Defending Education and AFPI received backing from some of the same
prominent conservative foundations and trusts, including ones linked
to libertarian-minded billionaire Charles Koch and to conservative
legal activist Leonard Leo, an architect of the effort to strip
liberal influence from the courts
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politics and schools
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Maurice T. Cunningham, a now-retired associate professor of political
science at the University of Massachusetts, studied the origins
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connections of parents’ rights groups, finding in 2023 that the
funders — a small set of billionaires and Christian nationalists —
had similar goals.

The groups want “to undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy
donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to
strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through
school privatization,” he concluded.
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trying to advocate for parents and for school choice. They didn’t
discuss their relationship with donors when contacted by ProPublica.

These groups and their supporters now have access to the top levers of
government, either through official roles in the agency or through the
administration’s adoption of their views.

When the department created an “End DEI” portal to collect tips
about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in schools, it
quoted Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice in the press
release
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She encouraged parents to “share the receipts of the betrayal that
has happened in our public schools.” Moms for Liberty referred to
the portal as the “culmination” of Justice’s work. (Federal
judges ruled against some of the administration’s anti-DEI actions
and the department took the controversial portal down in May.)

Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public
schools going forward, Justice, who is now with The Heritage
Foundation’s political advocacy arm, told ProPublica: “I hope
zero. I hope to get to zero.”

She and others say most public schools don’t teach students to read,
are dividing children over race and are secretly helping students to
change genders — familiar claims that have been widely challenged by
educators.

When Trump signed an executive order in March to dismantle the
Education Department, Justice sat in the first row, as she had at
McMahon’s confirmation hearing. The president praised her, along
with various governors and lawmakers. “She’s been a hard
worker,” he said.

Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public
schools going forward, Justice told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope
to get to zero.”

Defending Education’s Nicole Neily, who was also at McMahon’s
confirmation, stood next to McMahon
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announced an investigation into the Maine Department of Education for
keeping records from parents about student gender identity plans.
Defending Education has filed civil rights complaints against colleges
and school districts and has been successful in having its causes
taken up by the Trump administration.

In an email, Neily told ProPublica she is proud of the work that
Defending Education has done to challenge schools that have supported
DEI in their curricula and have allowed students to hide their gender
identity from parents. She singled out teacher unions and “radical
education activists” while blaming drops in student achievement on
“the education-industrial complex.”

“The sooner this stranglehold is broken, the better,” she wrote.

McMahon’s tenure also has been marked by an embrace of religion in
schools. She signaled that priority when she appointed Meg Kilgannon
to a top post in her office.

Kilgannon had worked in the department as director of a faith
initiative during the first Trump term and once was part of the Family
Research Council, an evangelical think tank that opposes abortion and
LGBTQ+ rights.

She has encouraged conservative Christians to become involved in what
she’s described as “a spiritual war” over children and what
they’re being taught in public schools.

“This is why we have to lead as Christians, because what the left is doing is a top-down imposition of an agenda, of a Marxist and anti-God and anti-family agenda,”
Kilgannon said in a 2023 summit
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schools.

Reached by phone, Kilgannon told ProPublica, “I have no comment,”
and hung up.

Overhauling “Government Schools”

Betsy DeVos, the Michigan billionaire who was education secretary in
Trump’s first term, cheered on July 4 this year when Congress
instituted America’s first federal voucher program. It came in the
form of a generous tax credit program to encourage voucher expansion
at the state level. Families can start accessing the aid beginning
Jan. 1, 2027.

DeVos once said she wanted “to advance God’s kingdom” through
vouchers for religious schools and has funneled vast amounts of her
family fortune into advocating for school choice. She called the
passage of the federal measure “the turning point in ending the
one-size-fits-all government school monopoly.”

An article in The Federalist
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a conservative publication, boiled down the implications into one
headline: “How Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill Will Help Kids Escape
Failing Government Schools.”

But school choice isn’t the only tool that Trump’s education
leaders are using to target public schools. McMahon has gutted the
Education Department’s civil rights division, where lawyers and
other federal employees work to ensure all students can access public
school, free from discrimination.

The administration rolled back protections for LGBTQ+ students and
students of color, prioritized investigating discrimination against
white and Jewish students, and launched aggressive investigations of
states and districts that it says refused to stop accommodating
transgender students.

It has rescinded official guidance
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schools had to provide language help and other services for students
who are learning English, contradicting long-established federal law.

And Trump officials have repeatedly cast public schools as dangerous
even as the agency canceled about $1 billion in training grants for
more school mental health professionals — money that had been
authorized by Congress to help prevent school shootings. The
administration now says it plans to resume paying out a fraction of
that funding, which would be used for school psychologists.

Over and over, the department has used the threat of pulling federal
funding to force compliance with new directives and rapid shifts in
policy. The department, for instance, threatened to withhold money
from schools that did not verify they were ending diversity
initiatives, which were designed to address inequitable treatment of
Black, Native and Latino students.

In August, the department announced it was withholding millions of
dollars in grants from five northern Virginia school districts that
had refused the department’s demands to bar transgender students
from using restrooms and locker rooms that aligned with their gender
identity. The districts argued that complying would mean defying
Virginia law and a 2020 federal appeals court ruling.

Nevertheless, the Education Department told the districts that until
they acquiesced to the agency’s bathroom rules they would have to
pay expenses up front and request reimbursement. McMahon wrote to
districts that “Lindsey Burke is available to answer any
questions.”

The Fairfax County Public Schools sued and in a legal filing said it
faced losing $167 million this school year, money that it was relying
on to provide meals to students, support programs for children with
disabilities, help English-language learners and enhance teacher
training. The federal department has argued that it has discretion to
withhold funding and admonished the district for taking the agency to
court.

Trump officials have repeatedly cast public schools as dangerous even
as the agency cancelled training grants for more school mental health
professionals — money that had been authorized by Congress to help
prevent school shootings.

In this atmosphere, public school advocates are particularly concerned
about what will happen to funding for Title I grants, which is the
federal government’s largest program for schools and is aimed at
helping students from low-income families. In early September, House
Republicans proposed slashing more than $5 billion from the $18.4
billion earmarked for Title I, putting at risk reading and math
teachers, tutors and classroom technology.

At the same time, under McMahon, the Education Department is trying to
redefine how states and districts can spend the money.

In three guidance letters so far this year, the agency encouraged
states
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divert some Title I money away from public school districts. One
suggested paying for outside services, such as privatized tutoring.
Another urged states to use Title I money to benefit 
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students
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live within the boundaries of a high-poverty public school but attend
private schools.

McMahon is prepared to loosen even more rules on the money. The
federal dollars currently are distributed to districts using a
formula. Project 2025 calls for Title I to be delivered to states as
block grants, or chunks of money with few restrictions. McMahon has
encouraged states to ask her to waive rules on spending the money.

Critics of this approach fear that Title I money could eventually be
used in ways that undermine public schools — on private school
vouchers, for example.

Public school advocates like William Phillis, a former official at the
Ohio Department of Education, fear the change would devastate public
schools.

“I just know any block grant or any funding that would be left up to
state officials on Title I money would be misappropriated in terms of
the intent,” Phillis said. “Block grants to Ohio would go to the
private sector.”

A spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce did
not respond to requests for comment.

Rainey Briggs, chief of operations for Des Moines Public Schools in
Iowa, said he supports parental choice but worries that public schools
will suffer financially and will not have the resources to stay up to
date.

And he fears that right-wing narratives around public schools, the
distrust and lack of support for highly trained district leaders —
whether from some parents or politicians — could lead accomplished
educators to walk away.

“Public education is irreplaceable,” he said, citing its
commitment to serve every child regardless of their background or
circumstance.

Those influencing Trump’s education agenda disagree.

“If America’s public schools cease to exist tomorrow, America
would be a better place,” Justice told ProPublica.

_Megan O'Matz is a ProPublica reporter covering issues in Wisconsin
and throughout the Midwest.  Jennifer Smith Richards pursues stories
about abuses of power — often focusing on schools and education —
and stories about private businesses throughout the Midwest._

* public schools
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* privatization
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* Education Department
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* Linda McMahon
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