Where Linda McMahon, Trump’s education secretary pick, stands on controversial issues facing Philly-area schools

Former wrestling executive Linda McMahon, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary, has little experience working in education. But she chairs a conservative think tank aligned with a movement that has been fueling school board battles across the Philadelphia region.

It’s unclear to what extent McMahon would follow through on Trump’s pledge to eliminate the Department of Education, which has previously been a target of Republican politicians, or what mechanisms she might use to pressure schools to meet Trump’s other demands. Trump has called for cutting federal funding to schools “pushing critical race theory” and “transgender insanity.” About 10% of school funding, on average, comes from the federal government, including through the Title I program targeting students in poverty.

But the administration’s platform won’t be new to local school communities that have fought over the same issues and, in some cases, enacted policies carrying out its aims. Here’s what McMahon’s three-year-old organization, the America First Policy Institute, proposes for education, and how these topics have surfaced in the Philadelphia region.

The America First group bills itself as fighting back against “radical gender ideology,” which has included its opposition to the Biden administration’s regulations expanding Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. The regulations, which apply to schools receiving federal funding, have already been challenged by the conservative parents group Moms for Liberty, which won a court order barring their enforcement in schools across the country attended by children of its members. Trump and McMahon would be able to rescind the regulations entirely.

The rights of transgender students have already been a fraught topic in schools around Philadelphia. Some area districts, including Perkiomen Valley and Pennridge, last year barred transgender students from using bathrooms aligned with their gender identities. In Central Bucks, the school board last year limited the participation of transgender students on sports teams.

Those school boards flipped from Republican to Democratic control in November 2023, and have mostly reversed those policies. In Pennridge, however, the board rescinded the previous bathroom policy but replaced it with a new one that LGBTQ advocates say is still discriminatory — creating bathrooms that differentiate between “biologically” male and female students, and those that are male or female “identifying.” (The policy is cited in a discrimination complaint against Pennridge filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights — which could soon be under McMahon’s purview.)

After suspending the transgender athlete policy last year, Central Bucks’ school board formally retired it earlier this month — and drew pushback from some residents who expressed confidence Trump’s administration would force changes.

As Republicans attack public schools as ineffective and accuse teachers of “indoctrinating” students with liberal ideas, they have pushed for greater school choice — providing more taxpayer-funded education options outside the public K-12 system. That movement has been gaining traction, as states have expanded voucher programs that give parents public money to send their children to private school. Critics say the programs threaten the public school system and have yielded negative outcomes.

In Pennsylvania, a standoff over creating a voucher program — a proposal backed by Republican lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, but opposed by Democratic lawmakers who control the House — led to a budget stalemate in 2023. The fight fizzled out this year, and with Democrats maintaining their narrow edge in the House in this month’s election, the political dynamics may be unlikely to change.

But Pennsylvania already has programs that function similarly to vouchers, where businesses and individuals can receive tax credits for donating to organizations that give scholarships to students to attend private schools. In recent years, those programs have been growing, with lawmakers setting aside increasing amounts of money for tax credits. Democrats have agreed to expand the programs — which now cost more than $600 million — but have also criticized them as lacking accountability.

In nominating McMahon, Trump said that “Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America.” A proposal expected to advance under the soon-to-be GOP-controlled Congress would create a federal program that, similar to what has been in place in Pennsylvania, would award tax credits to donors who fund private school scholarships.

The America First platform is firmly aligned with the “parental rights” movement that has accused schools of usurping the roles of parents, through instruction about topics like race and gender and approaches to LGBTQ issues. The group advocates policies that allow parents to see all curriculum being used in their schools and to challenge “age-inappropriate” materials.

A Pennsylvania bill backed by failed 2022 GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano that would have required schools to post information online about their textbooks and course syllabi passed the Republican-controlled Senate last year, but never advanced in the Democratic-led House.

But debates over which materials schools are offering to students — in particular, library books — have flared in school communities across the region. Districts including Central Bucks and Pennridge passed policies banning “sexualized content” in library books — policies that have since been rescinded, though Pennridge still decided to bar 25 books and graphic novel series this school year.

Conservative activists have also targeted area schools over cultural competency efforts. The Lower Merion School District, for instance, was the subject of a federal complaint last year that claimed its racial affinity groups for students and cultural competency lessons were discriminatory.

“Racially divisive policies and theories and false teachings of the American founding are indoctrinating America’s youth with an anti-American ideology,” the America First group says on its website, which attacks the New York Times’ 1619 Project centering slavery in America’s origin story. The group’s platform calls for ensuring that “no current or future policies link federal education funding to the teaching of revisionist history, bigotry, or any other dishonest teaching.”

That battle has already been fought in Pennridge, where the former GOP-led school board hired an outside consultant at $125 an hour with ties to Hillsdale College in Michigan, a conservative Christian school whose president led a Trump-directed 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education.”

Supporters of the consultant said they wanted to remove bias from Pennridge’s curriculum. (At a Moms for Liberty conference in Philadelphia last year, the consultant, Jordan Adams, described his work by saying “the fox is in the henhouse,” battling against the public education “machine.”) But teachers and community members opposed his recommendations — which included directives that teachers consult Hillsdale’s 1776 Curriculum, criticized by some historians as ideologically driven.

Adams’ work was also unpopular with some Republicans on the school board, which terminated his contract last November.