Trump makes his first moves on education, but no McMahon hearing in sight

President Trump made his first major moves on education Wednesday, signing a series of executive orders that come even before his nominee to lead the Education Department, Linda McMahon, has had her Senate confirmation hearing.

While the Department of Education is being led by acting Secretary Denise Carter in the meantime, it will need to start work immediately on Trump's orders on school choice, critical race theory (CRT) and combating college antisemitism.

Supporters and opponents are already gearing up for fights around what Trump’s orders mean for K-12 and higher education.

“President Trump is using his Project 2025 playbook to privatize education because he knows vouchers have repeatedly been a failure in Congress,” the National Education Association (NEA), the biggest teachers union in the country, said in a statement against the order meant to bolster school choice.

“And we know this stunt is meaningless without the consent of Congress. So, we are putting all anti-public education politicians on notice: If you try to come for our students, for our schools, and for our communities, NEA members will mobilize and will defeat vouchers again,” the group added.

The school choice executive order directs the Department of Education to prioritize discretionary grants for school choice programs, and it tells multiple federal agencies to create guidance for how parents can take advantage of the programs and how states can allow some federal money to be used on K-12 scholarships.

The school choice movement has had a lot of success during and since the pandemic, with multiple Republican-led states adopting universal education savings accounts (ESAs), funds that are given by state governments to families that send their children to private schools or choose to homeschool.

Another order Trump signed “prohibits federal funding of the indoctrination of children which includes radical gender ideology and critical race theory in the classroom.”

The order follows Trump's pledge to get rid of “indoctrination” and “woke” ideologies in schools, although it is unclear what the standards would be for what is considered indoctrination and how schools would get defunded.

“For years, parents were gaslit that ‘critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools’ and mocked for voicing doubts about the efficacy of such programs; today’s executive order is a vindication of their concerns, and a tremendous first step in rooting out this poison from the American education system. It doesn’t matter whether it goes by the moniker of critical race theory or magical unicorn theory — as today’s NAEP scores show, students have suffered because schools prioritized ideology over academics,” said Nicole Neily, founder and president of Parents Defending Education, a conservative group that has been pushing this issue since the pandemic.

Only around 10 percent of K-12 funding comes from the federal level, with the bulk provided by state and local governments.

Higher education wasn’t left out of Trump’s barrage of education orders, with a third targeting antisemitism on college campuses and specifically threatening foreign-born students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests.

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” Trump said in the order.

Around 2,000 individuals were arrested last spring at the height of the pro-Palestinian protests on campuses, which sometimes led to classes moving online and graduation ceremonies being canceled.

“The Trump administration’s attempt to smear the many Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian and other college students who protested the Israeli government’s genocide in overwhelmingly peaceful ways represents a dishonest, overbroad and unenforceable attack on both free speech and the humanity of Palestinians, all for the sake of a foreign government. So is the administration’s apparent threat to deport any foreign student who merely participated in anti-genocide protests,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement.

“It is also important to note that the order completely ignores real and documented incidents of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim violence against American college students by pro-Israel extremists, potentially including some Israeli soldiers here on student visas,” it added.

The orders will provide fodder for McMahon's eventual Senate confirmation hearing, which has yet to be scheduled even as other Trump Cabinet picks have been voted on and sworn in.

McMahon was a surprising pick for Trump, as she has little experience in education apart from a year on Connecticut's State Board of Education.

Her nomination has not drawn as much vocal criticism from Democrats as others, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with her biggest scandal centering on a lawsuit against her and her husband from their time leading World Wrestling Entertainment.

The suit accuses McMahon and her husband of knowing a ringside announcer was sexually abusing ring boys and doing nothing about it for years.

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