Why ‘Education Experience’ Makes An Education Secretary Worse

President Trump’s education secretary nominee Linda McMahon began her confirmation hearings the morning of Feb. 13. One of the chief attacks against her is bemoaning “a thin resume on education,” as industry lobbying outfit Education Week puts it.

“McMahon’s background in education is limited. She served for about one year on Connecticut’s State Board of Education,” says government-funded mouthpiece NPR. The government-funded New York Times notes “critics” highlighting “a relative lack of experience in education.”

“Unlike President Joe Biden’s education secretary, McMahon has little experience working in schools,” USA Today bleats. Formerly government-funded Politico says she “has minimal education experience.”

The truth is, “minimal education experience” is a qualification for running an unconstitutional agency that poses an existential threat to our republic. Myriad data indicate the education industry is one of the nation’s lowest-performing, and its institutions some of the nation’s worst.

Institutions are run by people. The people responsible for the horrific performance of America’s education institutions are the least qualified to improve them. This is Management 101. And it is borne out by numerous longstanding data points. Here are just a few.

Untrained Parents Educate Better than Trained Teachers

Homeschool parents are better teachers than the average person with a teaching degree. Now, it shouldn’t make any sense that people with zero experience or preparation for a field significantly outperform people with experience and preparation. That is not true of just about any endeavor — except education.

Almost everywhere, homeschool parents need no college or even high school degree. They need to take no classroom management or even parenting classes. They need to demonstrate no knowledge whatsoever. Despite this, the children educated by homeschool parents constantly outperform the children educated by state-certified teachers — and on just about every measure, not just academically.

Homeschool graduates are more likely to be happily married than are public-school graduates. They are less likely to binge drink, try illicit drugs, or have premarital sex. They have more pro-social views. They volunteer more.

My children attend a Christian classical school. I do believe an excellent teacher is better at teaching than the average parent. My children’s teachers are at least as good as I am at teaching my specialties — writing, speaking, and literature — and far better than I at teaching disciplines that aren’t my specialties, such as math, music, and languages. Plus they spend full workdays on their profession, and most homeschool parents cannot.

The problem is, most teachers are not taught to be excellent, nor are excellent people recruited to teaching. So the average parent is better than the average teacher at teaching simply because the teaching profession is horribly substandard. The success of homeschooling is an indictment of the entire U.S. education system.

The Teaching Profession Is Horribly Substandard

One of the dirtiest little secrets of the teaching industry is the low academic expectations of the average teacher and teacher preparation program. Now, let me be clear: I don’t think a person’s worth is determined by his test scores or IQ. Everyone can contribute to society even if he’s not academically inclined. I hate technocrats who act as if IQ bestows the right to rule others. And I’m aware that there are exceptions to every group statement, so let’s not start the tiresome “But I had a brilliant math teacher in sixth grade!” as if one counterexample negates a generality.

But — perhaps with the exception of preschool and kindergarten teachers, who maybe shouldn’t exist because children shouldn’t be institutionalized that young — anyone who is going to be a teacher should perform at least academically above average. Most U.S. teachers do not, and this has been true for at least 50 years. This is a major problem because decades of high-quality research have shown that the No. 1 indicator of an effective teacher is subject-matter knowledge. The more a teacher knows, the better his students learn. This is why I believe a good teacher is better than an average parent.

Instead of setting high expectations for teacher knowledge, however, states set abysmally low expectations. Teachers can pass many state licensure tests despite giving a majority of wrong answers. Oh, and those tests typically measure middle-school- or even elementary-level competency, meaning teachers who graduated high school don’t need to perform even at a 12th-grade academic level (!). The terrible quality of these tests is probably why numerous studies find that unlicensed teachers are no worse than licensed teachers.

American elementary school teachers typically come from the bottom third of academic ability. Competing foreign nations ensure they draw teachers from the top quarter of academic performance. While American teaching students know less than most other college majors, they receive higher college grades than students in every other major.

Since American teaching students don’t learn much knowledge that would make them more effective teachers, what are they doing in teaching school? Being indoctrinated with left-wing cant. Funding such anti-intellectual propaganda is the dominant function of not just the U.S. Department of Education but state departments of education and teachers colleges, and it’s why they all need to go. They do not serve teachers, children, or the country, but ruin them.

Education departments are perhaps the most communist of all college departments, and they have been so for decades. As the National Association of Scholars explains, “The radicalized education schools both propagandize would-be teachers and screen out would-be teachers who refuse to assent to radical dogma.”

The bottom line is that American schools cheat the children who attend them, and American education schools cheat the future teachers who attend them. They are so bad that abolishing them would improve everything immediately, and anyone with a deep resume in this system should be considered with suspicion.

Long, Long History of Catastrophic Failure

Look, most American kids attend public schools and have for the last 70 years. This means the public education system owns U.S. academic performance. And that performance has been abysmal for decades.

Federal involvement in education began in the 1950s as part of the Cold War effort to outcompete communist countries, recognizing that U.S. public schools even then were damaging U.S. national security and economic competitiveness. Back in 1983 during the Reagan presidency, the famous “Nation at Risk” report claimed, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” That was 42 years ago, and things have only gotten much, much worse.

Some scholars recently found a “reverse Flynn effect,” which means the average U.S. IQ is declining, reversing a century-long trend of IQ improvement. The latest national test scores showed the largest percentage of eighth graders performing below “basic” level in reading since 2000, when the test began. Just one-third of eighth graders rate as “proficient” in math or English.

The United States recorded a near 30-year low compared to students from other developed nations on international tests in 2023. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but people who can’t and don’t read are not going to win the AI race against China or likely be able to pay more in taxes than they consume, let alone make great leaders in even their own homes. This is not about test scores, it’s about national greatness.

During the lifetime of the U.S. Department of Education, average American students’ test scores have not improved from their threatening midcentury levels, while inflation-adjusted taxpayer spending on K-12 has at least tripled. Heritage has a recent chart illustrating this, although the already minuscule achievement gains it shows would be essentially gone if it included the 2022 and 2024 post-lockdown declines.

I have long preferred the Cato Institute’s chart from 2014, which some researcher needs to update to 2024. Given post-lockdown declines in U.S. learning that I correctly predicted right when lockdowns began, plus continued education spending bloat, this chart would look even worse today.

While many Americans appear to be satisfied with public “schools” that are really tax-funded sinecures for incompetent Democrat ideologues, an education system hostile to American excellence is an existential crisis. Economists have noted that if American kids could just improve their math skills to the level of Canadian kids, the resulting economic growth would solve our government bankruptcy. Schools that educate instead of indoctrinate are essential to a self-governing republic, because a good education teaches a citizen to rise to the level of self-government.

Daycares masquerading as schools are not harmless. They fuel our slow national suicide. America cannot become great again when our schools are mostly run by communists and their intellectually starved stooges. In the 46 years we’ve had a U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education has gotten much worse, not better. That’s not an accident, it’s proof that most of those in leadership positions in such an anti-American system should be viewed with suspicion and deprived of power.

A system this bad is not above being run by a former WWE executive. Just about any competent person is too good to run an institution this chronically dangerous and dysfunctional. But somebody’s gotta do it — until the department can be abolished completely. Congress, let’s go.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.