Does McMahon Want To Let Teachers Teach?

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced this week (September 17) an initiative from her old buddies at the America First Policy Institute-- the Let Teachers Teach Coalition-- which appears to borrow from the Moms for Liberty playbook.

The headline at Fox News is "Pro-Trump group leads new coalition to undercut teachers unions." The America First Policy Institute is an advocacy outfit formed in 2020 as a sort of holding pen for Trump admin folks and other MAGA. McMahon served as a leader in that group for years. As for education--well, AFPI produced a paper in 2023 that rejects the notion of any sort of collective responsibility for educating all children argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” That message is very much at the heart of the dismantling movement, which is all about a policy of "I'll take of my own kids and what Those People do is not my problem."

Currently, the chairman of the board is Larry Kudlow, with Greg Sindelar (of the Texas Public Policy Foundation) as interim president and CEO. They also have a bunch of sub-chairs, including Kellyanne Conway (Chair, American Child), Riley Gaines (Chair, America First Athletes Coalition), Bobby Jindal (Chair, Healthy America), and Erika Donalds (Chair, Education Opportunity and leading Florida privatization activist). Besides McMahon, nine other AFPI "alum" are in the current administration (including Pam Bondi). We could dig deeper, but you get the picture-- this is a big bucket of Trumpian MAGA stew. 

For all that, the rollout of LTT includes lots of rhetoric that doesn't sound so bad. Here's Erika Donalds announcing the new "coalition"

Great teachers enter the classroom to educate, inspire, and prepare the next generation, and often end up taking the blame for rogue school boards and woke mandates that they had no say in. The Let Teachers Teach coalition will elevate the voices of educators who believe in scholarly achievement, parental partnership, and putting students first. I am honored to be a part of this work to empower teachers and restore excellence in American education.

And that doesn't sound too bad if you aren't familiar with the rhetorical vocabulary of the MAGA crowd.

The mission, as listed on the coalition web page, is also pretty tame sounding:

Build a national coalition that elevates the voices of teachers and equips educators to drive change where many of the policies affecting their classrooms are decided, at the local school board and district level

 The policy priorities are okayish. For instance:

Reward Teacher Excellence

Advance local and state policies that recognize great teachers, expand opportunities for professional growth, and promote classroom discipline, school safety, strong academic standards, and student achievement.

Merit pay remains a dumb idea that has eternal appeal to some folks, despite the fact that it mostly doesn't work. And these priorities are starting to sound familiar, albeit anodyne.

Reduce Bureaucracy Burdens

Fight back against district-level mandates that take teachers away from teaching, reduce unnecessary paperwork and administrative burdens.

Sure, who doesn't love that idea.

Restore Classroom Freedom & Civics Education

Empower teachers to lead their classrooms and work with local school boards to keep political activism and divisive ideology out of the classroom and embrace civics education through a patriotic perspective.

Oh, well, now the dog whistles are getting louder. "Divisive ideology" is anything that disagrees with MAGA ideology (except that, or course, MAGA ideology isn't "ideology," it's just "common sense truth"). Political activism isn't, say, demanding release time for Sunday School classes or stamping out displays of anything with rainbows or crusading for book bans. Ideology certainly isn't demanding that only a "patriotic" view of history be presented.

And as long as they're letting the mask slip, there's this fourth policy priority

Put Teachers Before Unions

Ensure teachers, not political organizations, are the leading voices in school board, district, and state policy decisions affecting their classrooms and careers.

As long as these folks have been around, the refrain has been "teachers are just swell, it's those damned unions that are terrible," as if teacher unions have somehow grown up like mold, and not actually including real teachers at all.

LTT also prioritizes "local action." The whole thing is very Moms for Liberty, from the pretense of "we're just here to help" through the idea of imposing their view of education by harassing one local school board after another. While smiling, because LTT also seems to have taken the M4L lesson of trying not to say mean or obviously cranky things-- at least for a year or two until you get tired of pretending to be happy warriors.

The coalition will, they promise, identify districts that can be targeted by Founding Teachers and AFPI state chapters. Example: maybe a local teacher wants to incorporate "civics education" into the curriculum and-- wait, there's some district that doesn't incorporate civics education? Nor have a means for teachers to address curriculum development? But this district apparently has a school board that does make curricular decisions, so the LTT will take the issue straight to them. I wonder if this hypothetical involves a particular type of civics education.

LTT will give teachers training and tools to "take a problem from the classroom to local community leaders" which, I guess, is different from the political teacher activism we want to stamp out.

LIT will build local coalitions around teachers "advocating for change." For example-- and I am not making this up and I think maybe someone forgot for just a second to keep this pitch bland and seemingly harmless-- maybe a teacher wants to "push against a vaccine mandate at a board meeting."

LIT wants to "replicate policies that work" aka "cart pre-constructed model policies to various states for implementation."

LIT wants to "train teachers to become ongoing education-policy voices in their communities." Testify before school boards, connect with policymakers, speak to media, organize other teachers-- you know. Become political activists.

LIT is as if Moms for Liberty and the Freedom Foundation had a baby. I would not be surprised to discover Rebecca Friedrichs hiding around here somewhere. 

What is this a coalition of, exactly? That's unclear (as is what a Founding Teacher might be). But it smells as if this is meant to be one more anti-union, like Ryan Walters' Teacher Freedom Alliance and a dozen others that have come and gone because that trick never seems to quite work out. LTT differs slightly in that it is more focused on turning MAGA teachers into crusaders on the local political level, much like Moms for Liberty tried to weaponize a bunch of cranky moms. Or like Parents Defending Education used to want to weaponize MAGA parents to help them find lawsuits to file (and then decided to drop "parents" from its name).

In short, LTT smells like old wine in new skins, like another activist group that has been Frankensteined together by committee, a new recombined version of the same old parts in hopes that maybe this time it will actually work. Because underneath this is the hope that there is some great untapped mass of MAGA teachers who are just dying to rise up against the evil leftists indoctrinating and gender-swapping students. 

But we should not let this go without noting that if McMahon really truly wanted to make it easier for teachers to do their job, if she really wanted to cut through red tape and bureaucracy--well, she is sitting in DC with a big pair of scissors right there. Instead of dispersing Department of Education functions to other departments, thereby exponentially increasing the amount of federal red tape involved, so could combine and simplify those functions. She could rise up against the Big Standardized Test, a policy imposition from DC that has vastly increased the bureaucratic, curricular, and policy obstacles in the way of every classroom teacher. She could let go of her school choice fetish, a policy goal that both decreases the resources available for every teacher to do their job, and simultaneously fosters an atmosphere where teachers must be part-time salespeople. 

In short, the biggest tell that LTT is a big bunch of baloney is that Linda McMahon hasn't done a thing in the last umpteen years to suggest that helping teachers do their jobs is anywhere near the top of her list of policy goals.