The Senate confirmed Linda McMahon as education secretary in a party-line vote, 51-45, on Monday. Best known for starting World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) with her husband, Vince McMahon, she sailed through the nomination process unchallenged by Republican senators. 

Citing her lack of experience in schools and willingness to execute President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education, Democratic senators voted against McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration (SBA) from 2017 to 2019. Her confirmation coincides with Elon Musk’s so-called cost-saving Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), slashing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Department of Education, which is offering staffers $25,000 to resign by Monday before midnight ahead of a major reduction in force. 

The financial cuts and the buyout offers have intensified fears that the department will be disbanded, an outcome that McMahon said during her February 13 confirmation hearing she is prepared to carry out. The Trump administration cannot close the Department of Education without approval from Congress, but it can deprive it of vital staff and resources to render it ineffective, leaving the nation’s most vulnerable students — kids with disabilities, economically disadvantaged children, young people of color and LGBTQ+ youth — without equal access to education, critics of closing the agency contend. 

McMahon is the fourth woman to lead the Department of Education on a permanent basis since its founding in October 1979. Republican presidents have nominated three of the four women who served in the role, with Democratic President Jimmy Carter picking Shirley Hufstedler, the department’s inaugural secretary. With McMahon, and Betsy DeVos during his first term, Trump has chosen half of the women education secretaries. Both have faced fierce criticism.  

McMahon’s detractors include teachers unions, advocates for students with disabilities and civil rights groups, which urged senators to reject her nomination. But Arne Duncan, education secretary during President Barack Obama’s two terms as president, offered a measured response when asked to discuss the former WWE executive’s rise to his former post. 

“I can only hope that she has our kids’ best interests at heart,” Duncan said. “I always thought my job was to try and fight for kids. I hope she sees that as her job. I do think people have talked about her relative inexperience, which is very real.”

Prior to becoming education secretary, Duncan had opened a charter school and served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools. McMahon’s predecessor, Miguel Cardona, head of the education department under President Joe Biden, was a teacher, school principal, assistant superintendent and education commissioner in Connecticut. In contrast, McMahon’s education experience includes a 15-month stint, which ended in April 2010, on Connecticut’s State Board of Education. Off and on since 2004, McMahon has served as a trustee at Sacred Heart University, a Catholic institution in Fairfield, Connecticut, to which she has donated millions.   

Still, Duncan said, he prefers McMahon to some of the career educators who reportedly made the short list of contenders for the job. “There are people who are technically much more experienced, who I think would have been absolutely disastrous.” Among them, he said, was Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction, who he said “tried to buy all of Trump’s Bibles with taxpayer money, trying to buy his way into the job.” 

Duncan also said he prefers McMahon to Tiffany Justice, cofounder of Moms for Liberty, which fights for parents’ rights, curriculum restrictions and anti-trans policies in schools. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has described Moms for Liberty as an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group and the Southern Poverty Law Center has called the group “a far-right organization that engages in anti-student inclusion activities.”

“For me, those other picks would have been much more destructive, much more damaging, and so I was pleasantly surprised that she was the selection and not and not any of those folks,” Duncan said.

He also offered kind words for Penny Schwinn, Trump’s pick for deputy secretary of education. Schwinn served as Tennessee’s education commissioner from 2019 to 2023, and Duncan said that her work to raise student achievement, particularly among Black students, impressed him during her tenure.

His most significant concern about McMahon leading the Department of Education is whether she will have a say in shaping the agency. 

“Will they have any ability to do anything, or are they just going to be minions in the Trump-Musk army?” Duncan asked. “Will they have any real authority or will they just be there to be lap dogs? If she goes in there really trying to create opportunity and fight for kids and has any ability to push back on Trump’s craziness, I would do anything in my power to try and help her be successful. I do not want her to fail. If she fails, that means kids across the country get hurt.”

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, a coalition of parent organizations and activists working to improve the lives of children and families, said that the parents in her network are experiencing “incredible anxiety” over the Department of Education’s possible closure.

“You’re talking about one of the key pieces of stability that we provide American families, which is access to a public education — pulling the rug out from under them,” said Rodrigues, who attended McMahon’s confirmation hearing. “I think part of the problem with Linda McMahon, in my view, is that we’re hearing everything about dismantling, destroying, destruction, descent into chaos. We’re not hearing anything about what her plan is moving forward, like what her vision is in preparing our kids for economic mobility and making sure that we’re globally competitive.”

Rodrigues said that she was initially optimistic when McMahon became the nominee because she appreciated the former SBA leader’s experience in business. But Rodrigues said that McMahon’s focus on dismantling the Department of Education and “pushing education down to the states” should have been disqualifying.  

“It’s almost as if we have forgotten that this has been tried before during the Reagan administration . . . and it was a mess, and Reagan had to walk it back,” Rodrigues said. “I would also argue we’ve seen examples in the past five years of how this doesn’t work.”

Rodrigues cited the way states and school districts allocated the blocs of federal funding sent in response to the COVID-19 pandemic — nearly $190 billion. “They did things like invest it in sports stadiums and pet projects, and we quite clearly have not seen them invest in the things that we know that kids need to adequately address learning loss.”

Before the Department of Education’s creation, Rodrigues said that students with learning differences and disabilities struggled to obtain equal access to education. States routinely denied an education to students who were blind, deaf or developmentally delayed, she said. 

“Why? Because it’s expensive to include those kids in classrooms,” she said. But states “could arbitrarily decide that they were going to do that because we were just pushing money down to them in the block grant formula, and they could decide what they want to invest in and how much they want to invest in. We used to take kids with autism and instead of giving them school, we pushed them into institutions.”

To Rodrigues, Trump and his supporters have forgotten the critical role and the function of the Education Department. To get equal access to education before the agency’s creation, parents often had to take schools to court, Rodrigues said. It is already difficult for parents to navigate the Department of Education to ensure that schools adhere to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), she added. Dissolving the agency and tasking another such as the Department of Justice with holding schools and states accountable will be a bureaucratic “nightmare” for parents, she said.  

Maha Ibrahim, a senior attorney for Equal Rights Advocates, which fights for gender justice in workplaces and schools nationwide, said that closing the Department of Education is just one of the organization’s concerns about McMahon. Her lack of experience, Ibrahim said, makes her “uniquely unqualified” to take on the role.  

“Sadly, this is a trend we’re seeing across nominations, people with no experience whose only real, stated or evident qualification is their willingness to be the grim reapers of the very departments they’re put in charge of to help this administration dismantle rights and agencies that we have built and relied on for decades,” she said. 

Ibrahim also raised concerns about a lawsuit accusing McMahon and her husband of ignoring a WWE employee’s sexual abuse of the underage “ring boys” who set up and broke down wrestling rings in the 1980s and ’90s. McMahon’s lawyer has denied the allegations against her client.

“Given that the Department of Education is tasked with the gender equity, access and protection of 50 million public school students, it’s very troubling that, within her own business, she has [allegedly] ignored reports of sexual harm and assault,” Ibrahim said.

In McMahon’s current role as chair of the America First Policy Institute, which promotes Trump’s policy proposals, she has supported the privatization of education, echoing Project 2025’s plan to increase access to vouchers that would allow families to use taxpayer funds to attend private schools. During McMahon’s confirmation hearing last month, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont criticized privatization as a trend that would divide students by class, race and other factors. Ibrahim agrees.

“We’re very afraid that the appointment of Linda McMahon will amount to a coordinated resegregation of public schools by taking money out of poor communities and putting it in the hands of rich parents to further ensure that those students will never have the opportunity to complete their education, to get an equal education, to attend higher education,” Ibrahim said. 

Duncan, too, fears that the multipronged defunding public education could hurt marginalized children. 

“The vast majority of funding in the Department of Ed goes towards vulnerable children, for kids with special needs, for English language learners, for kids who need a free or reduced lunch, for kids trying to go to Pre-K, get Pell Grants, first-generation college goers,” he said. “If there’s any attempt to reduce resources for the most vulnerable, that would be morally and educationally bankrupt.”