Exclusive: McMahon slams Democrats for acting like ‘throwing money’ at schools will solve literacy crisis

Democrats on Wednesday celebrated Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s one-year anniversary in office by bemoaning her efforts to dismantle the Department of Education (ED).

This happened at a press conference outside the federal ED building.

Democratic Reps. Mark Takano of California and Adelita Grijalva of Arizona denied that some of the best-funded school districts in the country still post abysmal test scores. This, after the Daily Caller News Foundation asked how they would improve education other than by spending more taxpayer money. Instead, they insisted that underfunding is the biggest issue with public schools, which McMahon said is “clearly wrong.”

“If you look around the world, the United States spends more per pupil for education than any other developed country in the world, and we have the poorest results to show for it,” McMahon told the DCNF. “It just shows that throwing money is not the problem.”

The United States outspends other nations on education by a significant margin, dumping $927 billion toward elementary and secondary schools in the 2020-2021 fiscal year. Despite this, the U.S. falls in the middle of the pack compared to other nations for overall academic achievement.

“The issue is not the money that’s being spent per student, that is for sure,” McMahon said.

The representatives, alongside National Education Association secretary-treasurer Noel Candelaria and Educational Opportunities Project director at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Michael Pillera, called on McMahon to “quit, resign, put someone in there who actually knows the job.” McMahon responded that the press conference “seems to lack any substance at all,” saying they all “seemed to be addressing issues that are just incorrect.”

Takano’s solution to the current education crisis was to shoot down “test-driven accountability” in schools, telling the DCNF, “We haven’t really fully worked out how testing is appropriate in education.”

“We’ve gone through a pandemic. There was tremendous learning loss. My heart went out to all the teachers who had to do virtual teaching. That is just very difficult to do,” Takano said. “So there’s been a tremendous hit on school performance and test performance.”

Less than one-third of fourth and eighth-grade students in the U.S. are proficient in reading as of 2024, following a nationwide trend that began far before COVID-19 lockdowns plunged test scores into the ground. The Trump administration has pointed to this fact as evidence that the education department has not served students for quite some time.

“The Department of Education doesn’t educate one child. We don’t hire teachers. We don’t buy books. We don’t set curriculum. We don’t do any of that. We’re simply a pass-through entity of the funds that are appropriated by Congress, and those channels are not going to change, even if the program is located in a different agency,” McMahon told the DCNF. “So all of this uproar about money not being funded, or classrooms getting bigger, all of that sort of stuff, it’s literally just unfounded and wrong.”

Yet the speakers at the press conference spent much of their time ranting about school choice programs that open up opportunities to students outside of public schools and fear mongered about the downfall of public schools and special education programs.

“For heaven’s sake, how did they exist before there was a Department of Education? The Department of Education stood up in 1980. Prior to that, we had people going to school, graduating from school, going to college, entering into professions,” McMahon told the DCNF, adding that all of ED’s duties will still be fulfilled through Congress and other agencies.

ED has already taken steps to transfer several programs to other departments, using inter-agency agreements to shift some of the responsibility of Career and Technical Education and workforce programs to the Department of Labor and partnering with the Department of State to oversee foreign funding reports.

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