Vouchers, Patriotism, and Prayer: The Grand Makeover of American Education

There’s something almost comforting about how predictable American political reinvention has become. Every few years, someone shows up with a promise to fix everything, armed with a PowerPoint, a buzzword (“reset”), and a deeply suspicious hatred of whatever system currently exists. This time, the target is public education — that sprawling, imperfect, stubbornly democratic institution that educates more than 80% of American children and refuses to collapse quietly.

Enter Linda McMahon, Education Secretary, former wrestling executive, and now the face of a sweeping attempt to redefine what “education” even means in the United States. Her diagnosis is blunt: public schools are failing. Her treatment plan? Shrink them, sidestep them, starve them, and replace large portions with vouchers, private religious education, homeschooling, and a curriculum heavy on reverence, light on discomfort.

If that sounds less like reform and more like a liquidation sale, that’s because it is.

The “Hard Reset” That Somehow Only Breaks One System

In November, McMahon promised a “hard reset” of American education. You might imagine that means smaller class sizes, better pay for teachers, modernized buildings, mental health support, or — just spitballing here — updated textbooks that don’t predate Wi-Fi.

Instead, the reset appears to involve dismantling the Department of Education itself while redirecting public money into private hands. This is presented as empowerment: states will “carry the torch of our educational renaissance.” Which is a poetic way of saying Washington is stepping back while quietly deciding which ideologies get federally blessed.

A reset usually implies improvement. This one feels more like unplugging the router and announcing that the internet was the problem all along.

Follow the Money (It’s Leaving the Building)

The centerpiece of the plan is vouchers — taxpayer-funded coupons that families can use to pay for private education, including religious schools and homeschooling programs. In theory, vouchers are about “choice.” In practice, they function as a polite extraction system, siphoning money away from public schools while leaving those schools responsible for educating the most expensive, highest-need students.

Private schools can choose their students. Public schools cannot. That asymmetry is not a bug; it’s the feature.

What vouchers really offer is choice for institutions, not families. Families get options as long as they fit the options. If your child has disabilities, needs language support, or comes with complications that don’t look good in a brochure, suddenly “choice” becomes a one-way street back to the underfunded public system everyone else opted out of.

And once enough funding leaves, public schools don’t “fail.” They’re engineered to struggle, then blamed for it.

The Advisors Who Don’t Believe in the Thing They’re Running

McMahon didn’t arrive alone. She brought at least 20 advisers from ultraconservative think tanks and advocacy groups — many of whom are openly skeptical of public education as a concept. These are not people proposing tweaks. They are people who believe the institution itself is the mistake.

The vision is clear: fewer public schools, weaker federal oversight, and a system where education increasingly reflects the beliefs of whoever can afford alternatives. Education becomes less a shared civic project and more a marketplace of worldviews, sorted by zip code, church affiliation, and ideological comfort.

When people who don’t believe in a system are put in charge of it, the outcome is rarely subtle.

Patriotism, Sanitized and Served Warm

A central pillar of the remake is a “pro-America” curriculum — one that offers an “uplifting portrayal” of the nation’s founding ideals. This is where the language gets especially slippery. Who doesn’t want students to appreciate democracy, liberty, and civic responsibility?

The catch is in what gets quietly removed.

Critics argue — with ample historical backing — that these curricula downplay slavery, minimize systemic discrimination, and smooth over the parts of American history that require reckoning rather than applause. It’s not that history is rewritten outright. It’s curated. Softened. Sanded until it fits neatly into a patriotic frame that never asks uncomfortable follow-up questions.

This isn’t about loving the country. It’s about loving a version of the country that never disappoints you.

Prayer in the Classroom, Separation at the Door

Then there’s the religious turn. McMahon’s advisers have been explicit about wanting Christian values infused into education — not merely available, but normalized. The constitutional separation of church and state is treated less like a foundational principle and more like an outdated guideline that got in the way of moral clarity.

The irony is rich. Public schools, long criticized for being too secular, are now being weakened in favor of institutions that are explicitly religious — using public funds. The state steps back just enough to claim neutrality, then quietly finances belief-based instruction.

For families who don’t share those beliefs, the message is simple: your tax dollars will help pay for someone else’s theology. Your alternative is an increasingly hollowed-out public option.

Civil Rights, Now With Fewer Employees

Perhaps the most consequential change isn’t curricular at all. Since 1979, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has been the place parents turn when schools fail to protect students from discrimination — whether based on disability, race, sex, or religion.

Under the Trump administration, much of that office’s staff was laid off early. The focus of investigations shifted sharply toward allegations of discrimination against white and Jewish students and schools that accommodated transgender students. This was framed as efficiency. A correction. A return to fairness.

What it functionally meant was fewer resources for students with disabilities, students of color, and those facing sex-based discrimination. Less enforcement doesn’t create neutrality. It creates silence — and silence always favors whoever already holds power.

If rights only exist when there’s someone to enforce them, then defunding enforcement is policy by omission.

Choice for Some, Consequences for Everyone

Supporters of this transformation love the language of freedom. Freedom from bureaucracy. Freedom from “failed systems.” Freedom to choose.

But freedom in education has a peculiar habit of concentrating benefits while distributing costs. Families with time, money, and information navigate the new landscape easily. Families without those resources inherit the consequences: fewer services, fewer protections, fewer dollars per student.

Public schools don’t just educate children. They provide meals, counseling, special education services, transportation, and a legally enforceable commitment to serve everyone. Strip away funding and oversight, and what remains is not freedom — it’s abandonment with better branding.

What Happens When the System Finally Cracks

The endgame is rarely stated outright, but it’s not hard to see. A smaller public school system, reserved largely for students with the greatest needs. A growing patchwork of private, charter, and religious schools funded by public dollars but accountable primarily to themselves. A national curriculum that emphasizes pride over inquiry, unity over accuracy.

This isn’t a sudden collapse. It’s attrition. Death by a thousand budget cuts, policy tweaks, and ideological appointments.

And when the system finally buckles under the weight, the same voices will point and say, “See? It never worked.”

The ProPublica Effect: Shining Light Where Power Prefers Shadows

Much of what we know about this transformation comes from months of reporting by ProPublica, whose journalists reviewed dozens of hours of video and internal statements to piece together what’s happening behind the rhetoric.

The Department of Education declined to respond to detailed questions. Which, in Washington, is a response of its own.

Transparency is rarely convenient for people who prefer reform by quiet erosion.

This Isn’t About Kids — And That’s the Tell

Every education overhaul claims to be “for the children.” But if children were the priority, the solutions would look different. They would involve investment, not divestment. Support, not withdrawal. Complexity, not slogans.

This plan is about ideology. About reshaping the civic foundation of education to reflect a narrower vision of America — one that feels orderly, reverent, and untroubled by dissent.

Public education has always been messy. It reflects the country as it is, not as we wish it were. That messiness is not failure. It’s democracy showing up to work every morning, coffee in hand, trying again.

Dismantling it doesn’t make the nation stronger. It just makes the fractures easier to ignore — at least until they become impossible to teach around.

The Quiet Question No One Wants to Answer

Here’s the uncomfortable truth sitting beneath the vouchers, the flags, and the prayers: a country that no longer believes in educating its children together is a country quietly giving up on the idea of a shared future.

You can call it a renaissance. You can call it empowerment. You can call it a reset.

But when public education is treated as disposable, what’s really being tested isn’t the school system.

It’s the country’s tolerance for living with one another — in all our complexity, disagreement, and inconvenient reality — without opting out.