Friday, June 19, 2026

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH: HOW LINDA MCMAHON & THE MAGA MACHINE ARE BODY-SLAMMING PUBLIC EDUCATION

A wild witty — but deadly serious — look at the "Returning Education to the States" waiver scheme, Project 2025's Trojan Horse, and who gets left in the rubble

Folks, if you thought Linda McMahon's most theatrical performance was scripting fake fights in a wrestling ring, wait until you see her latest act: dismantling the U.S. Department of Education one "flexibility waiver" at a time, all while smiling for ceremonial photo ops at suburban high schools. The Trump administration's "Returning Education to the States" initiative sounds as wholesome as apple pie and Friday night football — but strip away the folksy branding and what you find underneath is a Project 2025 blueprint dressed in khakis and a PTA polo.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Waiver Spectacular!"

Indiana just became the third state — after Iowa and Louisiana — to receive a federal waiver allowing it to consolidate roughly $50 million in federal education funds across five distinct programs into a single, flexible block grant. McMahon, Governor Mike Braun, and Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner gathered at Plainfield High School on June 16, 2026 — a high school, naturally, chosen for maximum optics — to ceremoniously sign the document like they'd just brokered world peace.

The five programs being folded into this bureaucratic blender are:

Title I-B — State assessment activities
Title II-A — Teacher and principal quality
Title III-A — Language instruction for English Learners (the one that should make you sit up straight)
Title IV-A — Student support and academic enrichment
Title IV-B — 21st Century after-school programs

The pitch? Indiana spends $2.2 million annually just on federal compliance paperwork, with $1.7 million of that going to reporting rather than students. Consolidate the streams, cut the red tape, redirect savings to classrooms. Simple! Efficient! American!

And honestly — if that were the whole story, it might even be defensible.

It is not the whole story.

The Wolf in the "Local Control" Wool Sweater

Here's where the WWE heel turn happens. The administration's framing of "returning education to the states" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for what is, at its core, a Project 2025 priority: systematically defunding, defanging, and ultimately dissolving the federal Department of Education.

Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation's 900-page governing bible that Trump claimed not to have read while implementing virtually every page of it — explicitly calls for eliminating the Department of Education, converting federal education funding into block grants, and supercharging school voucher programs that siphon public dollars into private and religious schools. Sound familiar? It should. You're watching it happen in real time.

The "Returning Education to the States" executive order Trump signed in March 2025 wasn't a policy nuance — it was a demolition permit.

McMahon said it herself at the Plainfield event, with the kind of straight face only a professional wrestling promoter could maintain:

"It's about breaking up the education bureaucracy in Washington D.C., a system that too often enriches adults while stifling progress for kids."

Stirring stuff. Except that "bureaucracy" she's breaking up includes the legal firewalls that have protected the most vulnerable students in America for decades.

Who Gets Hit When the Guardrails Come Down

Let's talk about Title III-A — the English Language Learner funding — because this is where the equity alarm bells should be deafening.

Historically, under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), these were categorical grants — meaning every dollar earmarked for English Learners had to demonstrably serve English Learners. Full stop. No creative accounting. No "well, we used it for general literacy, which technically helps ELL kids too." The legal firewall was the point.

Under the new block grant model, those protections become suggestions. Without strict federal guardrails, a cash-strapped district facing a budget shortfall can — with perfectly legal flexibility — quietly absorb ELL funds into general operating expenses. New AP Biology lab equipment. A career-readiness center for the kids whose parents vote. The English Learners? They'll be fine. Probably.

EdTrust — a national education equity organization — put it plainly: Indiana's new accountability system has such varying standards across student groups that the state could theoretically report every student is doing "fine" without providing data to prove it. Nicholas Munyan-Penney, EdTrust's assistant director of preschool-12 policy, warned:

"We believe that this new accountability system will actually make it harder for us to understand how high schools in Indiana are supporting students."

The Indiana State Teachers Association (ISTA) raised similar alarms, warning that consolidating federal programs "risks weakening" the rights of educators and parents to participate in funding decisions, and that shifting school-improvement dollars away from public schools toward microschools, charter schools, and industry partnerships could redirect money away from the students who need it most.

The $25 Million Heist That Almost Happened

Here's the part of the story that deserves its own true-crime podcast: Indiana's original waiver request included redirecting $25 million annually in School Improvement Grants — money explicitly designated for low-performing schools — toward higher-performing schools that happen to enroll transfer students.

Translation: take money from struggling schools serving poor kids and give it to schools already doing well because some kids escaped the struggling school. It's the educational equivalent of pulling the life raft away from the people drowning and giving it to the people already on the boat.

To her credit — and in a twist nobody in the wrestling world saw coming — McMahon denied this specific request. Federal law explicitly prohibits waivers from altering how funds are allocated to specific eligible recipients, and even this administration couldn't bulldoze that particular wall. The most under-resourced schools kept their partial shield. For now.

The Bigger Map: Where Does This End?

Indiana is state number three. Iowa and Louisiana came first. The Trump administration has made clear this is a national rollout, not a pilot program. The "Returning Education to the States" initiative is the opening act — the main event is the full dismantlement of federal education oversight and the mass expansion of voucher programs that redirect public tax dollars into private, religious, and unaccountable microschool ecosystems.

Project 2025 doesn't hide this agenda. It calls for converting Title I funding — the backbone of support for low-income schools — into portable vouchers that follow individual students, effectively defunding public schools in the communities that can least afford it.

The populations who lose when federal equity guardrails disappear are not mysterious:

English Language Learners whose dedicated funding gets absorbed into general budgets
Students with disabilities whose legal protections depend on federal enforcement
Low-income students in chronically underfunded districts
Students of color in states with long histories of educational disinvestment

These are not hypothetical victims. They are the exact populations that categorical federal funding was designed to protect — because history demonstrated, repeatedly and painfully, that without federal mandates, states and districts would not voluntarily prioritize them.

The Final Takedown

The "Returning Education to the States" waiver program is not about paperwork reduction. It is not about classroom efficiency. It is a carefully branded, Project 2025-aligned strategy to erode federal equity obligations one state at a time, normalize block-grant thinking, and pave the runway for a full voucher system that will hollow out public education in America's most vulnerable communities.

Linda McMahon knows how to put on a show — she spent decades perfecting the craft. The ceremonial signing at Plainfield High School, the smiling superintendents, the language about "empowering local leaders" — it's a masterclass in making a demolition job look like a ribbon-cutting.

But the kids sitting in underfunded classrooms in Indiana, Iowa, and Louisiana — the English Learners, the kids with IEPs, the kids whose schools were already on the federal watch list — they're not watching a performance. They're living the consequences.

And when the federal guardrails are gone, there's no referee to call the match.

📚 Sources:

Latest News and Comment from Education

Friday, June 19, 2026