“Use the power of the purse as a hammer.” That’s the advice to President-elect Donald Trump from education reformer Richard Corcoran, who served as president of the New College of Florida and former House Speaker of the Florida State Assembly.
As Trump names his nominees for Cabinet-level positions, he has stated his intention to eliminate the federal Department of Education and “send education back to the states.”
Corcoran, a veteran of many fights against “woke” educators at the college level, has a different message. Corcoran was on Trump’s shortlist as a possible nominee. Late Tuesday, however, Trump announced his intention to instead nominate Linda McMahon, who served as co-chair of Trump’s transition team and was the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). In Trump’s first term, she served as Administrator of the Small Business Administration and later worked as one of the leaders of the America First Policy Institutes that strategized for another Trump presidency. She also served one year on the Connecticut Board of Education starting in 2009 and has spent years on the board of trustees for Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.
Appearing on The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer, Corcoran believes the department should be “gutted and dismantled but not abolished.” He adds, “Go in and choose disruptors.”
Schweizer agrees, saying, “This is not an air war where you just drop a few bombs and fire some people… This is a trench war.”
Corcoran points out the Florida experience with educational bureaucracy during the Covid pandemic, where it was the state’s education department that forced schools to re-open and stop mask mandates — after local school boards, many dominated by members connected to teachers’ unions, refused to do so.
“Use the power of the law to your advantage,” he suggests, explaining that the strategy amounts to: “Comply, or you won’t get the money.”
Corcoran is the author of a new book, Storming the Ivory Tower: How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back Our Campuses that tells the story of his efforts with Christopher Rufo to reform the New College of Florida from a “woke” school that indoctrinated students with left-wing dogma into a true liberal arts college where students learn “how to think, not what to think.”
The problem with simply sending money to the states, Corcoran believes, is that in some states the education establishment is so far to the left that giving them more money will simply exacerbate the problem (prompting Eggers to quip, “the California Department of Education will just say ‘Hold my beer!’”).
Local school boards are often filled with union members, former teachers, and ideological liberals, Corcoran says. Eggers sums up the idea as using the federal DoE as a check on the worst state systems.
“We can’t allow them one more foothold,” Corcoran agrees.
He believes more money needs to get to charter schools, which are resisted by the bureaucracy. If the red tape around establishing charter schools in areas where the public schools are poorly performing, “the bureaucracy will buckle,” he tells the hosts.
What are his suggestions on how to reform federal education policy?
Change the law to make it easier for states to change their school accreditors, he says, because these accrediting organizations often enforce the DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) policies. The DoE harasses those who try, he says.
He also wants to get rid of the DEIB bureaucrats. “The way Covid exposed the local school districts, DEIB did for colleges and universities.”
“In Florida, we ended the DEI office,” he says. ”We actually fired people. We didn’t have to be told. We did it on our own,” Corcoran says.
During Covid, the DoE’s budget was about $238 billion. Something close to $190 billion was allocated for elementary and secondary school relief. “And a lot of it got spent on DEIB stuff,” Corcoran says.
He wants to reinvent the mission of the DoE as defending a world-class education and defining it as such. Teach students the truth and how to think rather than what to think. “Even the textbooks,” he says.
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