The Wrong Choice as Deputy Education Secretary?

Conservatives want Penny Schwinn to help gut the Department of Education—but she might end up strengthening its power.

This article originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.

At the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, a successful businesswoman with no background in education, is being given an experienced Number 2: Penny Schwinn, who served for 5 years as Tennessee’s Education Commissioner.  But Schwinn has not committed to a specific set of conservative policies or principles. Rather, she is a bipartisan operator who made her name embracing controversial projects antithetical to constitutional common sense. The fact that a nomination like this is occurring inside as conservative a White House as President Trump’s is not, in context, a surprise. For new administrations, nominating appointees is a political tidal wave. 11,000 positions need to be filled. Political stakeholders have to be satisfied: donors, specific activists, the senators doing the confirming. Background checks have to be executed. For a populist president like Trump this is doubly hard, because he and his advisers have to balance the need for disruptiveness with administrative experience and confirmability. According to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Trump "would rather have a disrupter at the top and buttress the disrupter with people who know the business or the agency." The trick, then, is making sure the secondaries are buttressing, not undercutting, the disruptor.

At the Pentagon, Trump solved this problem by installing Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Elbridge Colby as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Colby has been miles ahead of fellow national security analysts since he called the Iraq invasion of 2003 a disaster before it happened and predicted China as America’s clear and present threat. While Hegseth, a battle-scarred veteran, hacks away at bureaucrats, Colby will methodically re-orient America away from the Middle East and Eastern Europe and toward China and Latin America.

Examining Schwinn’s two-decade history in education reveals a very different kind of operator than Colby.

Schwinn’s Formative Background with Teach for America (TFA)…

Penny Schwinn, and her husband Paul, started their careers with three-year stints at Teach for America: the government-backed nonprofit which sends "high-achieving" college graduates into "low achieving" public school districts to help children there thrive. There’s no shortage of progressivism on Teach for America’s website, which states, to give only one example, that "Educational inequity is…deeply rooted in systemic racism." The progressivism also extends to its founder, Wendy Kopp, whose endorsements include one for former TFA colleague Diane Robinson, whose recent PBS-produced documentary The Young Vote featured young people avidly pushing progressive policies.

Still, Teach for America doesn’t come in for pushback from the Center or Right because it allies itself with charter schools against teachers’ unions, whose malfeasance and harms to children Restoration has reported on extensively in the past. Unfortunately, unlike conservatives such as Ron DeSantis who want to shift control from teachers’ unions to parents while creating a mix of public and private options, TFA and Democrats who oppose teachers unions want to shift power from unions to administrators. Among these Democrats are Andrew Cuomo, Josh Shapiro and Ritchie Torres; as well as former Boston superintendent of schools Michelle Rhee, a TFA alum; and former Chicago superintendent of schools Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s Secretary of Education, a TFA supporter.

…And TFA’s Big-Government Origins 

These Democrats look for inspiration to the Kennedy-Johnson Administration’s educational projects like Associated Community Teams and Mobilization for Youth, made up of "young volunteers" who "brought the spirit of the Peace Corps to…dismal slums..." According to critics, the members of this "domestic Peace Corps" completely ignored local voluntary associations that were helping impoverished children. Instead, they ended up alienating these children with their focus on "quasi- militaristic" recreation activities patterned on a "paramilitary organization" rather than "the soft, folksy style of traditional recreational programs," e.g. a typical American recess. They also alienated them with their insistence on teaching lessons in "smiling and emotional maturity," which seemed distant for the kinds of teenagers whose fathers had left home after their blue collar labor jobs were outsourced.  

TFA is a latter-day version of this project. It’s not by coincidence that TFA workers are called a "corps". Nor is it a coincidence that in 2004 Senator Ted Kennedy awarded TFA’s founder, Wendy Kopp, the first "New Frontier" award: the name for the set of programs (Peace Corps, Associated Community Teams, Mobilization for Youth) that John F. Kennedy put in place. Finally, it’s not a coincidence that TFA partners directly with Head Start, which provides "early childhood education" and is a direct outgrowth of Associated Community Teams and Mobilization for Youth.

None of this is a model for "conservative" policymaking—at least when conservatism means respect for local and state control and Christian values inside our Constitutional framework. Instead it’s education policy pushed by experts contracted with the national government. This is the context for Penny and Paul Schwinn’s careers, within which Penny Schwinn’s history becomes not just understandable but predictable. It amounts to an 18-year hopscotch across the country—California to Delaware to Texas to Tennessee to Florida—trailed by mounting controversies over public-private conflicts of interest and control.

Suspicious California and Delaware Sojourns Turn into Texas Controversy

In Sacramento, fresh from TFA, Schwinn founded a charter school; ran for and won a seat the Sacramento Board of Education; accepted a "six-figure administrative position at Sacramento City Unified School District"; and left the city—all in six years.  According to the Sacramento Bee, Schwinn is remembered in town for "a history of stepping down from Sacramento jobs."

Her next stop was Delaware, where she was appointed Chief Accountability and Performance Officer of the Delaware Department of Education. Paul was then hired at the Delaware Leadership project, a "state-approved alternate route to principal certification program for those interested in leading our state’s highest-need urban and rural schools." To some observers, this was a clear conflict of interest, since the Delaware Leadership Project was funded by Delaware’s Department of Education.

But the real concern about Penny Schwinn’s contracting surfaced in Texas, where she served as Chief Deputy Commissioner of Academics for the Education Agency and pushed "a $4.4 million no-bid contract with Georgia-based company SPEDx to help overhaul its special education practices by analyzing thousands of personal records of students with disabilities." A whistleblower who alerted the Department of Education to the breach of confidentiality, and the fact that the contract was done without following the proper procurement processes, was laid off "the day after."

Eventually this data-mining of vulnerable children—such an obvious evil that it’s been a plot point on TV—garnered serious pushback. At this point, the state cancelled the contract, after already spending more than $2 million which it left on the table.

In Tennessee, Schwinn’s Policies Lead to Conservative Pushback…

From there, Paul and Penny Schwinn moved, again, to Tennessee, where conservative activists engaged in what establishment media called a "culture war" but really amounted to a war over who had control over children: parents or schools. Schwinn’s approach was to emphasize "state assessment programs" and de-emphasize parental rights.

In Tennessee, Schwinn used $1 million of pandemic funding from Washington to "provide school districts with a toolkit for home wellness checks," and "refused to take a stand on masking in schools, opting to leave that decision to local school boards."  Later, when conservative pushback led to anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) legislation becoming law, activists argued that Schwinn’s Education Department "completely dodge[d] enforcement of this law"; "did not appear to side with the parents on these issues"; and that "multiple valid [anti-CRT] complaints have been dismissed."

Schwinn justified her inaction by emphasizing that it was local school districts’ choice—ignoring the fact that it was Tennessee’s Department of Education pushing the material to school districts to begin with. Indeed, it was Schwinn who allowed into Tennessee Schools the curriculum "Wit & Wisdom" from the private company Great Minds. She did this despite the fact that it had "failed a state review twice for backdooring CRT concepts into lesson plans" using Social Emotional Learning (SEL)—the links between which Restoration News has reported on extensively.

…Even as Schwinn Executes a Texas Repeat

Schwinn’s silence on SEL is not necessarily coincidental. SEL (and sometimes CRT) is prominent not just in public schools but in charter schools as well, and it uses psychological questionnaires which it sends to the state and to private companies for data-mining. This is not too far from the play Schwinn was trying to execute in Texas.

And there was more Texas influence in Tennessee. In 2021, Schwinn signed an $8 million contract with New York based TNTP (The New Teacher Project) as "part of the state’s reading initiative." TNTP was founded by Wendy Kopp of Teach for America, and helmed for many years by Michelle Rhee, the TFA alumni and Democrat charter schools advocate. It also employed Schwinn’s husband Paul, which Tennessee lawmakers said "created a potential conflict of interest." Reports indicated that Schwinn, likely thinking of her problems in Texas, had tried to head off this conflict-of-interest objection beforehand by "obtain[ing] approval from the state’s Central Procurement Office…"

Clearly, this is not an operator who "learns from her mistakes," except when it comes to finding legal loopholes to avoid being called on them. And when demands from her constituents start to conflict with her agenda, she leaves; as she left Tennessee’s Education Department in 2023, "having grown tired of distracting culture war battles over the way race and gender are taught in the state’s classrooms." She started for the University of Florida as a Vice President as well as working for BHA Strategy, whose clients include "Washington, D.C.’s premier bipartisan lobbying and public relations firm" and whose co-founder, Blake Harris, is a "prominent Never Trumper."

What a Whiffed Education Defenstration looked like under Reagan… 

Schwinn’s nomination points to a broader problem. At a point when Republicans have the executive force and legislative strength to permanently dismantle the Department of Education—a goal since its foundation in 1979—they may be stumbling in exactly the way that Ronald Reagan’s administration did. This means trading a straightforward dismantling for a focus on muting wokeness while reforming the department to foster "competitiveness."

The mover here was Reagan’s second Secretary of Education, William Bennett, who had too many bipartisan connections in Washington, D.C. and too much trust in central government. (As George H.W. Bush’s "drug czar" he increased arbitrary federal drug sentences that began a taxpayer-funded prison boondoggle it took President Trump to unwind in 2018.) Under Bennett, the Department of Education actually expanded in the name of a top-down effort to improve test scores and ensure international "competitiveness." ("He created what liberals wanted," one liberal observer said.)

The effort didn’t work. Math proficiencies rose slightly, reading proficiencies declined. But it paved the way for Bill Clinton to expand the Education bureaucracy into an enforcement arm for sexual and racial discrimination complaints. That, in turn, led to George W. Bush’s federal boondoggle No Child Left Behind, a centralization play opposed by a conservative minority which received such state pushback that President Obama finally unwound it in 2015.

But this "unwinding," under the aegis of ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act), didn’t reduce federal power. Instead it began the process of funding SEL in schools. As Restoration News has reported, by 2020, federal funding of SEL created the pipeline for CRT via the argument that a major part of Social Emotional Learning was overcoming trauma, and that much trauma was rooted in race— specifically the racial "trauma" of the George Floyd riots. It’s not an exaggeration, then, to say that the Reagan Administration’s failure to gut the Education Department led to SEL and CRT being foisted on American children.

…and the Lessons for Today

Unfortunately, the White House may not be listening, because Schwinn has a backer in Christopher Rufo, whose necessary and noble work focuses on eliminating wokeness from America’s elite. Rufo’s support earned him sharp remonstrations from Tennesseans, including those who have previously supported his work, and also including acknowledged educational authorities like James Lindsay and Carol Swain, both PhDs. "Ms. Schwinn is a proponent of DEI and CRT. How is she going to help dismantle DOE and return power to state governments and parents?" one comment went. Other objectors included Moms for Liberty of Williamson County, Tennessee, and John Rich, the latter of whom, in a lengthy exchange on X with Rufo, laid out in extensive detail the ways in which Schwinn’s conservative "reforms" related to DEI and CRT were either unresponsive to activists’ concerns or toothless.

But even if Schwinn ends up incorporating eliminating DEI and CRT into a broader Bennett-like push to empower the Department of Education, the question remains: To what end?As past Restoration News reports on the military have shown, wokeness occurred on top of a deeper trend: the rise of bureaucrats and insider government contractors who centralized authority in the name of risk management and efficiency. This is Penny Schwinn to a "T": someone with much more in common with Kennedy-Johnson bureaucrats and technocrats, as well as self-dealing insiders, than President Trump’s constitutionalist populist base.

Under Schwinn’s management, the Department won’t close. More likely, it will contract with charter schools, Teach for America-type nonprofits, educational consultancies, and data-mining services around which Schwinn has built her career. Nothing in these arrangements will bring back power over education to states or parents—and by perpetuating the Department they will lay the groundwork for worse (again) to come.

The Reagan and Thatcher Revolutions, the last great populist forces, were derailed because, in their second and third terms, the principals got too far from their loyal bases to hear their warnings. That’s not the case with President Trump. When the president-elect nominated Chad Chronister as Drug Enforcement Agency administrator, Florida activists warned that Chronister was the wrong choice, citing his onerous COVID policies—and the White House listened. When it comes to Schwinn, there’s evidence that Trump might welcome input: that, in the process of winding down two proxy wars and helping flood victims and deporting illegal immigrants, he may not have focused in on his Deputy Secretary of Education nominee. Indeed, the most noteworthy part of Trump’s announcement of Schwinn’s nomination was him calling her "Peggy."

Now is the time for conservatives to speak out again. Penny Schwinn’s nomination should be withdrawn.