U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon visited Elmira High School last week, for the only New York stop on a trip across the country.
WSKG’s Celia Clarke covered the story, and dug into her reporter’s notebook to share some of her observations with WSKG News Director Phoebe Taylor-Vuolo.
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Phoebe Taylor-Vuolo: So Celia, why was McMahon in Elmira?
Celia Clarke: She was there as part of a national tour she's doing. She's going to visit every state, and they call this the History Rocks! Trail To Independence Tour, where McMahon is visiting, as I said, one school in each state. This whole thing is organized by a private coalition in partnership with the Department of Education, and it's a coalition of conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA. These groups have a goal of using education to promote patriotism, but in a very specific way, which includes adding a particular Christian perspective on American history.
PTV: So did she visit classes at Elmira High School? What was that like?
CC: She did visit classes, but local reporters were not allowed to go with her.
I've been on a number of these trips with different politicians, Republicans and Democrats. This one limited the press in ways I've never experienced before.
To be clear, I don't know if the decision to not let local reporters go into classrooms with her was made by McMahon’s staff, the school district, or school officials, but it was very unusual. Instead we reporters—there were about seven of us—waited in the high school auditorium for about an hour until McMahon and others showed up.
PTV: When she did show up, what did McMahon talk about?
CC: There were three parts to this. One was McMahon talking to an auditorium of students. This was 11th and 12th graders. And her main message was that patriotism is low in the US, and so is just flat out knowledge of American history and civics, understanding the government and how it works.
What she said was that when you know the history, then you have greater pride in the country, that you're more patriotic. She didn't go into any details. She didn't say that there was anything wrong with the way that students are already being taught. But it was just sort of implied.
A really odd thing happened, which was that after McMahon spoke, there was another phase of this, and that was students began to play a history facts game, it was specifically New York state history facts. And these students were doing really well answering these questions.
Shortly after they'd started this game, the event organizers told us that a school administrator—tried but couldn't find out who that was—but a school administrator had told him that reporters were not allowed to be in the room while the students were “on stage.” We were sort of ushered out.
And this is part of what was really a little unnerving for me, was that even before we left, the audio feed to our equipment was turned off. And even when we were brought back in, our audio feed was never turned back on. So that was just really odd.
So the event was over. And it's at that point, which is the third part of this, that McMahon and Congressman Nick Langworthy, who's the congressman for the district, and that includes Elmira, they took questions.
But again, never experienced this kind of restriction—we were told in advance that we would only have five minutes total, to ask her questions. And that we could only ask on-topic questions, meaning that unlike any other time that I've been to a politician's press conference—politicians always want to talk on-topic, on-topic is the reason that they're there. And then they'll take anything off-topic. So, you might want to talk about other policy or other things that are happening locally or nationally, and what their opinion of those things are.
McMahon and Langworthy would not take those questions. And it would be a complete waste for a reporter under those circumstances to ask an off-topic question, that was unusually restrictive in my experience.
And, you know, events like this are about PR and promoting an agenda that's nothing new. I totally understand that. But this one left me with a lot of questions, like specifics of what curriculum changes [McMahon] wants schools to make, and how it would fit in with the local autonomy of school systems—or even a state—to set their own curriculum.
So some of these things have already been talked about publicly by people in the Trump administration at different times, but McMahon didn't do that while she was in a public school visit, and that was a little unusual to me.
There might be space for more reporting about this, especially if it turns out that there are going to be changes made that directly impact local public schools.
PTV: Celia, thank you for sharing your experience and observations with us.
CC: It’s my pleasure, Phoebe.