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Reading Education Secretary Linda McMahon's dramatic "final mission" message to the U.S. Department of Education's staff shortly after being confirmed to lead the agency last week, my mind wandered to a video that circulated on social media after her nomination was first announced. The clip depicts McMahon being flipped upside down and body slammed. It's an absurd yet undeniably impressive performance.

To be fair, those acting skills served McMahon well during her Senate confirmation hearing in February. She dodged and parried senators' questions about enforcing existing federal law and abiding by congressional spending authority while a group from the so-called Department of Government of Efficiency (DOGE) squatted in her soon-to-be office and canceled contracts and grants that allow states to better serve their students and teachers. These were the opening acts to President Donald Trump's anticipated executive order directing McMahon to bypass Congress and gut the education department entirely.

The Department of Education's mission is to ensure that all students — without exception — have the opportunity to thrive. As a former agency employee, I saw this mission in action every day. We all need the department to achieve its goals no matter who occupies the Oval Office, which is why it is excruciating to watch the Trump administration destroy this essential institution as a piece of political theater. Violating the department's statutory mandate and treating education policy as just another performance avoids the real issues our schools face and ignores the majority of Americans who oppose dismantling the agency.

This dissonance between the White House and the will of the people was further illuminated by a recent Hunt Institute survey that found that parents across the political spectrum actually agree on a clear set of priorities for our schools. Among other things, Americans want their kids to learn how to read well, want safer schools and want increased resources for teacher development.

These survey results bear little resemblance to the Trump administration's harmful obsession with transgender people and "DEI" programs that they can't coherently define. While espousing the sanctity of "parental rights," Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Linda McMahon seem to be gleefully working against what American families say they want.

Their actions are already making it harder for Minnesota's students to get the education they deserve. Here are a few ways how:

There is strong bipartisan support to ensure students learn to read and read to learn, but researching and implementing new evidence-based strategies at scale can be too expensive for many districts. The department's 10 Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) helped build this local capacity for decades before being unceremoniously shut down by DOGE on Feb. 13. One local example of REL Midwest's work in Minnesota was a free professional development program offered to kindergarten through second-grade teachers to help them use more effective classroom practices and data when teaching reading skills. Rather than the "fraud" Musk seems to find in every program President Trump doesn't like, the labs are a program proven to test, deepen and scale solutions to problems faced by local educators.

Safer schools is another parental priority shared across the political spectrum but being actively undermined. In January, Trump's Department of Homeland Security announced that it would reject a longstanding policy prohibiting ICE agents from executing enforcement operations where children gather, citing without evidence that undocumented people are using schools "to avoid arrest." Stories about these brazen raids occurring near Minnesota schools have since emerged. These aggressive tactics will likely increase dropout rates for immigrant students, and districts are scrambling to ensure all students feel safe enough to learn amid the possibility of a raid on or near campus.

McMahon also spoke during her confirmation hearing about a desire to "invest in teachers." Among the many federal grants canceled by DOGE is a University of St. Thomas program that gave 185 Minnesotans (who might not otherwise have had the opportunity) scholarships and stipends to pursue their teacher licensure in special education and elementary education. Another canceled grant would have funded a registered apprenticeship program through the University of Minnesota designed to recruit, train and retain 60 new special education teachers placed in high-needs schools across rural, suburban and urban settings. These cancellations are confusing choices when over 90% of Minnesota districts say they are experiencing significant and worsening teacher shortages.

Minnesota families deserve to know exactly why the Trump administration is compromising their students' classroom instruction, personal safety and teacher quality through these haphazard actions. With Musk's slash-and-burn modus operandi already laying waste to the department's programs, McMahon's plan for massive layoffs and Trump's imminent (and possibly illegal) edict to dismantle the agency, it's also our right to know exactly what comes next.

Any leader who has successfully navigated a period of difficult change will tell you that he, she or they needed to find ways to orient people to a positive vision that made the chaos worthwhile. "Return education to the states" is not a plan; it is a slogan. In the absence of any detailed vision from President Trump beyond slogans, we can reasonably surmise that there is no serious plan coming for the future of our public education system.

Chaos is the Trump administration's only strategy, and it's Minnesota's students, families and teachers who will pay the price.

Anil B. Hurkadli served as a presidential appointee at the U.S. Department of Education in the Biden-Harris administration. He lives in Minneapolis.