Secretary McMahon outlines priorities at House budget hearing, including school choice, literacy

House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and human Services, and Education Chairman Robert Aderholt asks Education Secretary Linda McMahon about the department's plan to refocus on core educational achievement while reducing the big bureaucracy overall, and McMahon responded that she had three priorities as Secretary of Education: to increase school choice, focus competitive grants on literacy as the absolute basis of what we need to do, and return education to the states, explaining that students are learning to read from pre-K into third grade and after that they are reading to learn, that if you cannot read you cannot learn and schools must return to the science of reading which focuses on phonics