U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon speaks to students about the state’s 250th birthday at West Pelzer Elementary School in West Pelzer, S.C., on Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025. (Photo by Skylar Laird/SC Daily Gazette)
WEST PELZER — The U.S. secretary of education pointed to South Carolina education programs as a reason to give control of public schools to states while vowing not to cut certain federal funds during a visit Tuesday celebrating the state’s outsized role in the Revolutionary War.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s afternoon stop at West Pelzer Elementary School — in an Upstate town of about 1,000 people — was the fifth on a nationwide tour ahead of next year’s 250th birthday of the country’s founding with the Declaration of Independence. Previous stops included schools in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey.
The tour, called History Rocks!, is sponsored by a coalition of about 40 organizations, most of them conservative. That includes Turning Point USA, the nonprofit founded by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated on a Utah campus in September; and PragerU, a conservative nonprofit that creates videos teachers are allowed to show in South Carolina classrooms…