Penny Schwinn, the former Tennessee state schools chief tapped in January to serve in a top role at the U.S. Department of Education, will appear before U.S. senators next week for her confirmation hearing after promising earlier this month she would resign from a variety of business positions to avoid ethics concerns.
Schwinn, who has been appointed deputy secretary under Education Secretary Linda McMahon, will appear alongside Kimberly Richey, whom President Donald Trump has selected as the assistant secretary overseeing the Education Department’s office for civil rights. They’ll appear with two U.S. Department of Labor nominees at the hearing, which is scheduled for June 5 at 10 a.m. before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee.
The hearing comes after the Education Department has radically downsized its staff and Trump has ordered McMahon to “facilitate” the closure of the department. (A federal judge last week temporarily blocked those dismantling efforts and ordered laid-off agency employees reinstated.) The president’s repeated campaign promise to shutter the 45-year-old agency loomed large at McMahon’s own hearing in February, and is likely to come up at Schwinn’s.
“Like any senior appointed official, especially in the current administration, she’s going to get some tough questions, and it’ll be interesting to see how she handles them,” said Jonathan Plucker, a professor of education and faculty lead for the education policy program at Johns Hopkins University. “But I don’t expect this hearing to be a problem in any way, shape, or form. I think she’ll be confirmed in a straightforward manner soon after.”
Schwinn’s appointment in January drew praise from many—including three former education secretaries who served Democratic and Republican presidents—who cited Schwinn’s long history in education, serving as a classroom teacher, charter school founder, and state education chief. She also serves as a contrast to McMahon, whose experience is mainly in business, not education.
But Schwinn faced pushback from Republicans during her tenure in Tennessee; she later criticized culture war battles over gender and race instruction as “extraneous politics” in a 2023 interview with The 74.
With Schwinn appearing among several other appointees, she likely won’t feel too much heat, said Rick Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning public policy think tank.
The fact she’s not sitting alone indicates members have been able to address some questions ahead of the hearing, he said.
“Sometimes tensions flare up, and you’ve seen those raised from some of the folks who are more focused on culture, that she has not been as focused on those questions as they would like,” Hess said. “It seems to me that at this point, especially if they’re doing her as part of a panel, that that’s likely been sorted out.”
Meanwhile, Schwinn could face questions about potential conflicts of interest. In a five-page letter sent to a department ethics official earlier this month, Schwinn laid out a list of posts she’d resign from and corporate ownership stakes she would divest if confirmed for the role. The letter was first reported by the Tennessee Lookout.
Since stepping down as state education chief in Tennessee in 2023, Schwinn has been involved in numerous education-related businesses. She agreed she would resign from a number of roles—including from a consulting firm led by a former chief of staff to Tennessee’s governor, and education companies including Really Great Reading and Edmentum, for which she has served as a paid board member. She also pledged to divest ownership interests in Odyssey—which contracts with state private school choice programs to administer education savings accounts—and Amira Learning, which has AI-powered literacy instruction products. She vowed to no longer take clients for two LLCs she owns and for which she is the sole employee, as well.
“This is a Cabinet that includes a record number of high-wealth individuals,” Hess said. “The questions about conflict of interest have not been a big deal. I’d be really surprised if, for the No. 2 role in the Department of Education, it suddenly was a big deal.”
Rounding out the Education Department leadership team, senators on the HELP committee on May 22 approved the nomination of longtime North Dakota state education chief Kirsten Baesler, who was selected in February to serve as assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education. Her nomination, which the committee approved 12-11 in a party-line vote, now moves to the full Senate.
“You always want to get your full team on the field, and the fact that they haven’t had Baesler, and they haven’t had Schwinn, and they haven’t had Kim Richey has certainly made it more challenging for them to execute, especially given all of the executive orders,” Hess said.
The committee also approved the nominations of Nicholas Kent, a former deputy education secretary in Virginia who’s been tapped to be the Education Department’s under secretary, dealing mostly with post-secondary education; and Kevin O’Farrell, the nominee for assistant secretary for career, technical, and adult education. O’Farrell is currently Florida’s state CTE director.
Confirmation wait times for sub-Cabinet appointees are common
It’s not unusual for lower-level appointees to face longer wait times than Cabinet secretaries for confirmation hearings. Former President Joe Biden’s nominee to serve as deputy education secretary, Cindy Marten, had her hearing in late March 2021, weeks after the Senate confirmed Miguel Cardona as education secretary.
McMahon faced a longer wait than some other Cabinet secretary nominees while the federal government processed her financial disclosure paperwork.
(As part of her confirmation process, McMahon pledged to resign from board positions at Trump Media and Technology Group, Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, a family foundation she ran with her husband Vince McMahon, the Trump-affiliated America First Policy Institute, and other organizations. She divested her interests in a handful of investment funds and public bonds, including for many school districts around the country.)
But the delay in confirming Schwinn, Baesler, and other sub-Cabinet appointees to lead Education Department offices means their responsibilities are falling to career staffers—whose ranks are far smaller than when Trump took office Jan. 20.
“Traditionally, there’s a career civil servant at the same level who can kind of step in and keep the trains running on time,” Plucker said. “With all the cuts they’ve made, I just don’t know what the department’s capacity is to maintain operations with such a scaled-down staff.”
Though not yet confirmed, Schwinn has already begun some aspects of the job. She appeared before state chiefs alongside McMahon at the Council of Chief State School Officers’ annual legislative conference in Washington in March and met privately with the chiefs the following evening.
