Peter Goodman is a veteran observer of education policy and politics in New York City and State.
In this post, he asks, who is Miguel Cardona?
The answer is that Cardona will do what Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden want him to do.
He remains an unknown quantity. The only thing we know for sure is that he will roll back whatever damage DeVos did in her four year tenure.
Will he grant waivers from the federally mandated standardized tests this spring?
Will he seek to roll back 20 years of failed education policy?
Will he pare back or ask Congress to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program, which hands out $440 million every year to start new charters? CSP started during the Clinton administration with the intent of helping little teacher-led or mom-and-pop charters get a start. It has since turned into a behemoth that helps corporate charter chains like KIPP, Success Academy, and IDEA expand.
Stay tuned.
“The only thing we know for sure is that he will roll back whatever damage DeVos did in her four year tenure.”
Something tells me that he won’t come close to “rolling back whatever damage DeVos did.” I’ll know for sure if and when it happens. Until then call me a skeptic.
I share your skepticism, Duane, but we’re going in with eyes wide open in a way that they weren’t with Secretary Duncan.
DFER’ is bragging that they secured the Biden win. Will a Biden admin grant DFER their Day 1 wish?
“➜ On Day One, the Biden administration should announce that it supports
and will resume the administration of annual statewide summative
assessments for Spring 2021.”
This will be interesting to observe.
https://dfer.org/blog/dfer-highlights-2020-in-review/
Agreed, Eleanor. I’m calling this decision the canary in the coal mine.
yes: good analogy
DFER secured the Biden victory? Well, I don’t know about that, but DFER and Arne Duncan certainly helped secure the Trump win four years ago.
Cardona is a compromise candidate, not necessarily the best. He comes from Meriden which is a diverse town in Connecticut. It is very similar to the suburban district in which I worked. Meriden is about 60% white, 21% Latino, 8% black and about 1.5% Asian. Cardona benefited as a child from living in a integrated school district with well supported public schools. Cardona has been able to live the Amerian dream as so many of my former ELLs have been able to do as well. His “thin” resume does not give him a global perspective of what is happening with education across the country and the world. Cardona’s limited experience may give him a provincial outlook on the problems facing education. I hope Cardona has read some of Diane’s books as he is going to need to educate himself on the national education landscape ASAP.
Diane had said that Cardona will do what Biden tells him to do, and I agree. It will be up to those of us that care about public schools to watch what happens carefully and act appropriately. It is hard for me to understand how Cardona can be neutral on charter schools, even if the Meriden schools have not been directly under siege. Today’s mass privatization is not the “school choice” movement of twenty years ago. Privatization has become a behemoth of special interest groups backed by dark money with extreme politicking. Privatization has resulted in tremendous amounts of waste, fraud, embezzling, nepotism and very few real gains in educational outcomes for students. All of the diversion of funding has left many public schools struggling to survive. How anyone can turn a blind eye and remain neutral to such extreme corruption, rigged testing and hyper-segregation is beyond me!
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I’ll take a stab, RT. These past 20+ years, it’s been pretty hard to move up the education policy ladder without being in favor of the charters…among the other things you’ve mentioned. Certainly a red flag. He does seem to be a genuinely kind person/administrator from accounts we’ve read here, so let’s hope we can impact the positions of President-elect Biden and his proposed Secretary of Education.
Doubtful he will roll back policy thinking that has been ascendant since a Nation at Risk, a thinking that mainly focuses on trying to close achievement gaps through effective schools. His dissertation’s theory of action is that we currently lack the political will to enact the most effective within-school reforms, reforms- if enacted- he contends would close white-Latino (especially ELL) achievement gaps. Notably absent is any sort of David Berliner type thinking. But the within-school people would just mislabel Berliner a “deficit thinker” and say he is failing to see how the numerous funds of knowledge could be properly leveraged by the right school, teacher, pedagogy, curriculum. Never mind lead poisoning, early childhood stuff, and all those pesky structural outside-of-school factors…But who knows? John B King is like Jimmy Carter after he left office and now focuses a lot on outside-of-school structural things, but he was a bit late in his transformation. Maybe Cardona will make the shift a lot to breaking down the inside/outside of school dichotomy before his time is actually up.