The Connecticut Mirror wrote a revealing in-depth analysis of Secretary-designate Miguel Cardona’s life, career, and education ideas.
His meteoric rise has been well documented. He grew up in poverty. He started public school in Meriden, Connecticut, not speaking English. He saw education as his route to a better life.
He became a teacher, then a principal, then assistant superintendent of the Meriden district of 8,000 students. From there, he was tapped to become State Commissioner of Schools.
From the outside, the Meriden Public Schools system looks like a network of struggling city schools.
The state has designated it an Alliance District and one of the “lowest-performing districts” since more than one-quarter of the students are multiple grades behind in English, math and science. It is also an economically isolated district that spends 30% less per student than the state average despite three-quarters of its students coming from low-income families. And the school ratings often used in real estate listings don’t look favorably on the district, either.
This is where Miguel Cardona — President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to become the next U.S. education secretary — grew up and spent 21 years of his 23-year career as an educator. And his experiences there — his battles and the district’s successes — will likely be front-of-mind as he coordinates policy for all the public schools in the country.
Cardona has never put much weight into titles, and he has grown used to defying low expectations set upon him and his students.…
In Meriden, it meant broadening opportunity by opening access to advanced-level courses to drastically more students, embracing the Common Core standards and the accompanying tests that raised the bar for where students should be academically, providing emotional support and interventions for students acting out rather than suspending them, and setting up programs to help more high school graduates navigate to college.
Cardona also took the lead in Meriden to fine-tune controversial education reforms aimed at teacher accountability that were being pushed onto his district by state and federal officials into a model that the local union eventually supported.
Meriden’s results are ahead of most districts’ throughout the state on arguably the most important benchmark — the share of students who meet their growth targets and are on track to catch up or stay ahead.
Statewide, 33% of students from low-income families were on track to catch up in English Language Arts, compared to 39% of the poor students in Meriden by the end of the 2018-19 school year, the last year Cardona was the district’s assistant superintendent before becoming state education commissioner. In math, 37% of poor students in Meriden were on track, compared to 34% statewide. The growth of Meriden students also jumps out compared to the state’s 32 other “low-performing” Alliance Districts.
The share of Meriden students from low-income households reaching their growth targets has outpaced state averages nearly every year since 2014-15, when the state first started measuring whether students were on track to catch up.
The leader of Biden’s education transition team, Linda Darling-Hammond, served on a panel with Cardona when he was an assistant superintendent and was very impressed. That meeting was probably the key to his remarkable ascension.
This article provides insight into the educator who will lead the U.S. Depatnentbof Education in the Biden administration.
He ‘raised the bar’ by instituting Common Core? Did I read that right?
No wonder his rise was meteoric.
Tests are always the cure from the big shots who do not lose credibility by talking to too many teachers.
I just think having someone at the federal level paying attention to public schools will make a huge difference after 20 years of either neglect (Democrats) or outright hostility (Republicans).
One can see this in action in states dominated by ed reformers. It isn’t JUST that they promote, market and fund vouchers and charters exclusively- it’s that they never get anything done for public schools or public school students.
Ohio has spent YEARS focusing almost exclusively on charters and vouchers. Every single legislative session ends up completely hijacked by the list of demands by ed reformers on charters and vouchers. No one works for public schools. The “ed reform movement” offers public school families and students nothing positive or of practical value.
Here’s one of the endless examples:
“Two years ago, Governor DeWine and the General Assembly enacted a bold initiative that boosts funding for quality public charter schools. The Quality Community School Support Fund provides eligible charters up to an extra $1,750 per economically disadvantaged (ED) student and $1,000 per non-disadvantaged pupil.”
The governor and the majority of lawmakers in Ohio got NOTHING done for public schools or public school students, but they have passed lavish funding increases for charters and vouchers. Every single legislative session is like this. We simply get nothing from them. They return no value to public schools. Public schools and public school students are not being served by ed reformers. Our schools and students simply don’t interest them and it makes sense ! The whole objective of the “movement” is to replace public schools with a privatized system. They don’t invest in public schools because they don’t support public schools. But where does that leave public school students?
This part gives me great pause and is exactly what we had under Obama:
“embracing the Common Core standards and the accompanying tests that raised the bar for where students should be academically, providing emotional support and interventions for students acting out rather than suspending them, and setting up programs to help more high school graduates navigate to college.”
Can’t we ever get a Secretary of Education that doesn’t promote test scores and/or privatization?
and an additional way of stating the question: HOW can we get a Sec. of Ed. who doesn’t promote test scores/privatization
Something tells me that this Sec of Ed will be almost as bad as Duncan.
Why? See focus on testing described above.
Cardona is likely someone that embraces working on continuous improvement with his staff. I taught in a similar NYC suburban district. Administrators actively engaged with teachers with a focus towards working on doing the job better or more effective. Teaching was considered a craft, and the goal was to always expand knowledge and skills. It is also another way to ensure that some teachers do not become complacent and routinized with the perennial low expectation syndrome. If Meriden brought in outside consultants like Darling-Hammond, it is a sign this district does not want to settle for mediocre.
My district often brought in experts from Teachers College and Bank St. when we made curricula changes. My school also became designated a Blue Ribbon school which was largely awarded because the school produced students that did well on ‘the big standardized test’ compared to schools with similar levels of poverty and diversity. More important than results of tests is school attendance, graduation rates and the number of students heading to post graduation education.
Have you ever had a conversation with a bona fide journalist about Common Core State (sic) Standards? I have. The prevailing wisdom, from the ones I’ve met and had in-depth discussions with, is that they ‘raise the bar’ so that our students achieve more. And how could that be a bad thing?
And where did they learn this, if they’re good journalists? From the Obama administration. And where did the Obama administration get the idea, tools and staff to promote CCSS? From an organization called ‘Democrats for Education Reform.’
Who could be against Democrats who want to improve public education?
I know that readers of Diane’s blog see through all of that–but some of the best journalists I know, the ones who are out there pointing out that children spread the virus, and that teachers are heroes, swallowed the CCSS myths hook, line and sinker. And any teacher who tries to tell them the CCSS are developmentally inappropriate, or poorly written and thought out by a cadre of Ivy Leaguers who saw them as a money-making venture sounds overly defensive. Or worse–unable to work the magic that we expect from public school educators.
Look. We have an Ed Sec nominee and Deputy nominee who come directly out of public education, something we have said we wanted and needed since Jimmy Carter decided there should be a Secretary of Education. Both of them will have–as public school administrators–had to make decisions about all the issues we care about, from standardized testing to adopting curricula and standards to keeping kids safe from a deadly virus. And each one of those decisions has now been fly-specked by hundreds of thousands of public school teachers.
Let’s not use a sentence here or there to judge a candidate’s ultimate performance. In some ways, both Cardona and Marten will be unconstrained for the first time, not bound by state and federal legislation governing the running of public schools, but able to re-think some of the mistakes that have been made in shaping federal policy. And there isn’t anybody who will argue that federal policy hasn’t been creeping into classroom practice over the past 20 years.
Keep your powder dry. Give these folks a chance.
Thank you for this perspective. I agree there are all kinds of nuances here and I think that when “Common Core curriculum” morphed into “meeting Common Core standards” and “annual standardized testing to see if students are meeting Common Core standards” it all went off track.
But as a parent, when I first learned about Common Core curriculum (NOT “standards”), it seemed to me that it was an interesting approach that was more similar to what privileged students learned in private schools instead of the rote learning and memorization that was my own public school experience. It’s a shame that the greed and self-serving sycophants in ed reform turned it into something else where testing was designed to “prove” that public schools were bad and charters were good, and anyone who wasn’t on board with that agenda either shut up or got out.
To me, the real question is whether Cardona and Marten believe in the ed reform propaganda, or in facts and reality.
Not trying to cut you down, nycpsp, I am a PreK special who only tangentially was involved in CCSS (via one client in 2010), and whose youngest graduated just before they were implemented.
What is “Common Core Curriculum (NOT standards)”? What I see is neither fish nor fowl. CCSS claims to be stds NOT curriculum, w/ implementation via curriculum to be developed locally. Yet it is so detailed and sequenced that it resembles curriculum more than stds—and when you add in the concurrent stds-aligned high-stakes assessments, implementation means teaching to the test, thus you have a virtual curriculum. Was there something in there you valued?
But maybe you’re referring to the EngageNY curriculum modules your state came out with—was that the “interesting approach that was more similar to what privileged students learned in private schools instead of the rote learning and memorization” you experienced in pubsch?
Just wondering if there was a “there there”, or was it more theory described in PR that didn’t match the actual CCSS. From my POV, I don’t see CCSS as something with potential that ed-reformers turned into something else. As written, the ELA stds were a bizarre change from our district’s excellent reading & writing programs, and the elemsch math stds just cast in concrete the poor ‘conceptual’ approach they were using in the ‘90’s.
bethree5, thanks so much – those are good questions and it made me realize how ill-informed I am about all this. Like many people outside of education, I was completely clueless about the way “modern” (so to speak) public schools worked until my kid was actually in kindergarten (and even then, unaware of what “state testing” even was). The only thing I knew was that my kid’s public school education seemed so much better than my own, especially in science and reading.
Despite being impressed, I still had problems with some aspects of the pre-common core days — Everyday Math and Lucy Calkins’ reading programs were hated by some parents, and I could see both the good and bad points in both (and in other programs). So the only people in education I mistrusted completely were those pushing a program as working for all kids.
When I first heard some things about “Common Core”, I thought it was just yet another new approach to education that would be good for some students and not others. I didn’t connect that to testing – especially high stakes testing! In New York City, before Common Core, parents had already some experience with what seemed like “high stakes testing” but I guess it was high stakes for the students and not the teachers! Parents knew their kid’s 4th grade state test scores might affect their middle school choices, their 5th grade state test scores might affect their ability to even sit for the Hunter High School test, and their 7th grade state test scores might affect their middle school choices. And that’s before high school Regents’ exams, which seemed “low-stakes” after all that earlier testing!
The big change I witnessed with Common Core is how stupid those “Common Core” state tests became. Of course, they were flawed before Common Core, but after Common Core they became not just flawed, but almost designed to be intentionally ambiguous to guarantee some percentage of failure. And the pressure on teachers to have their students perform well on state exams instead of learn what they needed to know expanded exponentially.
Anyway, thank you for your insight. I realize now how little I know about the specifics of Common Core. As a parent, what little I heard about it seemed like it might have some good ideas, and since I already experienced various programs in math and reading that had both good points, I wasn’t expecting something great, just something that sounded like an interesting new approach.
But I probably paid more attention to this stuff than most parents, so one reason that “ed reform” was allowed to take over education is because parents didn’t really understand what it was they were doing when it wasn’t affecting their own kids. Which I suspect happened when the high stakes testing affected how their local schools were working.
I agree, Nancy Flanagan. Through most of his career, Cardona was responsible for poor/ minority/ ELL kids, and found ways to work with CCSS accountability systems to help them, while going beyond accountability-system metrics to help teachers improve in practical ways. All stakeholders find he listens to them & works with them. He worked the political system to get extra funding for his ELL’s, & during covid as a state actor to get 96% of state kids with devices/ internet to do remote learning. And despite cherry-picked statements exhorting covid school reopening, look at local details, you see he left decisions up to districts: CT came out pretty well, as the % students choosing in-person roughly matched % teachers willing to do it, & districts re-shuffled class assignments to match up.
The question is whether he can rise to the challenge of representing ALL public school students, many of whom are not poor/ minority/ ELL. In a sense, his primary job as Sec’y of Ed is championing those he’s always championed, and he’s well prepared for that. But there’s a huge proportion of students subjected to stds/aligned- assessments accountability systems whose school systems were ave/ good/ fine before NCLB– who have been subsumed into the witch-hunt for ‘failing’ schools and have suffered narrowed academic curriculum & loss of music, art, world language, even recess as a result. I am cautiously optimistic, based on his history of collaborating with all stakeholders.
Dr. Cardona has worked well within the system. Does he have the vision to change it?