Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has been nearly invisible these past three years, other than lamenting test scores. Veteran educator Nancy Bailey has some suggestions about how he could help kids, schools, and teachers right now. This post was reposted by the Network for Public Education.
The secretary keeps talking about raising the bar. Nancy Bailey has some thoughts about some bars he could work on. Reposted with permission.
She writes:
Education Secretary Cardona focuses on reducing absenteeism, tutoring, and after-school programs. And he refers to raising the bar, which sounds like A Nation at Risk talk.
Yet there are so many K12 issues that Cardona and the Biden administration could address, lead, and support the states and local school districts.
Here are some educational issues Cardona should drive this new year. If you have more, please share.
1. The Arts
Poor public schools have gone without the arts for years. Cardona should push for qualified art and music teachers for every school.
The arts help students struggling with mental health difficulties, and jobs exist in the arts.
Every child in K12 should have access to a vital arts program.
2. Career Education
Career-technical education is essential, but companies pushing their agendas into high schools to get workers raises concerns.
Tax dollars should help students decide what careers they want, giving them the chance to experience high school, not creating schools for corporate preparation.
3. Class Size
Reducing class sizes would help students with disabilities in inclusion classes and is essential for student safety. Cardona must endorse lowering class sizes and showcase schools that do.
If schools can’t lower every class (classes like P.E. wouldn’t be necessary), give students access to at least one small class where they are known.
Lowering class sizes in K-3rd grade would also help children get a good start. See the STAR Study.
4. Corporal Punishment
In 2023, The Washington Post reported that 15 states still permitted corporal punishment in schools (St. George, 2023). Like Florida, which vaguely gives a nod to it. Teens who wear the wrong kind of prom dress or misunderstandings resulting in paddling are examples.
Cardona deserves praise for standing against corporal punishment last year in schools, claiming educators should favor evidence-based approaches and that there should be no spanking, hitting, or paddling.
5. Data
Cardona must study and draw attention to child privacy laws which are currently inadequate.
In 2018, the NEPC published Educating All Our Children: Your Kids, Their Data, No Privacy by Linda McSpadden McNeil.
She stated:
When children’s privacy is violated in ways that are overt, visible, and knowable, the violation is unquestioned. It is unacceptable. In most cases, it is illegal.
So why is it different when the violation is hidden, opaque, electronic, commercial, and complicated?
6. High-Stakes Standardized Testing
President Biden promised teachers and parents he’d end harmful high-stakes standardized tests. Instead, he pushed assessments even during the pandemic.
Can Cardona show the American people who want these tests reduced or eliminated what, if anything, the Biden administration will finally do to end high-stakes standardized tests?
7. Lead in School Pipes
The Biden-Harris team promised to repair the lead pipes in homes and schools. They’re to be commended for this. It would be nice, however, if Cardona presented a report.
No amount of lead is O.K. for developing children, and it can lead to learning disabilities.
8. Reading
Reading has become a volatile issue, and Cardona has been mostly silent. Many commercial programs with little independent study, but nonetheless called the Science of Reading, are being pushed into classrooms.
The subject of reading deserves a better forum than short, often hostile debates on X.
Cardona should call for a new National Reading Panel to study programs and address reading instruction. The panel should include teachers who teach reading since they were left off the last panel. This panel should consider the concerns of the last NRP member, the only educator on the panel, Joanne Yatvin (Yatvin, 2002). Parents should also be given a voice on this panel. A new NRP would allow for a better collection of the research, old and the latest findings, and a review of the work of the last NRP.
9. Recess
Every public school in the nation should give children several unstructured breaks throughout the school day, supervised, on safe, well-designed playgrounds.
Driving students to work nonstop with mindfulness training or a dozen other excuses to bypass recess should not be permitted.
10. School Buildings
Americans need to know the status of their public school buildings. How are the HVAC systems and air quality? How many school facilities are still falling apart? Are public school buildings safe?
Are new schools being built to support teachers?
11. School Choice
The Biden administration discussed regulating charter schools (Lieberman, 2022). But concerns about vouchers, educational savings account, nonprofit and for-profit charters, and religion in schools needs to be better addressed.
In addition, the Biden administration should describe what they mean by community schools (often called charter schools), partnerships, and social impact bonds and how these schools are still public.
12. School Libraries and Librarians
It’s an abomination to drill children to learn to read in poor schools, and then not provide them a school library with a qualified school librarian.
Closing school libraries has been a disaster in many school districts, see Philadelphia as an example.
13. School Safety
The gun lobby is unfortunately influential, so despite shootings in this country, don’t hold your breath for meaningful gun laws. It was thoughtful of Cardona to visit Parkland.
In the meantime, school administrators must devise creative ways to make schools safe and identify students in their schools who need mental health help. See class size above.
14. Social-Emotional Learning
Concerns about the data collected on students includes social-emotional learning. Teachers always want their students to be socially and emotionally healthy, but social-emotional learning seems more about collecting unnecessary sensitive data about students.
Who is using this information and why?
15. Special Education
Parents are in danger of losing special education services. The All Handicapped Children’s Act reauthorized to IDEA should have evolved into a more inclusive and better programs for students with exceptional needs, but instead it has been hijacked by those who don’t want to pay for it.
Cardona should look into special education and create a task force to study it and determine exactly how much special education funding schools receive and the kind of services students receive. He might start with Tammy Kolbe’s work and the National Education Policy Center report Funding Special Education: Charting a Path that Confronts Complexity and Crafts Coherence.
16. Teacher Preparation
School reform has changed teacher preparation dramatically. There needs to be more effort to oversee these mostly fast-track nonprofit or for-profit programs often connected to charter schools.
Cardona should step up here to promote fully university-prepared teachers, and he should work with university education programs to improve their coursework and degree offerings. The United States Department of Education might provide scholarships to attract young people who want to pursue a teaching career in university education programs, not unknown nonprofits or charter school preparation.
Fast-track groups like Teach for America are a concern because they turn those without real qualifications into the system with little understanding of child development or what’s needed to teach well, and Grow Your Own programs are ill-defined.
17. Technology
While technology is useful to learning, a recent Columbia University study indicates that children read better with paper print not online.
The Guardian cites MIT neuroscientist John Gabrieli, skeptical about the promises of big tech and its salesmen.
Gabrieli states:
I am impressed how educational technology has had no effect on scale, on reading outcomes, on reading difficulties, on equity issues.
Is Cardona behind teachers or for replacing them with technology? Actions matter.
18. Third-Grade Retention
Third-grade retention is unnecessary. No child should be made to feel like a failure. Children can still learn to read in third grade, can still grow and become great learners. Speaking out on this issue would help end it.
References
St. George, D. (2023, August 10). In over 15 states, schools can still paddle students as punishment. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/08/10/school-paddling-corporal-punishment/.
Yatvin, J. (2002). Babes in the Woods: The Wanderings of the National Reading Panel. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(5), 364–369. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170208300509
Lieberman, M (2022). Lawmakers, Education Secretary Clash Over Charter School Rules. Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/lawmakers-education-secretary-clash-over-charter-school-rules/2022/04
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Thank you, Nancy Bailey! This is EXCELLENT. I concur.
Also happy re: study concerning reading print vs. online stuff. I read better using print rather than stuff online and so do kids.
And yes, 3rd grade retention is ridiculous. Glad to see Yatvin is cited.
Once again, I repeat: Disagree with Nancy Bailey at the risk of simply being wrong.
You disagree with Nancy Bailey? Huh. I disagree with no one. Actually, I think I might disagree with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and every other Microsoft executive. I disagree that they should be. Elon Musk too. Other billionaires too. Happy to debate if you disagree with a point of contention, with an idea or a policy. Hard to debate if you disagree with a whole person. I don’t mean to be snarky. Just wondering what the specific disagreement is.
I think Roy is voicing his support of Nancy, actually.
You’re right. Oops! Sorry, Roy.
First things first. . . He should resign. He’s a true milquetoast adminimal.
“Can Cardona show the American people who want these tests reduced or eliminated what, if anything, the Biden administration will finally do to end high-stakes standardized tests?”
No!
He doesn’t have the mental mojo to begin to think about ending the standards and testing malpractice regime.
Agreed!
Well said!
Agree!
#5-Data
Yes privacy concerns are an issue, but the most pressing issue is the invalidity of data derived from the standards and testing malpractice regime. . . and then using that invalid, false data for anything. Crap in, crap out is what that data is. It’s impossible to make chicken cordon bleu out of roadkill armadillos.
Duane,
I think Nancy’s concern about data is not test scores. It’s about PID—personally identifiable data. Address, phone number, email, SS number, birthdate, disability status, behavior, disciplinary records, etc. There are corporations that make money selling this sort of data for marketing.
The sale of data is the motivating factor behind over-testing.
Duane– appreciate this much-needed update to the antique “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Planning to use it!
#13 School safety
Until this nation breaks free from the stranglehold that the world’s biggest, sadly greatest, death and destruction machine the US Military and the accompanying industrial and congressional complex that enables it this country will continue to have karmic blowback in the form of mass shootings. We have met the enemy and he is us still holds true.
Until each individual gun owner starts being ethical in their gun ownership and usage we will continue to have the shootings.
Unless we can live in a county that will accept common sense gun laws, our people will continue to get shot and killed. Unfortunately, we seem to be a twilight zone where guns are more valued than women in some states.
Guns are surely valued more than children. Even more than fetuses.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has been nearly invisible these past three year.
If the overturn of roe v wade and the make-up of SCOTUS doesn’t threaten separation of church and state, I can see why religious charter schools would be far down Cardona’ s list. Never the less, it’s sad, he was appointed by a Democrat. The GOP serves the religious right. That is its base.
I will vote for Biden. He should be getting more from his cabinet. His Secretary of Transportation was on parental semi leave initially, his Defense Secretary was under anesthesia with the 2nd in command in the Bahamas and his Education Secretary- cricket’s? All that said, there is no indication that they are grifters or incompetent like trump’s were.
In summation, THIS! Any way we could send a few hundred thousand copies of this post to the United States Department of Education?
WOW! Cardona: watch, listen, & learn.
This is an impressive list. The disappointment I have with Cardona is that he has shown himself to be unwilling to upset a public education establishment, with politicians and central administration, that has for too long compromised with a corporate drive for privatization. The critical problems we face in public education come from a profound negligence toward resource support of schools. Until Washington and state governments are willing to acknowledge that the standards movement and infusion of misplaced technology have not worked, policies meant to serve students and school staff will remain inadequate. Cardona is simply unwilling or unable to separate from a top down system that ignores the needs on the ground floor.
It seems that one of the requirements for being appointed Secretary of Education in the United States is being pretty much ignorant of education. This is totally bizarre but, High Roller Mr. Moralizer Bill Bennett?? Arnie Dunk’em Duncan? Cruela deVos? Cardona the Invisible Man?
Give me a break.
I was hoping Jill Biden would help turn the corner, but that turned out to be a pipe dream.
Glad to see the sanity here.