Miguel Cardona, who rose from fourth grade professor to President Joe Biden’s schooling secretary, fiercely defended the federal company that oversees the public’s population faculties and that President-elect Donald Trump needs to do away with.
A first-generation Puerto Rican from Connecticut, Cardona become the stateโs first Latino commissioner of education. As he prepares to loose the U.S. Area of Training, he’s ultimatum towards Trump’s vow to โget ridโ of the segment and make allowance each and every condition to in my view โhandle education.โ Trump has picked former wrestling government Linda McMahon to oversee the department, a place that wishes Senate affirmation.
โProtecting the federal Department of Education is protecting the rights and the opportunities of students. Otherwise, youโre going to have systems that look totally different in one state versus another, and not everyone will have the same opportunity to succeed in this country,โ mentioned Cardona, one of four Hispanic members of Biden’s Cupboard.
In an interview with NBC News this year in Pristine York Town, Cardona mentioned he is taking admirable pleasure in having been a part of “an administration that looks like America” and having labored with a staff of crowd that “come from the classroom.”
Surrounding and native governments have lengthy been liable for schooling, atmosphere regulations and offering many of the investment for faculties. Although the federal segment does now not impose curricula or have a hand in most college insurance policies, it manages federal provide systems and offers billions of greenbacks in supplemental investment to high-poverty Ok-12 faculties โ in addition to covers the price of schooling for college kids with disabilities. It additionally oversees the $1.6 trillion federal pupil mortgage program and determines what schools should do to take part.
As a result of a congressional mandate, the Training Area is tasked with assessing student progress at the national level and creating tactics to enhance schooling. It additionally collects statistics on enrollment, crime at school, staffing and alternative subjects that assistance that challenge.
Most significantly for Cardona, the segment is charged with implementing civil rights regulations to stop discrimination in federally funded faculties. He considers this a key reason why to ensure the segment.
โWe donโt want to go backwards,โ Cardona mentioned.
โThere are about 65 million students in this country who need civil rights protection, who need to have a department that can make sure the dollars are getting to where theyโre supposed to go,โ he mentioned.
โStudents need their districts and states to get guidance on how to support kids,โ particularly with regards to addressing psychological condition wishes and faculty violence, Cardona mentioned. โThatโs what we do. We provide that support.”
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team, told NBC News in a statement that the president-elect “believes that school choice is the civil rights issue of our time” and will “ensure all families have access to a great education, no matter their zip code.”
“Trump will improve academic excellence for all students,” the statement read, “by increasing access to school choice, empowering parents to have a voice in their childโs education, supporting good teachers, and returning education back to the states where it belongs.”
A look back
The Covid-19 pandemic, the fight over student debt relief and the end of affirmative action were some of the issues the country grappled with during Cardona’s time as education secretary.
When Cardona first stepped into office, more than half of the nation’s schools were closed. “People forget that,” he said while recalling working for nine months to reopen them.
Students struggled with the mental health repercussions of the pandemic and the yearlong lockdown, leading the Education Department to enlist more than 16,000 social workers and counselors to address the issue.
Cardona said providing those resources was among his proudest achievements, as well as increasing Pell Grants, federal scholarships and forgiving over $176 billion in student loans to nearly 5 million people during his term.
Courts repeatedly barred the Biden administration from implementing its one-time student debt forgiveness planย toย cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loan debtย forย more than 40 million borrowers. So the administration provided debt relief under four existing debt cancellation programs: the Saving on a Valuable Education Planโs early forgiveness, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, the total and permanent disability discharge plan, and the income-driven repayment plan.
Cardona worries about a future dismantling of these programs, saying they’ve allowed “people to go to college, buy homes and move on with their life.”
As a former teacher and public sector employee, Cardona said he was taking a bit of solace in having ramped up debt forgiveness for those in public service who had been paying off their loans for 10 years or more under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. “This was something that was passed by Republicans and Democrats in 2007,” he said.
“We provided debt relief to people that earned debt relief, and I’m proud of that because a lot of people challenge that,” Cardona said. “The same people that didn’t complain when we bailed out an airline industry or we bailed out banks; we were bailing out working-class Americans who work hard.”
In an interview with NBC News NOW on Wednesday, Cardona said many of the public employees who got debt relief are “people we said we need in our classrooms” during Covid as well as “firefighters, police officers, veterans; everyone that we called essential four years ago are benefiting from the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.”
“No other administration has come close to the debt relief that we provided and fixing a broken system,” he said.
‘Good trouble’
Cardona warned that “there’s going to be a period of rain before the rainbow comes out” when it comes to education in the U.S.
“Students of color, who have historically been overlooked in admissions processes, have less access than they did three years ago,” Cardona said, in reference to the Supreme Court’s decision banningย selective colleges and universities from using race as a factor in admissions. “It’s going to make us less competitive as a nation when only some of our students have access to higher education.”
According to Cardona, previous state-level bans against race-based affirmative action have given the country a glimpse of the consequences of prohibiting such a practice on a national scale.
In the nine states where bans took place, research foundย that the enrollment of studentsย from underrepresented communitiesย declined, even when otherย factors, such as class, were weighed more heavily.
โThatโs probably going to happen in this country,โ Cardona mentioned.
Cardona said he looks at a rubber bracelet he wears on his right hand that reads, “excellent hassle,” in memory of the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who famously fought for civil rights.
“He fought, when he used to be younger, to get freedoms that scholars had been being denied. He sacrificed a dozen in order that shall we progress ahead as a rustic,” Cardona said. “Sure, we’re going to travel right into a unlit day by which they need to near the Area of Training, stop affirmative action. … However we want to come in combination as a rustic and struggle for what we imagine โ similar to Congressman John Lewis did.”
