How USA edu secy nominee Cardona works with teacher!

Miguel Cardona, a former teacher, school administrator, and currently Connecticut’s education commissioner, was recently nominated to lead the federal Education Department. Cardona’s selection reflects a shift from those who spearheaded education policy under Joe Biden’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama.

As president, Obama aligned himself with the pro–charter school PAC Democrats for Education Reform, which, as co-founder Whitney Tilson put it, was founded “to break the teacher unions’ stranglehold over the Democratic Party.”

Obama tapped DFER’s top choice for education secretary—Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan—and for the next seven years Duncan pushed controversial reform policies, including charter school expansion, weakening teacher tenure, and tying teacher salaries to student test scores.

Unions despised Duncan, and Obama, who largely left the dirty work to his appointee, made clear he approved of the job Duncan was doing. “Arne has done more to bring our educational system—sometimes kicking and screaming—into the 21st century than anybody else,” Obama said in 2015, according to CNN.

While Biden didn’t go so far as picking former National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García to lead the Education Department, the choice of Cardona has nonetheless been a relief to union advocates, who knew education reformers were lobbying behind the scenes for other candidates.

It’s another example of how Democratic leaders have drifted away from the Obama-era agenda and more toward a platform focused on traditional public schools and their schoolteachers.

During his confirmation hearing for education commissioner, Cardona made clear that under his leadership, Connecticut would be focusing its energy on “neighborhood schools” rather than charters.

He’s also echoed some of Biden’s criticisms of evaluating teachers by standardized test scores. “Not reducing a teacher to a test score and bringing the voices of teachers and leaders into the process of professional learning. Those are the two things I really felt like I had to champion,” Cardona told CT Mirror in 2019.

As an assistant superintendent for Meriden Public Schools—located about 20 miles south of Hartford—Cardona was intimately involved in one of the nation’s most successful so-called labor-management partnerships in public education.

Cardona helped lead reforms to boost student achievement in collaboration with the Meriden Federation of Teachers, at a time when educators nationally were being framed as the barrier to such efforts.