Miguel Cardona is sick of the political strife that’s consuming classrooms, and he’s ready to say so out loud.
President Joe Biden’s education secretary — a former elementary school principal from Connecticut — has sought to avoid conflict since arriving in Washington. But Cardona has been shaken by the country’s fractured education politics over curriculum, parents’ rights, LGBTQ students and race.
“I was hired to improve education in the country. I’m not a politician. I’m an educator. I’m a dad, and I want to talk about raising the bar in education,” Cardona said in an interview with POLITICO last week. “But I won’t sit idly when some try to attack our schools or privatize education.”
Cardona advocated for tighter gun laws after last year’s killings at Robb Elementary and has warned that the country risks failing students in Covid-19’s wake. Yet his newly public exasperation with school-centered partisanship comes as the Republican-controlled House approved sweeping “Parents Bill of Rights” legislation that captures broad strokes of pandemic-era conservative education wars.
“When we talk about politicization, when we talk about book banning, when we talk about Black history curriculum being picked apart — I think there are deliberate attempts to make sure that our public schools are not functional so that the private option sounds better,” the education secretary said. “I don’t doubt that’s intentional.”
Elections are also at play.
Nearly 30,000 school board seats are on the ballot this year across the country.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — a likely 2024 Republican presidential candidate who weighed in on school board races last year — has tapped conservative energy with a range of education issues. He signed one measure restricting how gender identities are discussed with schoolchildren, launched a feud over an Advanced Placement African American history course, and is primed to sign major private school voucher legislation.
Biden’s other potential challengers also frame their education concerns with a distinct culture war bent.
Conservatives say they’re the ones on the defensive. Many Republican governors and lawmakers argue their restrictions on classroom lessons, curriculum, and LGBTQ students are meant to blunt diversity initiatives run amok or what they see as the misapplication of legal protections to include transgender people.
Some Republican groups are also looking to combine a longstanding push for expansive school choice programs with renewed efforts to harness more power on local school boards.
“Many school board members are intertwined with biased political ideologies and are controlled by special interests groups like the teachers unions,” said Laura Zorc, the education reform director at the conservative FreedomWorks organization, after Florida lawmakers sent their school choice bill to DeSantis.
“The only way parents can ensure that their children receive a high quality education is if state educational dollars, traditionally earmarked for local school districts, are directed to parents who want the very best for their children,” Zorc said in a statement.
Cardona’s public frustration dovetails with a growing political counteroffensive from White House allies.
National Education Association President Becky Pringle and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently denounced DeSantis during an Orlando rally, and Weingarten is scheduled to deliver an address “in defense of public education” in Washington this week.
The Democratic Party of Illinois last week unveiled what it called an unprecedented effort to endorse dozens of candidates in nonpartisan local school and library board races. It also plans to funnel nearly $300,000 into an advertising and organizing campaign surrounding those elections.
Amid all this tension, Cardona has wielded recent op-eds in Newsweek and the Tampa Bay Times to accuse Republicans of “hiding behind the guise of ‘parents’ rights’” to defund public schools and trying to “hijack” classroom discussions.
And the secretary met last week with school superintendent and teacher representatives, who, he said, “feel the same way.”
“It just seems like it’s a constant attack on what I know as a dad, and what I know as an educator, is happening in our schools,” Cardona said in the interview. “Education being used to divide communities is the challenge that we face now as leaders.”
That challenge, he told state superintendents assembled in Washington last week, “is even harder than what we had in 2020” when Covid-19 first shuttered schools.
“Our students are as [emotionally] dysregulated as they ever have been in the last twenty years. The surgeon general reminded us that we’re in a youth mental health crisis, where one in three high school girls has considered suicide in the last three years,” Cardona told POLITICO. “I’m tired of folks looking to get political points by attacking vulnerable students, vulnerable communities and attacking our schools.”
