Evaluating Education Secretary Nominee Miguel Cardona
When assessing anyone for the top job in education, be it local, state or federal, the first step must be educational professionalism. For several decades, anti-teacherists have been using the top executive positions within education departments to further a corporate agenda, private, charter and for profit public school interests. Public education has had the deck stacked against it by profiteers, anti-unionists, political types and ambitious educators, whether right wing conservatives or progressive leftists. As a result, many unqualified, incompetent, ambitious, and rapacious individuals took the helm to steer their own ambitions, rather than those of students, community, country. Much of the wrath takes dead aim at teachers and their unions, for reasons which are beyond our scope here.
As a site devoted to the health of schools seen through educational ecology – society’s many connections to safety, security, and discipline—we will assess the relevant players. TGBL will judge the influencers or wannabes of educational policy-- executives, politicians, interest groups, individuals--as part of its mission for advocating the well being of our students and community through its commentary .
Unlike some previous education secretaries and other school chiefs, Cardona has been an educator his entire career. This is a welcome change, bringing some badly needed professionalism and experience. His specialty is bilingual and bicultural education, with degrees earned from Central Connecticut State and UConn. He has invaluable building level experience, as an elementary school teacher and a principal. Cardona served as Connecticut’s Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning and then state Commissioner of Education He also taught educational leadership working as an adjunct professor in University of Connecticut’s Department of Education. He supports fully the public school as an ideal and American institution. Cardona’s depth of knowledge coupled with years of classroom and administrative work bodes well for the DOE.
He appears well liked and respected, with a willingness to reach out to constituent groups, including teachers. His particular discipline and passion for it has the potential to improve school safety and culture by devoting much of his efforts to reach perpetually high-risk groups. For a ship often traveling through seas full of storms and mines, a competent pilot steering it gives hope for the future.
We do have one major concern. Cardona is under major pressure from left wing advocacy groups to restore the well-intentioned but wrong-headed disciplinary guidelines of the Obama administration. The sweeping changes over the last few years has resulted in disciplinary paralysis, verbal and physical assaults on teachers, lack of follow up on support services in lieu of eliminating most corrective measures, and a foxes-rule-the-hen house mentality. TGBL has no objection to reviewing the Obama policies and improving on them. However, a blind re-implementation would continue to put students and staff at high risk for physical and mental abuse. If Cardona is confirmed, we’ll find out just how sagacious and strong an educator he is. School safety is a matter of life and death, and asking students to learn from there actions often cannot be satisfied by a 20 minute therapy session during lunch and a good rendition of kumbayah.
So, we find Miguel Cardona highly qualified based on his resume, advocacy for public education, and work on behalf of minority students. However, because we have qualms about his vision of student discipline, we are withholding our top rating of most qualified.