The Biden administration's education agenda deserves a D, concludes Tim Daly. He surveyed a bipartisan group of "current and former district and state superintendents, Hill staffers, academic researchers, non-profit leaders, and current classroom educators." The highest grade was a B-. The most common grade was F. "More than one person asked if an F-minus was permissible," he writes.
President Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona provided no leadership on learning loss or chronic absenteeism, they said. Biden and Cardona were described as “absentee,” “silent,” “lacking vision,” “no sense of urgency,” and “missing the boat,” writes Daly.
The Education Department didn't create a national dashboard for academic recovery, he notes. "There was no summit called when national test scores 'flashed red'.”
Biden's attention was focused on forgiving student loans. Democrats and others called that policy "legally dubious, bound to fail in court, outlandishly expensive, and poorly targeted to ensure the resources aided those who truly needed it," writes Daly. If Biden thought it would attract young voters, it "did not work."
Some blamed the obsession with student loan forgiveness for the FAFSA debacle, which made it much harder for college hopefuls to apply for federal financial aid. Melissa Korn describes what went wrong in The Wall Street Journal.
Biden deserves credit for the American Rescue Plan (ARP), which sent more than $100 billion to schools, writes Daly. That funding led to partial recovery from Covid setbacks.
However, "student achievement for almost all subgroups has declined since Biden’s election," Daly writes. "Recent analysis suggests that COVID-era gaps are getting worse, not better."
Neither Democrats nor Republicans endorse school accountability any more, writes Paul E. Peterson on Education Next. Once the center of education reform, "school accountability is gone, fallen into a ditch, without so much as a shovel of dirt to give it a half-decent burial."
Education policy is where politicians go to kill their careers. The politicians and citizens of the U.S. just do not have a way to discuss education that will ever lead to real reform or any level of improvement. Remember when GW Bush was going to help make all student "above average."
I'd rather keep the feds out of Education. Of course, here in CA, we'll still get looniness.