The Biden administration's K-12 legacy is mostly about money, writes Brooke Schultz in Education Week. Schools got an extra $122 billion for pandemic recovery with lots of flexibility on how to spend it. But Education Secretary Miguel Cardona did not put forward a policy agenda "to counteract a historic decline in student achievement and focus the public’s attention on fixing it," she writes.
For example, there was no federal "push for evidence-based reading instruction as student achievement in reading (and math) hit its lowest levels in decades."
"Politically, Democrats lost their edge in voter trust on education during Biden’s tenure," Schultz notes. Education Savings Accounts spread in "red" states.
“I don’t think they did as much as they could have to use the bully pulpit to push schools and school districts to use that money wisely to make the biggest difference for kids," Fordham's Mike Petrilli says. "We have lost a generation of kids because of the pandemic, and these four years were not used as they could have been.”
"The department’s more ambitious vision certainly fell to higher education — student debt relief, college affordability, and its aggressive opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision invalidating affirmative action in college admissions," writes Schultz. "But much of his agenda didn’t stick."
NPR's Cory Turner asked "more than a dozen educators, researchers, advocates and policy experts" to rate Biden's education policies. The average grade was a C.
Of the 14 experts NPR consulted for this wholly unscientific poll, the Biden administration got no A's, a bunch of B's, two hedgie B-/C+'s, two C's, two D's, two F's and one "incomplete" for work left unfinished.
Most said the Biden administration will be remembered for the pandemic funding and "for a pair of high-profile failures: the FAFSA rollout and his unkept promise to provide broad student loan forgiveness," writes Turner.
Not surprisingly, the two most conservative experts gave F's. "It's hard for me to think how it could have gone worse," says Rick Hess at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In a National Review column, he calls Cardona "America's worst Education secretary," ever.
Betsy DeVos, who was Education secretary in Trump's first term, has advice for nominee Linda McMahon on running the department.
Governors and state superintendents had "great counsel . . . about what was and wasn't working," DeVos tells Hess. "I think the biggest risk is taking counsel from the 'experts' that populate the alphabet soup of D.C.’s education lobby. Many are bought and paid for by the unions and will do anything to protect the current system and their power. Washington is full of people who will tell you 'how things are supposed to be done,' but that advice is almost always in the service of systems, not kids."
Penny Schwinn, a former teacher, charter school founder and state commissioner of education, has been nominated as McMahon's deputy. "Developing a stronger pipeline of teachers and shifting the state’s elementary teachers to an evidence-based approach to teaching literacy were among Schwinn’s top priorities during her tenure as Tennessee’s schools chief," reports Lesli A. Maxwell in Education Week. "She took heat from progressives and conservatives."
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