Biden’s choice for Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, has all the personal characteristics many teachers have asked for – a Hispanic educator raised in the projects, a former classroom teacher (for a brief time) who rose through the ranks of school administration, someone who “gets” what it’s like in a classroom. He seems like a real educator. At the same time, his appointment, suggested by Linda Darling-Hammond, a much-respected liberal expert in education policy, revered in some progressive circles, captures why teacher activists have to see beyond the rhetoric and individual characteristics to the politics that underlie this choice. Because Cardona has a limited track record in educational policy and as his Linked-In profile shows, few high-level connections, we can better understand what he likely represents for Biden by looking at Darling-Hammond and her longtime allies, the NEA, AFT, and unions that supported the Obama administration as a “friend of labor.”
Darling-Hammond has had a stellar record as a scholar of education policy, especially teacher education, examining how to increase educational opportunity for those long denied what was due them because of social oppression: racism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism. She vigorously contested the spurious research about Teach for America, part of the neoliberal plan globally to deprofessionalize teaching, aimed at putting minimally trained grads from elite colleges into schools serving students who need the best trained, best educated teachers. Accolades given her for that research are well-deserved. Still, the policies she has advanced since her involvement with the Obama administration have attempted to square the circle, making the neoliberal project more equitable rather than challenging its destructive premises of privatization and the Democrats’ use of education reform as a substitute for addressing festering economic inequality.
To understand the convergence of Darling-Hammond’s ideas with what the Democrats will pursue in Biden’s administration, look at the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) which she created, with the purpose of “Promoting Data-Driven ‘Deeper Learning’.” To understand LPI’s aims, examine its political interlocks. LPI accepts as a given the future capitalist elites have planned for education: intensification of privatization with education technology, in particular the widespread use of proprietary software and public/private partnerships – a form of privatization that allows corporations to make profits from public funding. LPI’s links to big money in the Democratic Party, both the center and its purportedly more progressive wing including unions, show up in projects LPI’s staff undertake, advancing the aims of “big data” transforming education, carrying out what the World Bank, the OECD, and tech billionaires have planned for us, a project researchers are now exposing and some unions are fighting, as I describe elsewhere.
What seem to be victories in LPI’s projects for equity and teachers’ voice, like new “performance assessments,” occur within a framework of ceding control to Silicon Valley and Wall Street over what our children learn and how our teachers teach, for example in Big Picture Learning. The “big picture” LPI endorses is not one parents, teachers, or students have created. It consists of using online education for job retraining, linking learning, from early childhood years through college, to educational outcomes corporations say they need, vocationalizing education and taking more professional control away from teachers in deciding how and what they will teach, as standardized testing and its standardized curriculum have done. The networks of big money pushing privatization and surveillance with ed tech, documented so well by the blog “Wrench in the Gears,” are as staggering as they are chilling. LPI is deeply embedded and in bed with this undertaking, urged on by AFT and NEA.
It may be that Cardona will reject LPI’s assumptions and use his new post and power to resist the moguls who control the Democratic Party and have started the new bipartisan neoliberal project. Cardona’s presence as an invited speaker at a session on “Investing in education: Criteria for Success” at the Yale School of Management Educational Leadership Conference, along with representatives of big data and big profits, does not, by itself, tell us how he will manage demands made on him and the U.S. Department of Education, though it shows his political orbit. Nor do I think we can predict his actions from how he handled competing demands in school reopening as Commissioner of Education in CT, how he will respond to teachers’ activism about the terrible life-and-death choices COVID-19 and capitalism have forced on teachers, students, and parents.
Precisely because Cardona has not been deeply involved in setting national policy, we may have an opening to push him to stand up for what public education needs: Not a penny to venture capital and corporations pillaging public funds that should go directly to public schools. Not one piece of personal data given to ed tech to monetize. No use of school resources to advance “platform capitalism.” Parents, teachers, students who use the schools have the right to shape their future, to reimagine and make it. We want equality of educational outcomes as well as economic security for working people, health care, housing, food security – a program for social justice and school quality. We should let Miguel Cardona know we want to have his back if he defends what schools, teachers, students really need – while we simultaneously prepare for his not doing so.
Thank you for this balanced piece and the fact that we cannot sit by and wait for someone to save education. We are the drivers of the change and the new Secretary will have an opportunity to meet our demands. It is not the other way around.
Great article. We must remain vigilant because it is so easy to drag public figures back to the failed status quo. It’s time for those in the know to rise up and be heard right from the start of the new administration. We must Stop Politically Driven Education, which by the way is the name of my latest book. The need for change is too complicated to discuss in a single article so I put my thoughts in the book. Take what you like, throw out what you don’t but without hesitating, never stop short of systemic change.
Thomas Jefferson referred to the purpose of education to “Rake a few geniuses from the rubbish.” And that’s exactly what is going on. It’s a race to define some as geniuses and others as rubbish thrown in to the street. I must say, not only are we taking a perverse look at who we call geniouses, children are not rubbish. It is time to stop treating them as if they are.
The current system of education was never designed to serve all children. And it never will. Dr. Cordona will need some guidance in his new role. There is a call to arms for those who believe in meaningful education, for all to provide that guidance.
There is a glimmer of hope, it’s important for all educators to keep that hope alive.
Apologies for my website not being well-indexed. Just want to chime in that LPI is funded by the Hewlett Packard Foundation – which is the force behind so-called “deeper learning.” Once folks realize data collection is not going to be limited to screens, but will increasingly be captured through wearable technology, including behavioral data in project-based settings – I hope they will see how the trap is being laid. More info here: https://wrenchinthegears.com/2019/07/07/hewlett-packard-and-the-pitfalls-of-deeper-learning-in-an-internet-of-things-world/
LittleSis entry for LPI: https://littlesis.org/org/280078-Learning_Policy_Institute
Here’s a link to a report on the Oakland Unified School District’s (OUSD) “New Small Schools Initiative” published in 2009 by Linda Darling-Hammond and her group:
https://32dkl02ezpk0qcqvqmlx19lk-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/StandfordReport.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3V9_vW76fKQLnmoH21KtbxKZxwFKoNl81dQ0NzmDjP6Tv13-4yWqVYMgo
The report was based on “research” that Darling-Hammond’s group did (and were compensated for) before Obama was elected. It was a whitewash of the privatization and downsizing done under the state takeover of OUSD (2003-2009), which was organized and led by Eli Broad and his minions (with the Gates Foundation equally complicit with Broad for the first few years of the state takeover). This “New Small Schools Initiative” was responsible for closing several Oakland public schools, breaking up several secondary schools, closing libraries and eliminating electives in most middle schools and three of the original six large comprehensive high schools, emphasizing high stakes testing with all its accoutrements, and handing several others over the charter school organizations (charter school enrollment went from 2,000 at the start of the takeover in 2003 to over 8,000 three years later, while public school enrollment fell by one-third; it’s now over 15,000). Darling-Hammond and her team, as you will see, were quite enthusiastic about the “Expect Success” and “Results-Based Budgeting” (RBB) initiatives that were imposed on OUSD by the dictatorial state administrators. RBB ostensibly decentralized by eliminating essential central services (and schoolworkers — maintenance staff was cut by about 80%), while giving each school in the district an amount of money inadequate to fund even bare-bones education. “Expect Success” brought in local billionaires (especially Gary Rogers, then-CEO of Dreyers Ice Cream, and his charter school-founding son Brian. Their Rogers Family Foundation was the incubator for the charter-school-promoting GO “Public” Schools)). Naturally, the report was used by OUSD administration to bash teachers and other schoolworkers and to continue to impose their harmful model on students and the community. Note that in the acknowledgements section of the report there are many grateful thank-yous to district administrators and school board members, but none to schoolworker unions, union leaders or union members.
I met him. He is a monster. One on one, he’s so sleepy you need a shower after talking to him. He does not listen to teachers. He feels the need to tell us all what we are missing. It’s a balanced piece. I was there once. I saw who he was and what he did. It’s a hard pass.