(WASHINGTON) — Education Secretary Miguel Cardona signed off Friday as the nation’s top education official — calling it his “dream job.”
“To the students, families, educators, and education leaders I’ve served these last 4 years, I want to make it clear that while I will no longer be your Secretary of Education, I will still be your partner in all that we hope to achieve for America’s students,” Cardona wrote in a farewell post on X.
Cardona was sworn in on March 2, 2021, a year into the coronavirus pandemic, serving nearly the entire Biden presidency.
During his tenure, the former Connecticut education commissioner touted helping President Joe Biden safely reopen K-12 schools for in-person learning after monthslong closures. He also championed the Department of Education’s efforts to fix the so-called broken student loan system and cancel debt for millions of borrowers. The secretary also faced right-wing attacks at every turn, including the classroom culture wars battle. He vowed to continue fighting after leaving his post.
“Our fight for education is happening all around us in classrooms and communities across the country and it continues,” he wrote. “And I’ll be right there with you in the fight.”
Despite returning students to school after the pandemic, the department has been blasted for lagging student achievement in reading and math.
Cardona told ABC News the administration was focused on using the roughly $190 billion from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund to prevent “further exacerbation” from interrupted literacy and numeracy learning time in the classroom.
“Those [ESSER] dollars were set up to help us recover,” he said. “It was not intended to address decades of neglect in education or the normalization of failure that we have accepted in this country. It was to prevent it from being exacerbated.”
However, Cardona’s tenure was mired by higher education woes. For the past 2 1/2 years, the education secretary has been criticized for the botched rollout of a new Free Application for Federal Student Aid application and for how his department’s student debt relief plan was unconstitutional — facing Supreme Court rejections in 2023.
In his capstone event on Tuesday, Cardona laid into the next administration for choosing “a billionaire donor to lead the department of education.”
The Trump administration is expected to hand over the Department of Education to WWE co-founder Linda McMahon if she is confirmed by the Senate.
McMahon, a Trump loyalist and donor, is expected to carry out the president-elect’s policies, which Trump has said include shutting down the very department McMahon has been tapped to lead.
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