In his last week as education secretary, Miguel Cardona told a room full of Education Department staff and guests that he could sense a lot of apprehension for what may come under the incoming Trump administration.
“Will the investments we made be slashed or sustained? Will the new grants we stood up be canceled or continue? Will the recovery we began be abandoned or built upon? We can’t spend too much time wallowing in uncertainty. We can’t spend too much time feeling sad,” he said on Tuesday during an event recounting the agency’s four years under President Joe Biden. “The truth is, I leave here with a great deal of hope.”
During their farewell, Cardona and other top department officials touted what they consider the agency’s K-12 legacy under Biden. In the early days, there was a full-court press to reopen schools to in-person learning, they said. As the pandemic receded, they dealt with the continued fallout: issuing grants to bolster school mental health services; funding paid teacher apprenticeships—now an option in nearly every state—to grow the teacher pipeline and break down financial hurdles to pursuing a teaching career; recruiting thousands of tutors; and emphasizing opportunities for multilingual learners.
They sought to shrink student loan debt, and in recent weeks the president and others have touted a strengthened “classroom to career” pipeline through measures including a “career-connected high schools” grant program and new apprenticeships.
Much of the administration’s K-12 legacy comes down to the distribution of an unprecedented sum of money to the nation’s schools to recover from the pandemic—$122 billion from Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, more than the federal government annually spends on K-12 education.
But absent from Biden’s term was an aggressive policy agenda before Congress to counteract a historic decline in student achievement and focus the public’s attention on fixing it. There was no regulatory push, for example, for evidence-based reading instruction as student achievement in reading (and math) hit its lowest levels in decades. Districts had wide latitude to decide how to spend their pandemic relief funds. And although Cardona criticized the use of standardized tests as a “hammer,” there was no legislative effort to restructure the country’s test-based accountability system.
Meanwhile, the department and Biden faced strong political and legal headwinds that dashed the president’s hopes of expanding Title IX protections and relieving more student loan debt. A deeply flawed rollout of an updated Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, left a shadow hanging over the department. All the while, calls grew from Republicans to abolish the Education Department—a priority for the incoming Trump administration.
While Cardona argues the department’s work is more of a pilot light that “burns steadily” rather than a firecracker that goes “off in a flash,” critics say Biden’s administration will leave with little in the way of a cohesive legacy in K-12 education.
Politically, Democrats lost their edge in voter trust on education during Biden’s tenure, according to some polling. And conservative education policies continued to take hold in states during Biden’s four years.
“The administration, I think, was unsuccessful in communicating a vision for K-12 education in the way that previous immediate administrations had, both Trump and Obama,” said David Bloomfield, an education policy professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. “I think that neither the president, the vice president, or the secretary were able to enunciate a vision to counter the far right.”
With the pandemic, Biden didn’t carve out a robust K-12 agenda
Biden and Cardona took office as tensions were running high in the nation’s public schools. During the pandemic, school board meetings had become battlegrounds over masking and in-person learning, and later over which books school libraries had on their shelves and whether curricula were “indoctrinating” students.
This unsteady ground didn’t lend itself to carving out an ambitious reform agenda, said Amy Loyd, CEO of All4Ed, a national nonprofit focused on opportunities for students from low-income families and students of color. Loyd worked for the Education Department as assistant secretary for the office of career, technical, and adult education for much of Biden’s term.
“We were not going to go for a big grant competition or a major overhaul at a time when the education system was already experiencing deep upheaval and disruption,” Loyd said. “Instead, we were grounding ourselves.”
Cardona told Education Week in 2023 that the department had intentionally forgone expansive efforts like Republican President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act that erected a federal, test-based accountability system or Democratic President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top education reform grant competition.
We were not going to go for a big grant competition or a major overhaul at a time when the education system was already experiencing deep upheaval and disruption. Instead, we were grounding ourselves.
Funding is perhaps the lasting legacy of the Biden administration. Roughly $190 billion flowed to the nation’s K-12 schools in response to the pandemic that Congress approved in three rounds in 2020 and 2021, with the largest sum coming from the administration’s American Rescue Plan. Early research shows that the funding has contributed to academic recovery, though students’ progress is uneven and still lags behind pre-pandemic levels. And now, as those historic dollars have dried up, districts are weighing cuts.
“No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top—what was the total amount of [funding for] those versus the total amount of this?” Cindy Marten, deputy secretary of education, said in an interview. “This is a huge, huge investment. What we did is actually respect the field and say, the answers for what to do with these dollars already exist, but they do not exist at scale. So how do we scale and replicate in a systemic and systematic way with dollars that have never been available to us before, so that we can actually make something happen with the money that came to us?”
School districts could use the dollars to cover a litany of needs: teacher pay raises, HVAC upgrades, mental health services, and more, with at least a fifth of the final round of funding meant for addressing learning loss.
Though the first part of the challenge was getting schools open for in-person learning, the question then became: “What are we going to do with that money?” Marten said.
The department’s answer was its Raise the Bar: Lead the World initiative, which it introduced in January 2023. The agency outlined broad strategies that districts could pay for with the federal funds. Districts were under no obligation to choose from that menu, and the funds weren’t attached to any particular policy priorities, but the department tracked progress on its priority areas, and Marten toured the country finding success stories to spread to other communities.
“Local decisionmaking is king, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t help guide, we couldn’t help bright-spot and give examples,” said Marten.
The Education Department’s annual budget also gradually increased during Biden’s term, with the federal government’s main funding streams for schools, Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, growing—though Biden fell short of his campaign pledge to triple Title I.
The nation’s largest teachers’ union hailed the infusion of new funds, but others criticized it as lacking accountability and transparency, and said the department should have given schools more guidance on how to use the money.
“It’s hard to argue that they have done all they could do to help kids recover,” said Mike Petrilli, president of the Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education reform think tank. “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. I think at the end of the day, we have lost a generation of kids because of the pandemic, and these four years were not used as they could have been.”
GOP efforts on school choice and against progressive social policies thwarted Biden
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. But much of his agenda didn’t stick.
The department’s bungled rollout of a simplified, congressionally required FAFSA form—which was riddled with defects that delayed students’ financial aid rewards and caused some students, particularly from low-income families, to abandon the aid application altogether—also became a dark cloud hanging over the agency.
Department officials acknowledged the messy rollout, but said with the ironed-out revision, more students are now receiving financial aid than a year ago, and more first-time students have enrolled in college. (“Was that easy? No. Did it give me gray hair? Yes,” Cardona quipped in his farewell remarks.)
Some critics argued the focus on higher education left a vacuum in K-12.
“Had I been there, I probably would have done it a little differently,” said Margaret Spellings, president and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center, who served as education secretary during Bush’s second term. “I do think K-12, and frankly, a lot of the erosion and the confidence in the Department of Education and calls to eliminate it and so on, have to do with a kind of a lack of focus on reading and math and learning. People get that students are struggling and in the tank. And—where is everybody?”
Marten said the department sought to highlight visionaries across the country who used pandemic relief funds to make significant gains. But critics and policy experts argue the vacuum was filled by Republicans pushing to use public money for private school tuition, restrict instruction on race and gender, and bar transgender student-athletes from teams consistent with their gender identity.
An attempt to expand Title IX to protect LGBTQ+ students from discrimination at schools was immediately challenged by Republican states, and the rule was ultimately struck down by a federal judge in Kentucky after judges earlier put it on hold in 26 states and individual schools elsewhere. The administration walked back a separate proposal outlining protections for transgender student-athletes so Trump couldn’t use it to fast-track his own agenda (though legislation has already passed the Republican-controlled House barring transgender girls and women from playing on girls’ and women’s teams).
Biden’s repeated attempts to cancel student debt also saw legal challenges from Republicans that hobbled the effort, though the administration forgave loans for millions through other avenues.
I think at the end of the day, we have lost a generation of kids because of the pandemic, and these four years were not used as they could have been.
Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in 25 states passed legislation barring transgender students from sports teams that aligned with their gender identity; they continually railed against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at schools; and they penned bills aimed at strengthening “parental rights,” seeking to restrict instruction on race, gender, and sexual orientation and sometimes require schools to notify parents when their children use pronouns that don’t align with their sex at birth.
“There was not an attempt to try to calm things down or bring the temperature down,” Petrilli said of the Biden administration. “They could have shown more leadership on saying, ‘Hey, this is not only harmful to a lot of kids who are feeling bullied and threatened, but it’s also a distraction from what we should be focusing on.’”
Marten—who has been tapped to lead Delaware’s education department after Biden leaves office—said those discussions are best had at the local level, but the department’s office for civil rights would “step in when a student’s civil right is violated, whether it’s through a book ban or access to school and to safe and secure, supportive learning environments.”
As criticism of public schools grew, a swell of expansive private school choice programs passed in Republican-controlled states, allowing taxpayer dollars to fund tuition at private schools that don’t have to adhere to the same rules as public schools. Meanwhile, Biden took a harder line on charter schools than his predecessors, including fellow Democrat Barack Obama, erecting new requirements for charter schools seeking federal grant funding.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, said Biden was dedicated to public schools.
“If I were to articulate their agenda, it would be that they were doing what they needed to do at the federal level, to promote public education as a common good, as the foundation of our democracy, to protect it against privatization and voucherizing and all of those things, taking public money out of our public schools,” she said.
Cardona told Politico in 2023 that he’s not against school choice, but rebuked “privatization at the expense of the local school.” Bloomfield, the Brooklyn College researcher, said Cardona, who was a teacher, principal, district administrator, and Connecticut’s education commissioner before becoming secretary, struggled to effectively communicate the importance of public education. Spellings said he wasn’t particularly visible.
When the EdWeek Research Center asked educators about Cardona in August 2024, more than two-thirds of the nationally representative sample—68 percent—said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion. Of those with an opinion, 39 percent said it was favorable, and 61 percent unfavorable.
When President Biden put a former teacher and school principal in charge, he knew I’d approach this job differently than previous secretaries, that I wouldn’t be out there pushing top-down mandates, or slinging silver bullets to, quote-unquote, fix education.
Biden’s tenure coincides with loss of trust in Democrats on education
The Biden team’s approach to the politics of education mattered, said Jorge Elorza, the CEO of Democrats for Education Reform, a national education policy organization that has rankled some Democrats and commissioned the 2023 polling among battleground state voters showing Republicans had gained an edge over Democrats on education.
Democrats aren’t offering a “compelling alternative” to Republican pushes for private school choice, said Elorza, a former mayor of Providence, R.I.
“The president is the head of the party. They set the agenda. They provide policy guidance. They provide political cover all the way up and down the ticket,” Elorza said. “Without that leadership at the top, it has its trickle-down effect, and that’s a big part of why politically Democrats find themselves where they are right now, where they’ve lost their advantage in voters’ minds on education issues.”
But Cardona, in some of his final remarks as education secretary on Tuesday, said he had always known his approach would be less ostentatious.
“When President Biden put a former teacher and school principal in charge, he knew I’d approach this job differently than previous secretaries, that I wouldn’t be out there pushing top-down mandates, or slinging silver bullets to, quote-unquote, fix education,” he said. “In the face of historic challenges, this team would be about substance, not sensationalism, in education.”
