With Cardona As Ed Secretary, Schools Got Worse By Every Metric

President Joe Biden’s appointed secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, is out the door as President Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office. The end of Cardona’s tenure couldn’t come soon enough.

K-12 student learning achievement is pitifully low. Chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed. Condoned college campus protests are a disgrace. Federal student aid, including the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (known as FAFSA) form and process, is a mess.

Despite four catastrophic years, Cardona released a glowing report last week. It boasts about the U.S. Department of Education’s “accomplishments” under his watch and opens with a full-page letter from the secretary.

“This report, The Impact: Fighting for Public Education, is about more than documenting the successes under the Biden-Harris Administration. It’s about demonstrating what’s possible when we invest wisely in public education,” Cardona writes, declaring that President Biden invested more in education than “witnessed in generations.” However, the return on that investment of hundreds of billions of dollars has been nothing short of a seismic failure.

Continuing, Cardona asserts that “student achievement is rising, and chronic absenteeism is falling.” This is a blatant attempt to gaslight Americans. Under his nearly four-year tenure, student achievement overwhelmingly fell to record lows, and chronic absenteeism rose to historic highs.

More specifically, while Cardona has been at the helm of our nation’s education system, student test scores have sharply declined. For example, the most recent available test data, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exams in 2022, reveals the largest decline in student assessment in math since the exam began in 1990. Reading scores were the lowest since 2005 for fourth-grade students and the lowest since 1998 for eighth-grade students.

The 2024 NAEP exam data is scheduled to be released in the coming weeks. Yet with the 2022 NAEP scores revealing that 64 percent of fourth-grade students and 73 percent of eighth-grade students are not proficient in math, and 66 percent of fourth-grade students and 69 percent of eighth-grade students are not proficient in reading, it’s unlikely there will be much to celebrate. Cardona fails to mention this core academic data reported in the Nation’s Report Card, which is provided by the National Center for Education Statistics within the U.S. Department of Education.

Additionally, student scores on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study released in 2023 show a decline in math scores for both fourth-grade and eighth-grade students since the prior testing conducted in 2019.

According to the American Enterprise Institute and C2i’s Return 2 Learn Tracker, chronic absenteeism, which refers to students who miss at least 10 percent of the school year, jumped from 15 percent in 2018 to a dire 26 percent in 2023 — a more than 73 percent increase.

Cardona boasts, “More teachers, nurses, and mental health professionals are working in public education than before the pandemic.” This is nothing to brag about. That included a 3 percent increase in school counselors, a 23 percent increase in nurses, and a staggering 43 percent increase in social workers. This is despite 1.2 million fewer students attending public schools than pre-pandemic and staffing already bloated with non-teaching staff, outnumbering teachers.

As far as higher education, while Cardona verbally condemned the antisemitic activities on college campuses after being pressed by the Senate, he refused to take real action to hold the institutions accountable.

Furthermore, the so-called student loan forgiveness Cardona’s team implemented took more than $175 billion of financial responsibility from 5 million individuals who opted to take out a loan to attend college and moved their debt to taxpayers. That means everyday hard-working Americans who did not attend college will now be saddled with costs others incurred.

The massively damaging financial aid mishandling in higher education doesn’t stop there. The FAFSA under Cardona was a major debacle affecting millions of college students. According to The New York Times, “Far from becoming easier, however, the process has been plagued by a steady stream of bugs and data entry issues that locked students out, returned inaccurate aid calculations, and severely tied up the enrollment process.” The form release was delayed multiple months, two consecutive years, while Cardona was responsible for it, causing significant problems for students and universities nationwide.

Included as part of the celebratory report, a full page is devoted to a picture of someone holding a transgender “pride” flag. The caption reads: “Staff celebrate the first-ever Pride flag-raising event at the U.S. Department of Education headquarters building.” Advancing a “sexual orientation and gender identity” (known as SOGI) agenda has been a driving priority under Cardona’s time in office. This is the type of government behavior that led Americans to conclude this administration is out of touch with their concerns and to vote for change. Parents send their children to school to receive instruction in core academic content such as reading, writing, and mathematics, not these radical sexual ideologies.

Better days are ahead for American students as Miguel Cardona’s chapter at the Department of Education has finally come to a close.

Dr. Keri D. Ingraham is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute, Director of the American Center for Transforming Education, and a Senior Fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.