While acknowledging the major strides the K-12 and higher education systems have made in reopening and adapting to the pandemic as well as the immense ongoing challenges they face due to new coronavirus variants, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona challenged them to “level up” in order to reimagine education in the U.S. and “meet this moment in our country's history.”We have a daunting and important task ahead of us,” Cardona said in a speech delivered at the Department of Education headquarters in Washington on Thursday. “We must level up our entire system of education, from pre-kindergarten through adult education.”
During a major speech outlining the Biden’s administration’s education priorities heading into 2022, the secretary said school leaders must act with urgency to address student mental health challenges, academic losses and systemic inequities, commit to boosting funds through new funding models that direct the most support to marginalized students, create better pathways to colleges and careers and make being a teacher a career instead of one people run away from.Reopening schools – and keeping them open – while critical, is insufficient,” Cardona said. “Our hardest and most important work lies ahead. It'll be what we are judged against.”
“And I want to be very clear,” he added. “As educators and leaders, we're either closing educational opportunity gaps or making them worse with the decisions we make in the coming months and years.”On the K-12 side, Cardona applauded what he characterized as “courageous” leadership from district leaders, educators and school staff to get schools reopened: When America’s public school system began creeping back open in January 2021 after last year’s holiday break, only 32% of children were in school full-time five days a week – the majority of them from middle- and upper-income school districts that served mostly white families.
Heading into 2022, virtually all of the country’s 51 million children were back in classrooms learning in person – an incredible victory given states’ disparate responses to the risks posed by COVID-19 and the country’s bifurcated education system in which schools have access to varying levels of resources.
The highly transmissible omicron variant has complicated the landscape some. At one point this month, as many as 10% of public schools – more than 7,000 – were forced to temporarily close or return to virtual learning due to mounting coronavirus infections that left schools short-staffed and caused attendance to plummet among students.
As it stands, roughly 4,000 schools continue to experience disruptions – though the most recent analysis from the school tracking site Burbio concluded that the newest figures signal a sustained downward trend.Looking ahead, Cardona made several asks of school leaders, including increased access to mental health supports, nurses and career counselors, a renewed focus on parent engagement, various interventions for students who experienced the pandemic the worst. Specifically, the secretary said he wants every high school student participating in at least one extracurricular activity and that every school must provide 30 minutes of intensive tutoring, three days a week, to students who fell furthest behind academically.
With budget battles looming in Congress as the current stop-gap funding measure is set to expire next month, Cardona pressed appropriators to boost Title I funding for schools that serve low-income communities and supercharge funding for students with disabilities – two groups of students disproportionately impacted by remote learning.
The secretary also challenged states leaders to rethink how they fund their K-12 systems.
“Many of the students who have been most underserved during the pandemic are the same ones who have had to deal with barriers to a high-quality education since well before COVID-19,” he said. “We need our states and districts to take a hard look at their own ways of funding schools, and for those leaders to make the difficult decisions to fix broken systems that perpetuate inequities in our schools across the country.”
Cardona acknowledged the difficult position of educators, who are being asked to do much more than just teach and are caught in the crosshairs of nasty education culture wars that further complicate an already challenging job.
“Let's not just talk about honoring educators, let's make sure they are treated with the respect and the dignity they deserve,” he said. “This means a livable wage, ongoing professional learning and development, supportive working conditions and a work environment where their voices are welcome as critical partners in our work to improve education. Moving forward, it is on us to make sure education jobs are ones that educators don't want to leave and that people from all backgrounds want to pursue.”During the speech, the secretary also urged school leaders to think about creating avenues for students after graduation, beyond applying for a four-year degree. Cardona himself graduated from a technical high school in Connecticut, where he was a part of an automotive studies program.
“As we work to make colleges more affordable and accountable, we must also make them more accessible,” he said. “That means creating stronger college and career pathways between our pre-K through grade 12 systems, our two- and four-year colleges and our workforce partners so that our systems lead the world.”
Congress appropriated more than $130 billion through the American Rescue Plan to schools to help cover the costs needed to safely reopen, provide academic and mental health support to students and hire additional educators and staff. While the Education Department has approved every state’s plan for how to use the funds, they cannot compel them to use it exactly how they’d prefer – a limitation of the federal government’s control over education systems, which are governed at the local level and which Cardona and his team are up against in making aggressive asks of school leaders during an already challenging moment in education history.
“To my colleagues in the field, I know you are tired, you are stretched,” he said. “I see you and understand what you are going through – it will get better. And it will soon translate to our best opportunity for much needed transformational shifts in education.”
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