The 12-11 vote fell along party lines, with the Republican chairman of the committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, calling McMahon “the partner this committee needs to improve the nation’s education system.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an Independent who is the committee’s ranking member, said he liked McMahon personally. “I respect the work she has done in building a large and successful business.” But he said no matter who the education secretary is, “he or she will not have the power” to make consequential decisions. A small group of people in The White House, he said, will be “calling the shots.”

Sanders was referring to massive cuts at the department by auditors deputized by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Along with other Democrats, Sanders criticized White House plans to dismantle the U.S. Education Department, which he said “provides vital resources for 26 million kids who live in high-poverty school districts. These are the kids who most need our help.”

During her confirmation hearing last week, McMahon said she supported dismantling the department, but admitted that the administration needs congressional support to do it. 

“We’d like to do this right,” she told the committee. “We’d like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with.”

Sanders on Thursday said that was misguided. “Is it a perfect entity?” he said. “No. Is it bureaucratic? Yes. Can we reform it? Yes. Should we abolish it? No.”

Likewise, Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, said he’d vote no on McMahon’s nomination for that reason. “I can’t vote for somebody who will willfully engage in the destruction of the very agency she wants to lead. That is disqualifying.”

McMahon’s nomination proceeds as the administration sends decidedly mixed signals on its education agenda. President Trump has nominated two experienced, well-regarded educators — North Dakota state Superintendent Kirsten Baesler and former Tennessee education chief Penny Schwinn — as top lieutenants to McMahon, even as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency decimates the department’s research arm, slashing millions of dollars in contracts in search of waste, fraud and abuse. At a press conference last week, Trump called the department “a con job.” 

McMahon, for her part, has said she supports DOGE’s work, saying, “It is worthwhile to take a look at the programs before money goes out the door.” 

While she’s expected to easily earn confirmation in the Republican-controlled Senate, with support among conservative groups, McMahon faces opposition from education and civil rights groups that more broadly oppose the White House education cuts. 

The conservative group last week said Trump was smart to nominate McMahon to lead the department “in what we hope is a short tenure” as she works to shutter it.

Conservative commentator Rick Hess McMahon’s WWE experience gives her the right background for the top job: “Considering that it’s an agency that’s long been plagued by low morale and accused of being too chummy with the unions and the college cartel,” he wrote, “there’s a strong case that what’s needed is an outsider with a strong managerial track record.”

By contrast, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights on Wednesday urged lawmakers to reject her nomination, saying in a co-signed by more than 240 groups that she’s “unprepared and unqualified” to lead the agency. Her confirmation would be “disastrous for students, their families, and educators,” the group said. 

Worth more than $3 billion

One of 13 billionaires tapped to lead Trump’s administration, McMahon has held tightly to Trump’s key education priorities: advancing private school choice, preventing trans students from competing in sports consistent with their gender identity and fighting antisemitism. 

McMahon’s confirmation has taken longer to schedule than those of most other cabinet nominees as the education committee waited for her to complete ethics paperwork detailing vast financial assets and ties to far-right organizations. Her net worth totals more than $3 billion.

As a board member of Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs the president’s Truth Social platform, she earns $18,400 quarterly. Politico reported that she also received stock in the company worth more than $800,000 in late January. McMahon is also on the advisory council for the Daily Caller, a conservative media outlet that has given her favorable coverage. 

If confirmed, McMahon has promised to step down from her board positions, forfeit any shares in Truth Social that she doesn’t yet fully own and divest from those that she does within three months. She also earns interest income from education-related municipal bonds that fund school construction across the country and has pledged to divest from those as well.

A vote before the full Senate has yet to be scheduled.

Kamala Harris’ new running mate is an unabashedly progressive midwestern governor who appeals to veterans, hunters and football fans. If elected, he’d also be the first K-12 educator since Lyndon Johnson to be vice president, boasting the deepest connection to public schools of any candidate in recent memory.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is a former high school teacher and football coach who enacted a free college tuition program and expanded free school lunch statewide. But Walz, 60, a former congressional lawmaker who is in his second term as governor, may also carry left-of-center baggage that weighs down the ticket in a tight presidential race, observers said.

Walz rose to prominence earlier this year by informally leading Democrats’ turn to calling Republicans “weird,” suggesting in interviews that they’re out of touch and relying on culture-war fodder instead of issues Americans care about. 

Tim Walz first year as a high school football coach and geography teacher

— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE)

“Who’s sitting in a bar in Racine, Wisconsin, saying, ‘You know what we really need? We need to ban “Animal Farm.”’ Nobody is!” Walz with MSNBC.

In a introducing himself released by the campaign Tuesday, Walz described the “small-town” values he learned growing up in Nebraska and later tried to instill in his students: “respect, compromise, service to country. And so when I went into government, that’s what I carried with me.”

Harris echoed those themes in a speech at Temple University in Philadelphia Tuesday evening, calling him “the kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having and that every kid deserves.”

As governor, Walz put forward an education agenda that unions have cheered, signing a nearly state budget last year that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools. He also signed into law a new $1,750-per-child tax credit that he said will help reduce childhood poverty.

Walz enacted for Minnesota families earning less than $80,000 per year. Analysts predict it’ll cost the state around $117 million in fiscal year 2025 and $49.5 million annually after that.

With a $17.5 billion budget surplus last year, Walz promised “to put it behind our teachers so we can educate our children.”

Despite the “historic” spending, school districts throughout Minnesota last spring were facing massive cuts, the one-two punch of the end of COVID recovery aid and enrollment losses. 

The state’s second-largest district, St. Paul Public Schools, projects a $150 million deficit for the 2024-25 academic year. Minneapolis Public Schools anticipates a $116 million shortfall. And even the most prosperous Twin Cities suburbs must explain the disconnect to families who moved there for their well-funded schools.

Free lunch for all

Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard after high school and attended Chadron State College. He earned a social science degree in 1989, and spent a year in one of the first government-sanctioned groups of American educators to teach in China.

Walz went on to serve full time in the Army National Guard, retiring in 2005 as a command sergeant major. 

He and his wife, Gwen, met while teaching in Nebraska. They worked together at Mankato, Minn., West High School, where he taught social studies and coached football. She taught English and later served as a district administrator. 

Former colleagues said the couple were powerhouse teachers who balanced out each other’s energy-levels. He was animated, they . She was more reserved.

“He came in very outgoing, very gregarious,” former social studies teacher Pat Griffiths told The Post. “If there were 100 people in a room and 99 loved him, he would work on the one who didn’t until they did too.”

Another colleague told of a prank that a group of teachers played on Walz during his first semester there: They printed out a fake gift certificate for a free turkey as a bogus “welcome gift,” to be collected at a local grocery store. 

Walz returned to school with the turkey. 

In 2006, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating a Republican incumbent in Minnesota’s rural First District, which typically leans Republican. He served six terms before being elected governor in 2018.

These days, Walz is widely known on the national stage for last year’s Minnesota Free School Meals law, which made school breakfast and lunch free for all students, regardless of income. It made Minnesota the fourth state to do so after California, Colorado and Maine. Currently, offer free meals to all students.

At the time, Walz said the measure “puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up.”

During debate on the bill in March 2023, state Sen. Steve Drazkowski, a Republican, questioned whether food insecurity was even an issue in the state, saying, “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry. I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have access to enough food to eat.”

A video of his speech went viral, garnering on X and plenty of criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Recent coverage suggests that though the program is popular and the state’s surplus helps keep it afloat, the free-meals program than expected: an extra $81 million over the next two years and $95 million in the two years after that.

Walz has also criticized education savings accounts, saying they don’t help rural areas. Support for these accounts, championed by conservatives, may have hurt Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s prospects to become Harris’ running mate. 

A lifelong hunter, Walz shifted substantially on gun safety, moving from an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association in 2016 to endorsing an assault weapons ban after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. At the time, Walz said his then-17-year-old daughter asked him to do more on gun safety. He donated his NRA contributions to charity.

The move turned his rating to “straight F’s,” . “And I sleep just fine.”

On Tuesday, after word leaked about Harris picking Walz, gun safety activist and Parkland survivor David Hogg on X, “I’m smiling a mile wide right now.” 

Extreme or Norman Rockwell?

Policies like these have earned Walz endorsements on the left — American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on Tuesday called him “an unabashed champion for public education, for educators and workers.” 

It also doesn’t hurt that Mary Cathryn Ricker, Walz’s first state education commissioner, was a former AFT vice president. Before that, she led the St. Paul Federation of Teachers.

At Temple University Tuesday evening, Walz spoke of his 20-year career as a teacher and his wife’s 29-year tenure, saying, “Don’t ever underestimate teachers.”

Walz’s career nearly derailed when he was pulled over in a drunk driving incident as a 31-year-old teacher in Nebraska. As the reported, he was stopped for driving 96 mph in a 55-mph zone. He failed a field sobriety test, but later pleaded guilty to reckless driving, a misdemeanor. He left the state in 1996, when he continued teaching and coaching football in Mankato.

Invoking his time as a coach there, Harris said he was a role model — on and off the field. She recounted the story of one of the first openly gay students at Walz’s school, who sought to start a gay-straight alliance “at a time when acceptance was difficult to find.”

Harris said Walz “knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved. So he signed up to be the group’s faculty advisor. And as students have said, he made the school a safe place for everybody.”

But in a tight race, Walz’s progressive credentials could spell trouble for Harris, said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative .

Hess called the Walz pick “an odd choice” in a race in which Harris already has teachers’ union backing but needs to shore up support among independents and conservatives. He suggested that Shapiro might have been a better match for those constituencies.

“You couldn’t get the NEA and AFT working any harder for Harris than they already are,” he said. “She’s already broken out ‘the full pander’ for them.”

Hess said Harris likely chose Walz as a “vibe pick” who suits midwesterners in style if not substance: “He looks like a big, burly high school football coach, assistant principal, kind of sensible guy from Middle America” who served in the military, “whereas Shapiro looks like an investment banker. Part of the calculation might be that that visual is worth plenty.”

Harris may also be trying to “buy herself a lot more leeway with the left so she can keep tacking back to the middle on issues — and the left will be happy because they feel like Walz is one of them.”

It’s possible centrists or moderates in battleground states will be swayed by Walz, Hess said, but his progressive policy solutions could stop them in their tracks. “The guy’s a high school teacher who has been in the National Guard for 20 years,” he said. “His politics are extreme, but his profile, his biography, is about as Norman Rockwell as you can get.”

That moment when you’re a union president, and find out that a teacher and union member is going to be the next vice-president.

We’re excited for former public school teacher & AFT member to join on the ballot this November!

— AFT (@AFTunion)

But Chris Stewart, CEO of and an education blogger based in Minneapolis, said framing Walz in traditional political terms is misleading. Minnesota may be progressive, but it’s “not wild and crazy. We’re not San Francisco. … I don’t think people know how purple Minnesota can be,” he said of . 

Despite the divide, Stewart said, Walz has succeeded with a “very slim majority” in the state legislature. 

But rather than judging Walz on a “left-right continuum,” he said, we should look at him as “just a better version of a great American Democrat. He is not left or right in the way that we traditionally think about things. He kind of breaks that binary.”

Now that the Democrats will stay in control of the Senate next year, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a far-left independent, has officially announced his intention to chair the education committee. According to a statement from his office, he’ll likely focus more on higher education and health care issues than K-12.

Meanwhile, conservative Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — in line to be the top Republican on the committee — that he will instead take the role of ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. That leaves Louisiana Sen. Dr. Bill Cassidy as the next Republican in line for the job. Cassidy, an advocate for , is also considering a

The progessive believes in free college for all and wants to triple funding for poor schools.

The conservative once campaigned to abolish the U.S. Department of Education.

One is the son of a former Libertarian Party candidate for president and sounds a consistent drumbeat on schools: The federal government should stay out.

The other, ranked by one scorecard, is a self-described democratic socialist known for pushing just one education cut — to charter schools.

But in the latest example of the nation’s topsy-turvy politics, Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and Kentucky Republican Rand Paul will soon be first in line to run the Senate education committee.

“They’re a heck of an odd couple,” said Rick Hess, a senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

“Alpha and omega,” quipped Jack Jennings, a retired education policy expert and former Democratic staffer for the House.

Depending on the outcome of this week’s election, the two firebrands are the top contenders to be chair and ranking member of the Senate HELP Committee, which also oversees health, labor and pension issues. While it may seem increasingly inaptly named in an era of gridlock and rabid partisanship, the committee wields considerable power, overseeing a $235 billion education budget and issues from special education to preventing sexual harassment and discrimination in schools.

With Republicans already proposing to restrict lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation and the Biden administration engulfed in a to wipe out billions of dollars in student loan debt, there’s plenty of potential for the two to clash. Neither senator’s office responded to requests for comment.

The succession battle is triggered by the expected transition of longtime chair Patty Murray of Washington to a leadership position on the appropriations committee — that is, if she wins  against a suddenly formidable challenger—  and the retirement of ranking member Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina.

From COVID closures to parent protests at school board meetings, the committee has seen its share of hot-button topics over the past two years. While hearings have been clearly partisan, Murray and Burr have kept the tone fairly civil.

Bethany Little, principal at EducationCounsel, a consulting firm, sees it as the end of an era in which members wanted “to get things done.” That’s how it was, she said, when she worked for the committee under former Democratic chairs Edward Kennedy and Tom Harkin. 

“There is a shift in the posture of the people taking charge and their interest in making a deal and being able to find middle ground,” she said.

The ascendency of Sanders/Paul — or Paul/Sanders — is by no means assured. Earlier this year, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he expects Paul to run the committee if the GOP flips the Senate. But first, Paul has to defend his seat in Congress, which he’s expected to do in solidly Republican Kentucky. Sanders, for his part, would have to give up chairmanship of the budget committee. 

Some say that’s a switch he’d be likely to make. 

The senator “got his green money,” Hess said, referring to climate-related provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. But for free preschool and community college, part of the original version of that bill, fell by the wayside. 

Sanders recently said he’d like to revive efforts to pass what he has described as “transformational” programs for families, such as the larger child tax credit that was part of the American Rescue Plan. But he never wanted to stop at two years of free community college. He wants to be free and for the federal government to cancel all student debt.

As an advocate for , the chairmanship would also allow him to lead the panel that oversees the government’s various health-related agencies.

Health care issues might also be a reason why Paul, an eye surgeon, would savor the chance to chair the committee. Paul is known for his regular with medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci over COVID policies and vaccines. Paul wants to investigate allegations that tie Fauci to the virus’s creation by funding research in China. While Fauci categorically denies the allegations, an Oct. 20 Paul fundraising email declares, “If you help me win, I promise to subpoena every last document of Dr. Fauci’s unprecedented coverup.”

“He’s so off the rails on just about everything,” said Charles Barone, a former Democratic staffer in the Senate and now vice president of K-12 policy with Democrats for Education Reform, a think tank. “His level of combativeness and his general aversion to anything bipartisan is problematic.”

Paul was the among the handful of Republicans to the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. Aside from wanting to put Education Secretary Miguel Cardona out of a job, he also proposes sending federal directly to parents.

Jennings said moderate Republicans on the committee — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah — could mitigate some of Paul’s  rhetoric.

But as for the Vermont senator, he said, “I don’t think there’s any restraint on Sanders. He speaks his mind.”

As Election Day nears, predictions on whether Democrats will hold onto the Senate change almost by the hour. According to election forecaster FiveThirtyEight, they are now in a with Republicans, who in the polls.

Regardless of who leads the committee, as long as one party holds a slim majority, there’s little chance members would advance bipartisan bills, said Michelle Dimino, deputy director of education for Third Way, a center-left think tank. 

“It’s more likely to stay in the realm of hearings and investigations,” she said. 

Hess said he could see Republicans questioning how districts are spending COVID relief money, and Jennings added that they would likely try to stop the Biden administration’s move to cancel student debt.

“There’s enough for them to muck around in,” Jennings said.

Possible common ground

Despite their differences, the two iconoclasts have one thing in common: They are both known for bucking their own parties — a trait that could make them occasional allies. One issue where the pair could find common ground is testing and accountability. the federal requirements to assess students annually as “Washington’s intrusion into the classroom,” and Sanders is an of standardized testing.

They might also find agreement on protecting student privacy. Paul has sought to roll back government surveillance programs, and Sanders is “wary about big tech collecting data” on students, said Lindsay Fryer, senior vice president of Penn Hill Group, an education lobbying firm.

Paul is also up for the top Republican seat on the homeland security committee and has said he doesn’t plan to make until after the election. That committee the , which would still give Paul a chance to put his stamp on expanding school choice.

Republicans want to see the program, which serves about 1,800 students, have “stable financial footing,” said Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Right now, she said, it exists “at the whim of Congress.”

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is among those who probably hopes he’ll choose homeland security. She told �鶹��Ʒ that the prospect of him leading the education committee “absolutely” keeps her up at night as she travels the country for Democratic candidates.

Given how far apart the parties are on education, leaders might have no problem with Paul and Sanders promoting their out-of-the-mainstream ideas.

But the opposite could also be true. 

Hess said Republicans could regret giving more attention to the idea of eliminating the education department. Likewise, he said, the “Democrats might be better off if Sanders doesn’t have such a visible, public platform to talk about giving money away.”

�鶹��Ʒ’s senior reporter Jo Napolitano contributed to this report.

When Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured South Bend, Indiana’s Madison STEAM Academy in September, he made a quick impression on the district’s superintendent, C. Todd Cummings. 

Cummings remembers the secretary’s interest in COVID protocols, the facility’s STEM makerspace, and that he spoke Spanish to students at the bilingual school. By the time the visit ended, he came away feeling like he could pick up the phone and call Cardona if needed. 

“He’s done a lot to make the department more approachable,” Cummings said. “He understands running a district, but he also understands teachers in the classroom.”

Having one of their own helming the U.S. Department of Education has gone a long way toward mending the fractured relationship between district leaders and the agency that existed under Cardona’s predecessor. Betsy DeVos was the consummate outsider. She warred with unions, made comments that many teachers found , and attempted to direct relief funds meant for the public system to private schools. In contrast, when the former Connecticut state chief meets with superintendents and school leaders, “he’s talking shop” on everything from bell schedules to graduation rates, said Ronn Nozoe, head of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

But almost a year into Cardona’s tenure, and with the pandemic showing no signs of abating, his department has sometimes struggled to keep up. COVID-19 has thrust the agency into the public eye almost as much as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and, like the CDC, it has often come under fire for being slow to respond to a fast-changing virus. To some, Cardona’s camaraderie with educators helps explain why he has sometimes appeared reluctant to embrace another constituency, whose power and visibility has grown with the pandemic: parents. 

Sarah Carpenter, executive director of The Memphis Lift, a nonprofit that trains parents to advocate for their children’s educational needs, said she hasn’t forgotten that parent leaders weren’t asked to speak at Cardona’s first virtual summit on reopening almost a year ago. 

“They know we’re here, and we’re just not accounted for,” she said, adding that parents “in those communities where this pandemic hit the hardest” should have had a voice. A June event focusing on equity didn’t feature parents either.

Cardona hasn’t ignored parents, and often reminds the public that his two teenage children, still attending public school in Meriden, Connecticut, have endured their own disruptions in learning. His first act as secretary was to write to parents and students acknowledging the hardships caused by the pandemic, and he has urged schools to rebuild trust with families.

More recently, when schools began to shift to remote learning because of the Omicron variant, Cardona told �鶹��Ʒ, “Our parents have done enough.” That same week, the announcement of another round of grants to state came with Cardona’s statement that, “Meaningful parent engagement … has never been more important.”

But observers say his messages tend to emphasize over student recovery. When the department last month to use federal relief funds for teacher pay raises and hiring bonuses, Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said “the balance feels a little off.”

The pandemic has mobilized many parents to take a more central role in their children’s education, and their frustration over extended school closures likely tipped the Virginia governor’s race in favor of Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, has tried to drive that point home. She regularly participates in “stakeholder” meetings with the department, and shares monthly parent survey data with Christian Rhodes, chief of staff for the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. But she described the department’s parent engagement efforts as a “box-checking exercise.”

“That’s not what this moment calls for. It calls for listening to people’s pain,” she said. “Parents expect to be engaged on a whole new level because we had to hold it down for [schools] while they weren’t there.”

‘Not a slow-moving moment’

Leaders in education said Cardona has shown skill in managing the mountain of challenges he faced when he entered the job: more than half of schools still not fully open, expectations that he quickly reverse the previous administration’s stance on students’ civil rights, and low morale among what Nozoe called the department’s “beat-down career staff.” Cardona, he added, is trying to rebuild an agency that DeVos shouldn’t even exist.

Cardona said his top priority has been helping schools reopen and stay that way. Others credit him with steering billions in federal aid to states and districts on a short timeline.

“They’ve made a huge amount of progress in a very, very difficult time,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the California State Board of Education and president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, a think tank. She led President Joe Biden’s transition team for education and as the nominee.

She specifically noted his team’s work to get the American Rescue Plan funding for schools “out the door with guidance and support for how to spend it” and early efforts to make the CDC’s “wonky and mysterious” school reopening guidelines more accessible to educators. Recent confusion over whether the agency’s updated quarantine guidance applied to schools, however, drew fresh .

Some noted that communication from the department often hasn’t matched the urgency state and district leaders have experienced during the pandemic. 

In November, the department said it was OK to use relief funds to pay for alternate forms of for students in the face of a bus driver shortage. But that was a month after New York , a Democrat, asked for the guidance, and two months after Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker called in the to drive students to school. 

In mid-December, the department issued a on jumpstarting school accountability systems, but state officials started calling for that in September. 

“They are slow moving,” said Roza, “and it’s not a slow-moving moment in public education.”

In an interview with �鶹��Ʒ, Cardona said the department responds with guidance when “we hear from the field.” He noted the staff’s efforts to host multiple webinars and respond to questions from educators, but acknowledged that guidance from the department has sometimes lagged. He vowed to do better. “We have to stay ahead of things, and we’re going to continue to improve communications.”

‘More influence’

As he nears his first year as a cabinet member, Cardona reflected on what the department has accomplished under his leadership. 

While Omicron has led to short-term closures of as many as 5,400 schools, according to a frequently updated , Cardona noted that in-person learning had hit of schools by early December. And he takes pride that the department is addressing problems with Public Service Loan Forgiveness — a federal program meant to encourage students to go into nonprofit and public sector jobs, like teaching, in exchange for debt relief. Under DeVos, the department denied most requests for relief, and borrowers complained that loan servicers gave on how to meet the program’s strict criteria. The department’s management of the program prompted the American Federation of Teachers . Since Cardona started, the department has wiped out roughly $12.7 billion in college debt, including almost $2 billion for the public service program.

“Not only are we providing some loan forgiveness, but we’re fixing the systems that led to the problems that we have now,” he said, adding that he wants to continue to “make higher education more accessible to more students without having to be tethered in debt for the rest of their lives.”

Before Cardona was confirmed, there was speculation he’d be overshadowed by Biden’s White House advisers, who included two former high-level education officials from the Obama administration. More recently, Rodrigues quipped that , president of the National Education Association, likely has more pull with the administration than Cardona.

Conservative pundits have sized him up as Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, described him as “under-the-radar, except when he’s been waving the flag for partisan administration objectives.”

But those who support those objectives say Cardona has clout with the president. 

“I think with every passing day, he has more and more influence with the White House,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who first met Cardona when he was a teacher and now has a friendly competition with him over who has visited more states and schools over the past year. By late December, she’d hit 28 states; he’d made it to 25.

She said he advocated with the White House for changes to the loan forgiveness program and for putting teachers second in line to receive the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines, after health care workers.

Interestingly, given the coziness many of his critics assume Cardona enjoys with the unions, he has had trouble with the one representing employees in his own department. 

‘The huge political divide’

In early December, the Federal Labor Relations Authority found the department guilty of 14 violations of labor law — actions that date back to 2018 when the employee union’s collective bargaining rights. A of federal employees showed that morale within the department had declined far more than in any other agency. Those grievances have continued under Cardona, according to Cathie McQuiston, deputy general counsel with the American Federation of Government Employees.

The complaints involve inconsistent policies for working remotely, employee evaluation procedures and denying staff union representation when they have a dispute.

Under DeVos, the department was “paraded out as an example to other agencies of the kinds of things they should be doing in the Trump administration,” McQuiston said. “There has to be a political will to come in and say, ‘We’re not doing that anymore.’ At education, we struggle to get that commitment.”

According to a department spokesperson, efforts to resolve the complaints are ongoing and the agency is “committed to making sure it is a great place to work.” Both sides are scheduled to meet Thursday.

While addressing internal issues, Cardona was hit with a summer storm of public controversy over mask mandates and school equity initiatives. Superintendents were targeted with death threats, brawls broke out at school board meetings and school leaders tried to make sense of contradictory court rulings and mandates over masks.

“I wonder whether he anticipated the huge political divide over masks or no masks,” said Deborah Delisle, who served as assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education in the Obama administration and is now president and CEO of ALL4Ed, a nonprofit education policy organization. 

In August, Cardona departed from his usual cordial tone to take a against states banning local districts from mandating masks. 

“Don’t be the reason why schools are interrupted,” he said at a , indirectly challenging the governors of Florida and Texas.

But unless Republicans pressed him during Congressional hearings, he avoided the fray over critical race theory — a legal argument that racism lies at the core of U.S. institutions to intentionally advantage white people — and even to the controversial 1619 Project and the work of author Ibram X. Kendi from a civics grant program.

“We don’t get involved in curriculum issues,” he said during a June budget hearing, but stressed his support for culturally relevant teaching. “When students see themselves in the curriculum, they are more likely to be engaged.”

Some observers suggest he could have done more. 

Hess, at the American Enterprise Institute, said Cardona could “perhaps carve out room for the serious center” by defending “a progressive vision” but denouncing some of the examples that critics have found so , such as asking students to label themselves as “oppressed” or “oppressor.”

But Julia Martin, legislative director at Brustein and Manasevit, a law firm specializing in education, said there was no political upside for Cardona to wade any deeper into those waters.

“These issues, by their nature, are local issues,” she said. “There’s no way in many of these instances to come out and make a principled statement that doesn’t bother some people.”

The typically controversy-averse Cardona is a departure from the activist chiefs who have occupied the department since the No Child Left Behind era. Unlike many of his predecessors, Cardona doesn’t have a presidential mandate to implement bold reforms. 

“We’re still in a crisis, versus coming out of a crisis back in 2009,” said John Bailey, a senior fellow at AEI. That’s when Arne Duncan became secretary under President Obama, with a far-reaching mission to incentivize states to embrace controversial reforms such as overhauling teacher evaluations and adopting Common Core standards.

Even if Cardona had such a mandate, Bailey said, the pandemic leaves him in the position of trying to provide a “rapid response during an unfolding crisis that continues to play out.”

If the pandemic doesn’t continue to steal most of Cardona’s focus, he said he hopes to shift attention in 2022 toward issues a little closer to his heart: “teaching and learning.”

As someone who attended a technical high school in his hometown of Meriden, Cardona wants to see “better pathways” for students to two- and four-year schools and the workforce, especially with the jobs that will be created as a result of the $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure bill passed in November.

“There’s funding … unlike we’ve seen in the 20 years that I’ve been in education,” he said. “We have an opportunity here to really lift our field … and to give our students opportunities that they’ve never had.”

Lead Image: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona testified during a Sept. 30 Senate education committee hearing on school reopening. (Greg Nash / Getty Images)