President Joe Biden has nominated Miguel Cardona, the current Connecticut Commissioner of Education, to be the next U.S. Secretary of Education. Anyone he nominated would be better than Trump’s Secretary of Education. But who is Miguel Cardona and what is the vision that he brings to the U.S. Department of Education and to the teaching and learning in all of the schools in this nation? 

When I ask Connecticut teachers about Miguel Cardona, those who know him or have worked with him say that he is really nice guy who knows what the challenges in our classrooms are, knows how to help teachers to improve their teaching, and respects public schools. All good.

The majority of Connecticut teachers who don’t know him personally say that he has been largely quiet as Commissioner and are critical that he seems more interested in keeping schools open than in caring about public health, including the welfare of teachers, students and students’ families during the pandemic. 

But what is his vision for teaching and learning that he will bring to the U.S. Department of Education? When appointed Commissioner of Education in Connecticut 19 months ago, he stated that his goals would be to:

1. Make a positive impact on graduation rates.
2. Close the achievement gap.
3. Ensure that all students have increased access to opportunities and advantages that they need to succeed in life.

It is reasonable to assume that the goals he had for Connecticut 19 months ago will be goals that he will now bring to the country. Those goals, however, are “old hat” and don’t have a record of being successfully accomplished.

The goals themselves are worthy ones, but they need a new interpretation which would give rise to a dramatically new vision and radical new actions. The questions are: What would that new vision and new actions look like? And is Dr. Cardona open to that vision and those actions?

New Vision for Increasing Graduation Rate

The first step in reinterpreting those goals would be to change the term “graduation rate” to something like the graduating of well-educated high school students. Currently, graduation rates make good headlines but can mean very little in terms of student learning.

Increasing the number of students graduating is now often accomplished through something called “credit retrieval”.  “Credit retrieval” allows students to make use of often dubious computer programs that, in no way, equal courses in academic subjects, yet the students get credit for the academic courses. In doing so, students increase the graduation rate for their schools but do not have adequate learning experiences.

Charter schools have another way to increase their graduation rates. They “counsel out” students who are likely to not graduate before the students get to be seniors which leaves only a pre-selected group as seniors and, unsurprisingly, they all graduate. And, lo and behold, the charter school has a high graduation rate. For example, one year at Achievement First’s Amistad Academy in New Haven, Connecticut, 25 students out of 25 students in the senior class graduated, but 64 students had been in that class as ninth graders.

With a new vision, a way to count the students who receive a high school education is to not count the number of students who receive diplomas but rather count how many of the students who begin as ninth graders complete the coursework necessary for graduation. For example, some innovative public high schools hold Saturday classes with actual teachers instead of plugging kids into computer programs. The applause should be given to high schools who deliver a quality education to all the students who begin their high school education in the school not to the schools who either give credits without the academic content and skills or who dismiss those who won’t make for a good statistic. 

With a new vision, the statistic to calculate is to follow up on the students six years after their high school graduation to see how many are employed and/or have graduated from college. Then we can know how successful their high school education was and how meaningful it was that they graduated from their high school. Increasing graduation rates, as it has been addressed in the past, gets us nowhere.

New Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap

Increasing the achievement gap is a hackneyed expression that needs a new vision. That vision begins with redefining “achievement” and redefining “gap”.  Achievement, since the publication on A Nation at Risk, has meant the attainment of good standardized test scores. 

Standardized test scores are always correlated with the income of the parents of the students taking the test. The test scores tell us nothing about the quality of the teaching and learning in the school. We can raise test scores most efficiently by getting wealthier kids into the school.

The other way to raise those scores is to teach to the test. All commercial test prep courses and online free test prep courses claim that taking those prep courses will improve test scores. And they do. They do because standardized tests measure only one skill: the ability to take a standardized test. But that is not achievement.

A new vision for learning in the 21st century can mean that students are engaged learners who are able to think critically, problem solve, collaborate with others, demonstrate initiative, speak and write effectively, access and analyze information, explore their own questions, and use their imagination as described in The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner of Harvard University. No standardized test has ever, or can ever, measure those skills.

The goal of “closing the achievement gap”, based on standardized test scores, will serve only to highlight the disparity between the affluent and the poor. Even more importantly, the goal of “closing the achievement gap”, as measured by standardized test scores, guarantees that the students who most need a quality education will be relegated to test prep in a school’s efforts to raise its standardized test scores and will continue to suffer from their lack of real teaching and real learning long after they leave our schools.

As for the “gap”, the gap that we should be addressing is not the gap between the standardized test scores of the kids in affluent towns with the standardized test scores of the kids in struggling cities, but the gap between what all kids can do before we teach them with what they can do after we teach them. We should be working our brains full-time exploring how to help each student to reach further, to know more, to try harder, and to accomplish what that student never thought possible. That’s the gap our schools should be closing: the gap between students’ current assumptions about their possibilities as thinkers and learners and their eventual accomplishments. That is a goal with a vision that is worthy of our energy and investment.

That goal can be measured by high quality, teacher-created, and externally-validated performance tasks and can never be assessed by standardized tests.

A New Vision for Creating Equity

And what are those “opportunities and advantages that children need to succeed in life”? We know exactly what they are because they are the opportunities and advantages of many of the students in our affluent, largely white schools. They are the opportunities and advantages denied to other students due to poverty and racism. The new Secretary of Education could take on these underlying problems of poverty and racism that affect children for every minute they are in school and which any school cannot prevail against without appropriate funding, personnel, academic resources, and social services. Looking at the big picture of poverty and racism with its complex causes beyond the classrooms will take vision and strong political action. It will switch the narrative from one of “failing public schools” to one of how can we adults and taxpayers not fail our public schools.

Miguel Cardona

So where is Miguel Cardona with this proposal to rethink his goals and implement the vision and actions suggested here? I don’t know. What I do know is that I will send this post to my two senators and hope that they ask him during his confirmation hearing.  I suggest you do the same with your two senators. We, as a nation, so desperately need a new interpretation of old goals and a new vision and a new plan of action for our schools. Only then can our schools be all that they are meant to be. Only then can our children be all that we know they can be.

A highly respected Connecticut teacher has written an open letter to Miquel Cardona, President-elect Biden’s choice for Secretary of Education, and hopes that the letter is the beginning of a state-wide effort to send a petition to Dr. Cardona about improving the teaching and learning in the nation’s schools. Here is that letter:

Dear Commissioner Cardona:

Connecticut is proud that you, our Commissioner of Education, was chosen as the Biden/Harris administration’s Secretary of Education.

Educators support your dedication to: increasing graduation rates, closing the achievement gap, and ensuring equity for all students. All educators should be committed to making these goals a reality. America’s children need and deserve this. 

However, educators also know that the regime of profit-driven standardized testing will not improve teaching and learning. They never have.

• If educators are forced to teach to a test in order to increase graduation rates, students are merely learning how to take a test. This is antithetical to what 21st-century learning should look like: problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, project-based learning, capstone projects, creativity, and more. 

• If schools are pressured to close the achievement gap, but their only tools are computer programs that hold students hostage to rote “learning”, then students are not experiencing rich and meaningful learning. Only 21st-century learning experiences will increase graduation rates that are credible and that actually prepare students for a growingly complex world.

• If equity means giving students in impoverished areas less rich and meaningful learning, by continuing the standardized testing regime, the equity gap will only increase. What students in impoverished areas need is much more of what students in more affluent areas already have. Connecticut’s discriminatory per-pupil expenditure disparity tells the whole, sad story. 

Dr. Cardona, what holds schools back from making meaningful progress are ill-conceived federal mandates. These mandates have never improved the quality of teaching and learning. They never will. Test scores may have increased. As well as graduation rates. However, those are meaningless if they are not products of rich and meaningful teaching and learning. 

No standardized test can measure 21st-century skills. Hence, standardized tests cannot cultivate the acquisition of those skills.

We ask you, Dr. Cardona, to recommit yourself to the vital goals you have set by shifting the paradigm. Shift how we achieve those goals. That requires ending the testing regime started with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (2002 – 2015) and continued with Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” (2012 – 2016).

We, Dr. Cardona, are asking Connecticut’s teachers, parents, and students to send a strong message to you by refusing the standardized testing planned for this spring.  

We are also asking all who oppose the standardized-testing regime to sign this petition, which will be delivered to you, Dr. Cardona.

We are all trying to survive a global pandemic. In my 25 years in the classroom, I have never seen my students so stressed, depressed, and anxious. It is unnecessary and insensitive to add to the weight of their mental health struggles by adding the stress of standardized testing. Also, when thousands of stressed, depressed, and anxious students are forced to take a standardized test, will the results be accurate? Were they ever really accurate? Able to capture what students know and can do? Teachers know the answer: No!

Now is the time to end standardized testing. 

#RefuseTheTest 

#DoNotTakeTestingToDC. 

A faithful teacher,

Jeannette C. Faber – MS, MALS, EdD