Miguel Cardona
President Biden's nomination of Miguel Cardona to be Secretary of Education was greeted with a
sigh of relief from some education reformers — more for who he isn't than for who he is. He isn't a teachers' union leader. He's not a tenured radical. He isn't a vocal charter school opponent.
Cardona doesn't, in fact, have much of a paper trail. After working as an elementary school teacher and principal, he became an assistant superintendent for Connecticut's Meriden School District (which serves about 8,000 students) in 2015. He was appointed Connecticut's education commissioner in August 2019, where he served for a little over a year before being tapped for the presidential Cabinet.
But during his tenure as commissioner, Cardona was a trailblazer in one respect that merits strict scrutiny during his confirmation hearing this week:
he oversaw the creation of America's first state-mandated ethnic-studies course.
The Connecticut legislature determined that all high schools must offer — though students need not necessarily take — a year-long "African-American, Black, Latino, and Puerto Rican Course of Studies." Proponents of ethnic studies claim, reasonably enough, that it is beneficial for minority students to see people of their ethnic background represented in the curriculum. Stanford University professor Thomas Dee, who authored a
study showing GPA and attendance benefits from an ethnic-studies elective for San Francisco high school students,
suggests that a "high quality" ethnic-studies curriculum effectively stresses "the considerable cultural assets" of minorities and their capacity to achieve.
But "ethnic studies" can also denote academic indoctrination into the political dogma of critical race theory, which holds that all whites are oppressors, that America is an inherently racist country, and that for nonwhite people to be "liberated" or for white people to be "anti-racist," we must interpret human affairs through the lens of identity politics and advocate on behalf of left-wing causes.
Comment: Marc Elias, of Perkins Coie infamy, has a long, tawdry history as a Clinton operative: