Education Secretary Cardona hits the road and stops in major battleground states
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Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona will travel by bus to the eastern United States next week to advance this year’s priorities. This includes strengthening the teaching profession, increasing mental health support for students, and helping children regain lost academic achievement.
The five-day bus tour is part of an annual tradition that goes back to at least a few education secretaries, building on a road trip in Cardona last fall that covered the Midwest and focused on success in in-person learning. will be built A spokeswoman said next week’s tour will highlight the importance of this semester as all students are back in the classroom. Schools are flooded with her once-in-a-lifetime, fleeting COVID-relief dollars, but they often struggle to retain or recruit. Enough staff who have to work with students digging holes in the pandemic.
In a recent op-ed for USA TODAY, Cardona said, “We must now raise our standards for our students and use the resources necessary to meet those standards.” We have to recognize that the progress of our students, and of our country, depends on it.”
Bus tours could also help move swing voters and encourage Democrats to vote. Opinion polls suggest Republicans have the public’s trust in education, a top priority for voters this year, and it’s getting more attention than abortion or climate change. Much of the Republican’s interest is in ideological debates, such as making certain books available to students or discussing LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom.
A road trip itinerary shared exclusively with USA TODAY shows that most of Cardona’s stops are in battleground states or communities with some of the most competitive elections of the year. Education advocates, First Lady Jill Biden and Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff, will both be at several events along the way.
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After a stop in Tennessee, Cardona will spend most of the first day of Sept. 12 at a higher education institution in Greensboro, North Carolina, at an event focused on building a pipeline and career paths for teachers. spend.
Day two will focus on stops throughout Virginia and how American Rescue Plan funds are used to help students with disabilities and those with mental health needs.
On the third day, September 14th, Cardona will stop in West Virginia for an event on mental health in higher education before heading to Pennsylvania for a series of events that will continue through the evening of September 15th. Among them is a teacher union-sponsored effort on forgiveness of civil service loans that many educators are qualified but struggling to secure.
Both North Carolina and Pennsylvania are home to highly competitive U.S. Senate elections, and both are in danger of flipping seats for incumbent Republicans retiring this year. Also, his two districts in Virginia (districts near his two locations that Cardona will visit next week) are expected to help determine whether Republicans control the House. Last year’s Virginia gubernatorial election also focused on education.
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The back-to-school bus tours undertaken by many of Cardona’s predecessors, both Republicans and Democrats, often had political overtones. has effectively campaigned for the party’s platform priorities.
At the very least, they’ve used these tours to remind the public of the educational accomplishments of their respective administrations.
Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former assistant secretary of education, said in an email that the bus tour “doesn’t make any policy sense.” They are probably “intended to have good press,” she said.
In 2007, George W. Bush’s then secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, gave her “No Child Left Behind” bus tour. At the time, with the polarizing federal education laws slated for reauthorization, Spellings spent three days on a bus in Ohio and Indiana, where she spent three days in a policy that included heavy reliance on standardized testing. advocated maintaining the core principles of
To kick off the 2019 back-to-school tour, then-Administrator Betsy DeVos (one of the Trump administration’s least popular members and a critic of traditional public education) visited a private school. rice field. Jack Schneider, an education historian and professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said DeVos “didn’t do much in terms of changing policy.” But Schneider said it has normalized once-radical ideas, such as taxpayer-funded private school vouchers.
Schneider said this year’s bus tour will provide an opportunity for Democrats to “tell a different story” about public schools than “both parties have been telling over the past 40 years.” It may be about public schools as such and the need to “maintain and maintain schools when they are increasingly under attack.”
“When Secretary of State Cardona embarks on a bus tour, he will use the symbolic power of the office rather than pull specific policy levers,” Schneider said. Issues such as teacher recruitment and retention are largely left to states and school districts.
“But the secretary can use the bully’s pulpit to get attention and try to set the national policy agenda.”
Please contact Alia Wong at (202) 507-2256 or awong@usatoday.com. Follow @aliaemily on Twitter.
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