Article #24 of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

United States Department of Education Leader Miguel Cardona Is An Intellectual Lightweight---  and the Phenomenon is Apparent Throughout National, State, and Local Systems of Public Education

Miguel Angel Cardona was selected by President Joe Biden to be his Secretary of Education.

Cardona's appointment is typical for designates for the top education position in the United States.  Betsy DeVos, Trump’s appointee, was not typical, inasmuch as her goal was to dismantle the public education system in the United States.  But being a much better appointment than Betsy DeVos is faint praise.

Cardona's typicality is rooted in the intellectual corruption he manifests as someone who has worked his way up the public education bureaucracy by accumulating insubstantial academic credentials acquired in programs administered by those campus lightweights known as education professors.

Cardona received his Bachelor of Science degree in education from Central Connecticut State University (1997), a Master of Science in bilingual and bicultural education at the University of Connecticut (2001), and an Ed. D. (Doctor of Education, 2011).  His dissertation was entitled, Sharpening the Focus of Political Will to Address Achievement Disparities.

Thus, Cardona has no substantive training in a major discipline (mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, political science, economics, literature, or the fine arts).  His professional experience has been as a fourth grade teacher, principal, and Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning in Meridien, Connecticut.  He also occupied the position of adjunct professor of education in the University of Connecticut's Department of Educational Leadership.  Despite Cardona’s very slim preparation in terms of any subject matter of academic importance, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont appointed Cardona that state’s Commissioner of Education in 2019.

Upon the recommendation of Linda Darling-Hammond, a major star in the intellectually corrupt world of the education professor’s firmament (and the same gadfly who recommended failed United States Education Commissioner Arne Duncan), President Joe Biden appointed Cardona United Sates Education Commissioner in December 2020.  Tellingly, Biden had considered education establishment mainstays and fellow academic lightweights National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garcia and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. 

Thus does Biden operate in an environment dominated by the same sort of public actors that also includes his education professor wife, Jill Biden, all of whom are intellectual lightweights with no serous academic credentials.

Know, then, that the prospects for the imperative K-12 Revolution will never emanate from the United States Department of Education.

Advocacy for knowledge-intensive, skill replete curriculum, imparted by teachers possessing the pedagogical skill to deliver substantive education to students of all demographic descriptors, will only occur as a result of overhaul at the locally centralized school district, which can then serve as a model for other districts.

That district must be the Minneapolis Public Schools.