APP Staff In the early days of Joe Biden’s presidency, as he began to fill out his cabinet, attention quickly focused on the well-known names he had chosen for high-profile positions — Merrick Garland, Janet Yellen, Pete Buttigieg, and Xavier Becerra, among others. Some of these nominees generated a great deal of controversy. But other Biden picks flew under the radar, including his choice for Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona.
A former Commissioner of Education in Connecticut, Cardona cut a low profile during his confirmation hearings. Republicans largely avoided confronting him, and some even outright praised him, with Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) promising the nominee that he would “encourage all of my colleagues on my side to support you … and to move expeditiously to have you sworn in as the next secretary of education.” Unsurprisingly, Cardona sailed through the Senate by a vote of 64-33.
But in the time since then, Secretary Cardona has been busy. Although he has still mostly avoided the spotlight — as an April headline in POLITICO put it, “If you can’t name Biden’s Education secretary, you probably aren’t alone” — he has arguably done as much to advance Biden’s radical, left-wing agenda as any other member of the president’s administration. As a result, Cardona represents a uniquely dangerous threat to American families.
As head of the Department of Education, Secretary Cardona has significant power to impact families, power he has not hesitated to use since stepping into the job. In the fall of 2021, for example, as parent outrage was beginning to rise over the continued mandatory masking of their children in schools, Cardona threw his support behind the mask mandates, threatening to go after any state which attempted to scrap them. This embrace of masking notoriously backfired on Democrats in Virginia, where Republican Glenn Youngkin rode a wave of parental support into the governor’s mansion.
But unfortunately, Cardona was only getting started. In January 2022, emails obtained by FOIA request revealed that the education secretary had requested the National School Boards Association send a letter to the Biden administration calling for the investigation of parents protesting at school board meetings. The NSBA letter caused an uproar particularly over its comparison of concerned parents to domestic terrorists and its call for federal law enforcement to invoke the PATRIOT Act in going after them. While Cardona later denied any involvement in the letter, he did not disavow the letter’s clear aim of frightening parents into submission.
In fact, Cardona has consistently taken the side of teachers’ unions and education bureaucrats over the concerns of parents. In March 2022, following the passage of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, the education secretary joined with the rest of the left-wing chorus in smearing it as a “don’t say gay” bill that would “target…vulnerable students and families.” The bill, in truth, merely mandated that parents be informed about their children’s health and well-being in schools and prohibited teaching students in kindergarten through third grade about sexual topics — all provisions that had overwhelming support from Florida voters. Nevertheless, Cardona warned his agency would be “monitoring” the state, threatening to roll back these parental protections should they be able to cook up some justification for doing so.
There are, of course, many other examples one could point to of Cardona’s blatant disregard of the concerns of parents and families — to name just a couple more: his injection of critical race theory concepts into federal education grantmaking or his agency’s proposed rule to replace “sex” with “gender identity” in Title IX, thus paving the way for biological boys to be allowed in girls’ bathroom, locker rooms, and athletic competitions. But what has already been stated above likely suffices to prove the point. Since taking on the role of Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona has waged an extensive war on parental rights and, by extension, the American family itself. He has fully earned this place as one of the family’s top threats.
