Public education

Amid a widely recognized crisis, it may be asking too much of those in charge to engage in honest self-reflection, but one would hope that leaders would at least have enough self-awareness not to engage in self-flattery in lieu of pursuing corrective actions. However, with less than a month remaining of its tenure, the outgoing Biden administration’s Department of Education published a three-dozen-page report that seems to do just that, avoiding confronting its many failures and shortcomings in favor of clinging to phantom successes, many of which are exaggerated or misleading.

“The IMPACT: Fighting for Public Education” contains no shortage of vague happy talk and inoffensive pictures, but the department and Secretary Miguel Cardona do little to address or even acknowledge the severity of the problems they caused or neglected, opting instead for a self-congratulatory laundry list of purported accomplishments that do not stand up to scrutiny.

The report doesn’t start off promisingly, with the department claiming in the first line item to have “safely and quickly reopen schools.” The truth is that schools eventually reopened because the pandemic ended, not due to any effort on the part of the federal government. In fact, the department refused to challenge teachers’ unions’ efforts to keep schools closed, despite even President Biden saying they could reopen safely. Union leaders like Randi Weingarten have since tried to erase this history and baldly lie about their past stances once they became a political liability. These extended closures were especially harmful in big cities with strong teachers’ unions, where some of the schools serving low-income populations stayed closed the longest.

The next item on the list twists another notable area of failure for the Biden team, boasting about their efforts to accelerate students’ learning and claiming that these efforts are “contributing to a significant rebound in student achievement” in the wake of the pandemic. Once again, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Just last month, in fact, the results of the 2023 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) showed that American students’ science and math scores have only continued to decline in the years since the pandemic, particularly when compared to other countries. Rather than call attention to these numbers, however, the department rests its claims of success mostly on the sheer amount of money it has spent on the problem—as if that alone provides any consolation for egregious outcomes.

The theme of pinning success to the amount of money spent “fixing” an issue is a recurring one throughout the entire report. In another section, for instance, it brags that teacher salaries have increased by an average of 9.5 percent since 2021 (ostensibly as a product of the department’s coordinated efforts). However, with inflation during that period totaling nearly 20 percent, the insignificance of this bump only serves to underscore this administration’s record of backing union bosses at the expense of their members.

A similar deception is present in the report’s coverage of Secretary Cardona’s marquee initiative: student loan forgiveness. Buried in the report’s latter pages, these sections focus mostly on the administration’s efforts to reform “broken loan forgiveness programs.” Far less space is spent on the new initiatives it attempted to launch, some of which represented the administration’s top education priorities and would have been among the most costly regulations in American history. Amusingly, zero mention is made of its original loan cancellation scheme that was defeated in the Supreme Court, and a mere sentence is dedicated to the failed SAVE Plan, which is currently stalled in a legal battle. Of course, the only indication to readers of SAVE’s failure is a conditional “…if implemented…” attached to the report’s description of the shortcomings are similarly concealed or, in some cases, entirely omitted from the report. In the section on civil rights, only a glancing reference is made to the rampant instances of antisemitism on college campuses, many of which have been tacitly endorsed by settling complaints with essentially zero consequences for perpetrating colleges. Some failures like the department’s gainful employment rule (which went into effect too late to bring about its desired consequences) only received one vague sentence of coverage. Others, such as its botched Free Application for Federal Student Aid, weren’t mentioned at all.

Unfortunately, the true legacy of the Biden administration’s Department of Education seems less likely to be characterized by its accomplishments than by its dramatic shifting of the Overton window away from things it is averse to: meaningful student loan reform, sector-wide accountability, civil rights enforcement, and school choice. One can only hope that the incoming Trump administration takes heed of the mess it is inheriting and comes prepared to roll up its sleeves to make generational change.

Learn more: One Small Cut for ED, One Giant Leap for DOGE-Kind | Trump Has an Unprecedented Opportunity to Fix Higher Education as Biden Surrenders His Agenda | Where DOGE May Get Its First Major Victory | How a Lame Duck Congress Can Leave Its Mark on Higher Education and Workforce Issues