Q&A
THE TWO YEARS THAT MIGUEL Cardona has been in the nation’s top education job haven’t exactly been serene: In June, the Supreme Court rejected President Joe Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness plan and, in another ruling, essentially overturned affirmative action. The nation is in the midst of both a teacher shortage and a wave of book-banning attempts. At the same time, students are still working to recover from pandemic-era learning loss.
The Secretary of Education covered all that, plus ChatGPT, in a July conversation with TIME.
When the student-loan-payment pause ends this fall, what do you say to borrowers who won’t be able to make ends meet? We announced the best income-driven repayment program in our country’s history, which will change the experience for so many borrowers. It cut in half the college payments that are due to undergraduate students. We’re also going to fight really hard to continue with debt relief. The Supreme Court got the decision wrong.
With the Supreme Court effectively overturning affirmative action, what practices could build more diverse student bodies at the nation’s top colleges and universities?
That’s another example where the Supreme Court took us backwards—a really, really wrong—decision. It ignores the fact that in this country, as much as we’re fighting for an equitable system, it’s still not there—we could be talking about health care access, higher-education access, K-12,e education outcomes. Black and brown students, particularly, have to work twice as hard to get to that starting block.
The math and reading performance of 13-year-olds in the U.S. hit the lowest level in decades, per test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). What needs to be done?
It’s appalling how the Nation’s Report Card continues to remind us not only of how poorly our students are performing, but also of the impact of a pandemic. There’s a plan for bringing qualified teachers into classrooms because we can talk about reading and math all we want, but we have a teacher shortage. If we’re not hiring highly qualified teachers, it’s going to be difficult to get those numbers up.
How can learning loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic be reversed? This Administration put out $130 billion to address the impact of the pandemic. What we’ve seen is the dollars being used to provide after-school tutoring support for students, summer-school programming. More students attended summer school in the past
