JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The last four years have been rocky for the Department of Education. K through 12 students who returned to school after pandemic closures suffered record levels of learning loss and have not yet recovered. Many are still absent a lot. A disastrous rollout for last year's FAFSA - that's the free application for federal student aid - actually hurt some of the low-income students the new form was intended to help. And the courts have struck down affirmative action and college applications, and they've blocked the Biden administration's sweeping plan to forgive student loans for tens of millions of borrowers.
Still, there have also been successes. Nearly 5 million Americans have had their student loans forgiven. And this year FAFSA applicants are having a much smoother experience. Education secretary Miguel Cardona has led the department through all of those ups and the downs, and he joins me now. Welcome back to the program.
MIGUEL CARDONA: Thank you - glad to be with you.
SUMMERS: Thanks for being here. OK, I want to start off by talking about the FAFSA because any parent or student knows just how important that form and that process is...
CARDONA: Yeah.
SUMMERS: ...For people who are hoping for help paying for college. And you know as well as I do how tough that rollout was for a lot of people last year. I want to start just by asking you to take stock. What do you attribute the shortcomings to?
CARDONA: You know, it's 40 years of stagnant status quo, and we changed it. And I'll be honest with you. It was tough for several of those months, but at the end of the day, over 500,000 more students were eligible for aid last year than the previous year. So, in my opinion, it was worth the challenges to get to a system where more kids could have access to higher education. And - you know, and I'm one of those parents. I filled it out last year for my daughter, and I had to fill it out two years ago for my son.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
CARDONA: It was a big difference, and I'm so thankful that this year we have record numbers. And we're proud that moving forward for generations to come, more students are going to have access to federal dollars.
SUMMERS: I wonder, from your point of view as a leader, do you believe that your department identified the problems with the FAFSA quickly enough? And once those problems were identified, do you feel like you acted quickly enough once you knew about them to make a fix?
CARDONA: I don't think we identified them soon enough. And quite frankly, Juana, we were dependent on external contractors too much. So when we found out what the issue was, we had to fix it, but we also had to overhaul federal student aid, the group that oversees FAFSA. So we removed some folks. We brought in some new folks. We changed the system to make sure that in the future this never happens again.
SUMMERS: In the process of putting together the form of troubleshooting what went wrong, making sure things went better this year, did you have the opportunity to speak with any of the students who were personally affected by all of the students who were seeking financial support to be able to go to school? I remember hearing from people who were waiting and waiting to know what kind of aid they might receive and didn't find out until much later than they were expecting. And it affected their choices, where they choosing to go to school.
CARDONA: I did. I actually was out as much as possible, sitting with students who were struggling with it with their families to try to get a better sense of the impact of what the decisions that were being made at FSA, how that impacted. And there was a student I visited - I believe it was in Arizona - who - he was living independently. And the form expected the parents to contribute, yet he couldn't even tell me where his parents were. So I looked at students that had the greatest need. The form wasn't working for them. So we got to work to make sure that we made the changes needed.
SUMMERS: Let's turn now to another topic - that of student debt, one of the education department's biggest mandates. And this was a big priority of President Joe Biden, was forgiving student loans for tens of millions of people that have them. And as we mentioned, that effort faced opposition in the courts. It failed. Are there ways you wish you'd approach that differently?
CARDONA: You know, we worked really hard to try to fix a broken loan system, and I believe we were successful in many ways. But I do believe that, unfortunately, the courts and some of our Republican friends really were set against any type of debt relief despite not posing so much opposition when we're bailing out the airline industry or we're bailing out the auto industry or the banks. But when it's their constituents that - that's when they wanted to speak out against government supporting and fixing a system that was broken.
SUMMERS: Do you have any regrets about the amount of energy and manpower that education department spent pursuing such broad student loan forgiveness, which meant that if you're pouring a lot of attention into that bucket, that means attention was diverted away from other things that the agency might have been able to do?
CARDONA: No, because, you know, we went after those schools that preyed on first-generation college students or veterans. We did a lot of work to fix a system that was broken. And right now, today, 1 out of every 8 students with - or borrowers with student loan debt has had their loans forgiven. I still get texts from people who know someone whose, you know, loans were forgiven because they're a public servant or because their school was found to be liable of cheating them. So there are 5 million people across the country whose lives are different now, and their children's lives are different because of the work that we did around debt forgiveness.
SUMMERS: I want to turn now to the K through 12 level. We know that students who endured pandemic closures - they've made some progress, but there's still a significant achievement gap. I know that you spent decades in public schools in the state of Connecticut, both as a teacher and an administrator. As you think back to that time in your own experience, if you were still in those roles, what kind of support would you want from the Department of Education to help those students in classrooms who are still dealing with that learning loss?
CARDONA: Quite frankly, Juana, you know, I've been Secretary of Education for four years, and it's such an honor to be in this role. But I've been a public school educator for my whole career - over 27 years. They need additional reading support, which is why we fought for Title 1 funding. They need mental health support, which is why, under the Biden-Harris administration, we have 16,000 more school social workers, psychologists, pathways to careers and not just four-year colleges, right?
I was a tech school graduate, Juana, and I know that so many of our students need a pathway into the labor, and getting credentials might be a better way of doing it for them. So we've increased career technical education programming. As an educator, as a fourth-grade teacher, I would want to make sure that the resources from the federal government are focusing on the things that I need, making sure that our local public schools are still great places for all students.
SUMMERS: There's also the issue of chronic absenteeism, though. That is something that has been at a crisis level, affecting our most vulnerable students in districts big and small across this country. Is there something you might suggest to your successor that might help turn that tide?
CARDONA: Absenteeism is a symptom of something greater, right? When I was a school teacher, kids weren't absent because, as a 9-year-old, they didn't want to be absent. They were absent because they had housing issues. They had transportation issues. They had hunger issues. There were other things that were impacting it. So I would tell the successor to continue to focus on those programs that take care of the whole child because when children are well, when they're not hungry, when they know where they're sleeping at night, they're more likely to be able to succeed academically.
SUMMERS: Though I imagine some parents who are sitting there in their communities might think the decisions about how my child is educated are best made in my state and my city and my community rather than by the federal government. So if you could just make the case to them, why should the federal government be involved here?
CARDONA: Oh, I totally agree that states should do it. As a matter of fact, the way the system is set up now, Juana, states are doing it. I was a state commissioner of education. I had more say in education in Connecticut than I do as a federal Secretary of Education. That's how it should be. As a matter of fact, the local boards should be the ones making a lot of the decisions.
So, you know, to assume that federal government has an outsized role is false. And I think, you know, that's part of the rhetoric that is misinformation. I do believe, you know, school choice should be a part of a parents. Look. I'm a product of school choice. I went to a high school that was technical. I didn't go to my local neighborhood high school. I'm a total believer in that. I think a lot of the misinformation has people thinking that the federal government has a bigger role. You know, we fund 9% of public education. Ninety-one percent of it is state and local, and that's how it should stay. And I do agree that decisions at curriculum should be made at the local level, not at the federal level.
SUMMERS: Education secretary for a little longer, Miguel Cardona thank you so much for joining us.
CARDONA: Great talking to you. Thank you.
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