How Should We Grade the Biden Administration on Education?
There won't be four more years. What legacy will Biden leave?
Joe Biden will be a one term president. On July 21, he announced that he would stand down from his re-election campaign.
Now seems like an appropriate time to consider how has Biden performed on the issue of education, since we’ve learned there will be no encore.
I reached out to more than 25 people to ask for opinions: current and former district and state superintendents, Hill staffers, academic researchers, non-profit leaders, and current classroom educators. A decidedly non-scientific sample drawn from my personal list of “people with interesting perspectives who might reply.”
And reply they did. I heard back from a large majority of the group. I’ll do my best to summarize their views and offer a few of my own.
How do you grade a presidential administration?
I left it up to each individual.
There’s no science to this. For some, the biggest factor is which issues receive priority. Republicans won’t find much to like in a Democratic administration - and vice versa.
For others, their view may be determined by day-to-day competence or how much an administration attempts to meddle politically with schools.
I asked respondents to share a bit of their reasoning. They tended to focus less on the administration’s ideological bent (e.g. few referenced charter schools or vouchers) and more on where it chose to allocate staff time, financial resources, and the Secretary’s access to the bully pulpit.
Before I share the feedback I heard, I want to express my admiration for those who serve in this or any administration. It is demanding, thankless work. Biden’s team inherited a pandemic that had closed schools and sent student learning into a tailspin. That’s a tough hand. Now, after four hard years, they’re forced to suffer peanut gallery yahoos like me claiming the right to pass judgment on their work.
Point granted. But this is the reality of public discourse. In just a few months, there will be a new President who will inherit a pretty tough hand, too, and we need to ask ourselves what that leader’s agenda should be.
What was the verdict?
Let’s rip off the Band-Aid first: Almost across the board, grades for the Biden administration on education were low. The most common grade was F. The highest grade was a B-. That was the lone B. There were a few C’s. The rest were D’s and F’s. More than one person asked if an F-minus was permissible.
The average of all the submissions fell in the D range.
Why? I hear three driving factors on a bi-partisan basis:
#1. FAFSA debacle. The meltdown of the student financial aid application over the course of the 2023-24 school year is the biggest knock against the Biden administration’s operational competence on education. Fairly or not, many believe that senior staff spent too much time on student loan forgiveness and not nearly enough monitoring the complex modernization of FAFSA. The result was an embarrassing series of missteps that were exhaustively catalogued by Melissa Korn in The Wall Street Journal this spring. Real-world, kitchen table consequences for families in every corner of the country. There’s still work to be done for the system to work effectively for next year.
#2. Lack of focus on student achievement. This concern was referenced even more often than FAFSA. It has folks straight up angry. President Biden and his Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, were variously described as “absentee,” “silent,” “lacking vision,” “no sense of urgency,” and “missing the boat” when it came to learning loss. The feeling is that, in a moment that cried out for leadership, there was none. Someone asked if they were allowed to assign a grade of "N/A” for K-12. That gives you the flavor of it. When the Biden administration did show up, it tended to be late. For instance, the Department of Education took almost no concrete actions on chronic student absenteeism until the 2023-24 school year even though data on the crisis had long been accumulating. It was actually the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors that first moved assertively. There’s been no national dashboard for academic recovery overseen by the Department. There was no summit called when national test scores “flashed red.”
#3. Student loan forgiveness. Far and away the issue referenced most often - universally in negative terms. Respondents criticized it for being legally dubious, bound to fail in court, outlandishly expensive, and poorly targeted to ensure the resources aided those who truly needed it. One person summarized it as “a lousy policy freighted with moral hazards.” There were plenty of questions - notably from Democrats - about why such a quixotic initiative consumed a large portion of the administration’s attention. If it was an attempt to court favor among young voters for an aging president, it definitely did not work.
I tend to agree with the group consensus. I would give Biden a D on education. The administration’s work was never commensurate with the scale of the crises students, families, and educators faced.
Weren’t there some positives?
Yes - and they deserve mention. The American Rescue Plan (ARP) passed in March 2021 on a razor-thin, partisan basis, sending over $100 billion to schools. According to recent research by two separate teams, that funding led to increases in student learning and partial recovery from COVID setbacks. Could it have accomplished more? Sure. But the Biden administration did its job getting resources out the door and they helped.
Additionally, Biden kept the peace with teacher unions, ending what had been almost 20 consecutive years of friction or all-out battle between the teachers and presidential administrations of both parties. Conservatives don’t think this is an achievement and some further to the left feel it was achieved only by allowing unions a veto on important issues, contributing to a lack of results in K-12, but I argue a measure of credit is due. The NEA famously called for Obama’s EdSec, Arne Duncan, to resign. Biden avoided that drama. His team focused on alleviating teacher shortages, which became acute during the pandemic, and raising teacher pay. Teachers felt the love.
What will be Biden’s education legacy?
On many issues - climate change, infrastructure investments, prescription drug prices - Biden has done very well. I heard that from many respondents. He also deserves tremendous credit for ending his re-election campaign when he could have clung selfishly to power. I suspect his presidency will be judged positively.
But we’re here to talk about education. The recurring theme for this administration has been a willingness to spend big on questionable strategies that ultimately brought small returns.
Meanwhile, student achievement for almost all subgroups has declined since Biden’s election. Recent analysis suggests that COVID-era gaps are getting worse, not better. Unless Biden receives an unexpected batch of 11th-hour good news when new NAEP results are released this fall, he will exit having presided over the worst stretch of K-12 academic results in modern history.
Just as importantly, Biden has delivered the Democratic Party into a rudderless era of strategy. Like Milton from Office Space, education was moved into the basement of the administration’s list of priorities. Someone made off with its beloved red stapler, too.
If Kamala Harris wins in November, it is unlikely that her Department of Education can simply continue to execute on Biden’s policies. Why? Because the well of post-pandemic patience and goodwill is running dry. Pressure to do something, to deliver something, is growing. There needs to be a set of ideas beyond more funding.
Similarly, if Donald Trump wins a second, non-consecutive term, his 2016 playbook will feel instantly out-of-date for our present challenges. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan - which Trump seems to embrace and disown as his mood shifts - is incoherent and messy. But that doesn’t mean some of it won’t be enacted through executive action.
For all these reasons, change is on the horizon. There are big questions. Folks want to know:
How will federal leadership improve student learning? COVID relief money is expiring. There is little prospect for a new infusion. Most American students are far behind the academic pace of their peers from just a few years ago. What’s the plan?
What strategies will bring student absenteeism back to pre-pandemic norms? Teachers have made phone calls home. Superintendents have invited television cameras on door-knocking trips. Schools have installed washers and dryers. And kids just keep missing school. We need more leadership. Right now, that leadership is coming from elsewhere.
What is a legislative agenda that can gain support in Congress? The last overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed in 2015 with more than 80 percent of the House and Senate voting in favor. Going by student outcomes since then, the law is not aging well. But there’s little bipartisan momentum to update or replace it. When will that change? And what’s the vision for a federal role in the next decade?
Someone better find Milton’s desk in the basement and bring it back up. There’s work to do.
Appreciated this post, as I have heard a lot of people say things along these lines, but not actually put them in writing. Very interested to see what the answers to these questions will be. I wonder if the NEED Act, if it passes, could then help exert pressure for an update to the ESEA.