School, the choice of Biden: a former elementary school teacher as minister of Education

is Not yet official, but the majority of average americans, the damage is now almost done. If you do not take over a stumbling block and to the last mile, the next minister of Education in american will be the 45-year-old Miguel Cardona, a former teacher, the son of immigrant puerto ricans. In line with what Biden had promised in the election campaign after the fiasco of Betsy DeVos, the minister in the absolute most hated of the outgoing administration. The meaning of the choice is clear: return the school to see who makes it after 4 years of expropriation. On the bench where the president Trump, in contempt of the public school, he had decided to put a multi-billion dollar shamelessly in favour of private schools, and not even too much veiled antiscientist (the DeVos contested the darwinian evolutionism in the name of the doctrine of “intelligent design”), will sit a former teacher of elementary school, grew up in a house for people who spent the last twenty years in the service of the public school in Meriden, a small town of a little more than 60 thousand inhabitants in the county of New Heaven (Connecticut).

A life for the public school

Principal at 28 years of age (the youngest ever appointed in the state of Connecticut), “dean of the year” in 2012, deputy superintendent of schools of Meriden, in 2017, Miguel Cardona has made the first real career jump only in 2019, when the governor-dem Ned Lamont has chosen him as his “assessor” to Education. Married to Marissa, father of two children, she calls herself “a product of the public school american” and has always been committed to non-profit organizations. His appointment strengthens the Latin element of the Biden administration, that slowly is emerging as one of the most diverse ever, and there is to swear that you meet the full satisfaction of the first lady Jill, a teacher in love with his craft to the point of having already announced that it will continue to work even after you will be settled in the White House (a first in american history: even the combative Michelle Obama gave up a career as a lawyer “to blame” for Barack). Even if the Washington Post has not failed to observe with a degree of perfidy that in spite of the brilliant career of Cardona in the last few months, his remains in a nomination “low profile”. And a confirmation of the rumors on his name, he cited a meeting of Cardona in a videoconference with the president but with his wife Jill and his deputy Kamala Harris.

Reopen schools in time Covid

Now, the first decisive challenge he has in front of Cardona is to be able to keep the promise of Biden to reopen the schools within the first 100 days of its mandate. As head of Education in Connecticut, Cardona has always wrought for the school, arguing that while there is evidence that the school is a place of transmission of the virus, it is shown that the closure of schools has disruptive effects on the formation and the growth of children, especially those less fortunate. But he did it only after having prepared specific security protocols in line with the directions of the science (unlike the administration’s Trump, in the long-skeptical even about the usefulness of the mask) that at least until the virus has come back strongly to run had allowed many districts of the State to keep the schools open.

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