One bright note, and the one giving many parents and educators hope, is that the incoming first lady, Jill Biden, is herself a teacher and plans to continue working after her husband is inaugurated as president. She has made it clear that she will encourage the president-elect to appoint someone who has actually worked in the system and knows both its challenges and possibilities.
In his victory speech on November 7, the president-elect referred to Jill as he declared: “For America’s educators, this is a great day. You’re going to have one of your own in the White House.”
Among the initiatives Biden has said he wants to pursue as president are universal pre-kindergarten for all three- and four-year-old children; making community college debt-free; and increasing the amount of Pell grants to help low-income students pay for college. He has also signaled his support for a proposal to forgive student debt.
According to the New York Times, the president-elect also plans to restore “Obama-era civil rights guidance”—policies rescinded by DeVos—“that allowed transgender students to choose their school bathrooms, addressed the disproportionate disciplining of Black students and pressed for diversity in colleges and K-12 classrooms.”
As Stef Feldman, the Biden campaign’s policy director, told reporters last month, Biden would “be able to get some big, bold education legislation passed and certainly immediate relief for our schools and our educators, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not also going to take executive action within existing authority.”
Of course, the biggest challenge facing the next secretary of education is how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic and safely educate the nation’s children. It is an issue that most brutally exposed DeVos’s incompetence.
“But it was in 2020, as American schools faced arguably their biggest crisis since the civil rights era, that you really made your contempt for teachers and children plain,” Dan Kois recently wrote in a scathing analysis of DeVos’s tenure for Slate. “As schools across the country sought aid and advice to reopen safely in the fall, you holed up in your Michigan compound, protected by around-the-clock U.S. Marshals that have cost taxpayers as much as $25 million over four years. (You’re the first Cabinet secretary ever to insist on such protection.) From your mansion, you joined Donald Trump’s demands that schools reopen NOW—but offered no support or assistance. The end result: politicizing school reopening as an issue, making it more difficult for schools to open safely. You’ve overseen a slow-motion education disaster that will have lasting effects on an entire generation of children.”