WASHINGTON—At the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee confirmation hearing, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) introduced Connecticut Education Commissioner Dr. Miguel Cardona on Wednesday as President Joe Biden’s nominee to be the U.S. Secretary of Education. Murphy also asked Cardona about his work in making schools safer by reducing suspensions and expulsions as well as promoting racially and socioeconomically diverse schools.

“Miguel Cardona keeps getting asked to do bigger things for a reason. He has a servant’s heart, an immovable moral compass, a refusal to take no for an answer, and a unique talent for consensus building, something that will be essential in this job,” said Murphy. “He’s going to make a great Secretary of Education, and I’m so glad to join Senator Blumenthal in expressing Connecticut’s pride and support for him today.”

A full transcript of Murphy’s introduction as well as his question and answer with Cardona can be found below:

“Thank you Madam Chair. Thank you Ranking Member Burr for giving us the opportunity to introduce our friend Miguel Cardona.

“If you are from Meriden, you know the Cardona family. The Cardona family are, in some ways, a typical and in some ways, an extraordinary American family—a family that eats, sleeps, and breathes to make its community better. And while today, the whole country is learning about Miguel Cardona, it frankly is his gregarious police officer father with his trademark handlebar mustache, Hector, who often draws the most attention in Meriden.

“I can’t remember exactly where I first met Miguel, but I’m going to guess it was the city’s Puerto Rican Festival. Connecticut has one of the largest, proudest Puerto Rican communities in America, and Meriden is home to thousands of families. But its cultural festival had hit hard times. There were years where only a couple hundred people were showing up. Until the Cardona family took the festival over. Each summer, now, you can find Miguel and his family speeding around the festival in their golf carts, organizing children’s activities, checking on vendors, organizing bus transportation. Now, 8,000 people a year come to Meriden to this festival because Miguel and his family not only care about their community but because they are willing to do something about it.

“So it won’t surprise you to learn why Miguel’s professional career has been this rocketship ride, advancing so quickly from classroom teacher to principal to Assistant Superintendent to State Commissioner to this nomination. At Israel Putnam Elementary, Miguel, on a starting teachers’ salary, fished $450 out of his pocket to make sure that his kids had the supplies they needed. He was relentless in teaching his students to refuse to let socioeconomic obstacles block their dreams and their progress. And so it was no surprise that he was named the state’s youngest school principal a few short years after he started teaching.

“As a principal, it also won’t surprise you to know that he was one of those principals that knew every kid’s name, knew every kid’s story. He dressed up as a conductor for Polar Express Day, he performed with the students at holiday concerts, and he relentlessly built a community of teachers, students, and parents. He led by example.

“And so the promotions kept coming. He tackled teacher diversity as Assistant Superintendent in Meriden, he championed the cause of replacing draconian exclusionary school discipline policies with restorative justice practices. And, as has been mentioned, as our state’s Commissioner, he led the effort to reopen Connecticut’s schools earlier than most people thought was possible, and he did it in a way that didn’t divide teachers from students and parents.

“Miguel Cardona keeps getting asked to do bigger things for a reason. He has a servant’s heart, an immovable moral compass, a refusal to take no for an answer, and a unique talent for consensus building, something that will be essential in this job.

“He’s going to make a great Secretary of Education, and I’m so glad to join Senator Blumenthal in expressing Connecticut’s pride and support for him today.”

[…]

MURPHY: “Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Again, congratulations, Dr. Cardona. Thank you for your willingness to serve.

“Just a word on the topic that Senator Byrd raised about assessments. Listen, I'm a believer in assessments, I think it's really hard to figure out how to target resources if you don't know how your kids are performing, admittedly much tougher to do assessments right now and there's probably a worthwhile conversation about how you tie assessments to accountability measures. But on a bipartisan basis, we've approved hundreds of billions of dollars to send to states and municipalities, we want to make sure that money is spent well, and having a sense of what kids are succeeding and what kids aren't is just, I think, a proper exercise of responsible taxpayer dollar management. And so I’d  just add that to the conversation.

“Dr. Cardona, I want to talk about two issues unique to Meriden, Connecticut that I think are great to highlight for the country. One is the work that you've done there to reduce suspensions and expulsions, and the next is the work that Meriden has done to promote a truly diverse community, racially diverse and economically diverse, and to talk about the benefit that is provided to students by going to school in a diverse environment.

“So first, I'm a believer that the federal government should move more quickly to try to reduce the school to prison pipeline, that we should be encouraging states to use less exclusionary discipline, meaning kicking kids out of school as a means to try to make schools safer. What have you done in--you led this effort in Meriden—what did you do to reduce the use of suspensions and expulsions in a way that, frankly, ended up making your schools safer places?”

CARDONA: “Thank you, Senator. Yes. It's hard to learn if you're being excluded from the learning environment. So efforts to reduce exclusionary practices were critical to our work in Meriden, and at the state level. And to do this you have to really engage students as partners in the process. Engaging student voice and giving students an opportunity to communicate their experience and how their learning is best and what struggles they're having in their learning environment is critically important. 

“You mentioned restorative practices, making sure that when issues arise in our schools that we're looking at it as a learning opportunity for our students and trying to bring a stronger sense of community as a result. So restorative practices was something that we did in Meriden, but also monitoring. 

“I know you talked about accountability monitoring. We're not going to improve it if we're not monitoring it, if we're not looking at our data disaggregated by race, by socioeconomic status, by free and reduced lunch, by students with disabilities, we have to be open and honest about what we're doing and what the results are and are they different for different students. And then we have to be honest about building capacity for educators, for our schools, and for our systems to make sure that we're addressing it intentionally.”

MURPHY: “One of the things that you will be immediately presented with is an Executive Order around school discipline policies that included a lot of incentives for data collection, and I hope you'll take a hard look at re-implementing all are part of that Obama era executive order, in part because it does get to this question of making sure that we're watching what happens. What we know is that it tends to be students of color and students of disability that end up getting excluded from school more so than their white or non-disabled peers.

“Lastly, I just wanted to ask you to talk about the benefit of Meriden’s diverse student community. I have legislation that would set up a federal grant to support voluntary school integration programs, racial integration programs and economic integration programs. And I've always been struck in visiting Meriden how the kids themselves are so conscious of the benefit they get from going to middle schools and high schools where they have economic diversity. And, in fact, I've talked to lots of kids who moved from less diverse communities, either all white communities or communities with almost exclusively students of color, and they themselves just have their eyes opened. So why is that important to Meriden’s success?”

CARDONA: “Thank you, Senator. So I'm a big believer in not only curriculum providing a window into other cultures or a mirror into your own culture where you can see yourself, but I also believe the environment, having a diverse environment, is a better environment. Diverse perspectives, diverse backgrounds, there's a level of celebration of differences, which, if we can get our students to graduate school with a celebration of differences, they're going to be much more successful in the global economy that we're in. So it's definitely a benefit. And it's something that, in my home community, I've benefited from and my children do as well.”

MURPHY: “Well, I look forward to it working with you on ways that we can allow the federal government to be a facilitator of those conversations. These are ultimately decisions that get made at the local level about how to approach this question of desegregation and integration, but it's a conversation that the federal government can play a more helpful role and look forward to working with you on that.

“Thank you Madam Chair.”

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