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“NOMINATION OF MIGUEL A. CARDONA (Executive Session)” mentioning Patty Murray was published in the Senate section on pages S919-S921 on March 1.
Of the 100 senators in 117th Congress, 24 percent were women, and 76 percent were men, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
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The publication is reproduced in full below:
NOMINATION OF MIGUEL A. CARDONA
Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, after 4 years of Secretary DeVos' efforts to promote greater privatization of our education system and dismantle the civil rights of students, Miguel Cardona is the person we need to restore the promise of America's schools. A former public school teacher who went on to be a leader in the same district where he was once an English learner, Dr. Cardona has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to our public schools and the belief that all children are entitled to a quality education in a safe and nurturing learning environment. He also has a proven track record of effectively responding to the pandemic, helping students overcome the digital divide, and safely reopening schools as the Connecticut Education Commissioner.
The pandemic has upended our education system, disrupting learning and exacerbating inequities. From day one as Secretary of the Department of Education, Dr. Cardona will need to be prepared to meet the challenges facing our students and educators, from addressing learning loss and social, emotional, and mental health to reversing declining higher education enrollment rates and a sky-rocketing affordability crisis. Additionally, as deep disparities continue to shortchange low-income students, students of color, and students with disabilities, Dr. Cardona will be a key partner in working toward closing these funding and educational opportunity gaps.
I am proud to support Dr. Cardona's nomination, and I look forward to working together to at last make good on our promises to fully fund title I and IDEA, to expand access to quality early childhood education and community schools, and to ensure higher education is accessible for everyone.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I rise today to voice my strong support for Dr. Cardona's nomination to serve as Secretary of Education.
Across the country, students, parents, and educators are in crisis. Every day without an experienced leader at the Department of Education is a day that we are losing precious ground. Back in my home State of Washington, I heard from a mother in Yakima whose children shared one iPhone to learn. I heard from a father of a high school freshman in Spokane, worried about the social and psychological toll the pandemic is taking on his son. I heard from students at the Lummi Nation, trying to focus on remote classes while in multigenerational households on a shared, spotty broadband.
I know there are so many similar stories from people in my State and across the country about how this pandemic is making life harder, the ways it has set back students from where they would be in a typical year, denied them access to critical school resources, deepened longstanding inequities, and so much more.
From early education to higher education, we need to make sure students and their families have the support they need to not only get a high-quality education but to make sure every student can try.
Democrats want to get students safely back in the classrooms for in-
person learning as soon as possible. So I am glad the Biden administration put forward clear, science-based, public health guidance schools have long needed. There is no one solution that will ensure safety on its own as our country ramps up vaccine distribution.
Congress has to do its part and pass the American Rescue Plan to provide vital funding for schools--to secure adequate PPE, to reduce class sizes to increase social distancing, to improve ventilation and contract tracing, and to take all the steps they need to do so that they can safely reopen for in-person learning or provide high-quality distance learning if it is not safe in their community to return to the classroom and so that they can assess and address the damage this pandemic has done, especially the way it has deepened inequities that have hurt students of color, students of families with low incomes, students with disabilities, LGBTQ students, women, English learners, students experiencing homelessness, and so much more.
At this moment of crisis, Dr. Cardona is exactly the leader we need at the Department of Education to tackle these challenges. During his confirmation hearing in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, he demonstrated beyond a doubt that he has experience, principles, and the perspective that we need in this critical role. That is why Dr. Cardona was voted out of our committee by an overwhelming 17-to-5 margin with broad bipartisan support.
Dr. Cardona will come to the Department as a proven leader who will work with students, parents, caregivers, educators, school administrators, and State, local, and Tribal officials. Just as importantly, he will come to the Department as a former elementary school teacher, an adjunct professor, a principal, assistant superintendent, and former English learner himself who knows we have a responsibility to make sure every single student has access to high-
quality public education.
At our hearing, he made clear he will fight against longstanding inequities and for every student, including those who have not had a champion at the Department for the last 4 years. He spoke about his commitment to accomplishing President Biden's goal of safely reopening the majority of our K-8 schools for in-person learning within his first 100 days in office.
He showed he understands the challenge the Department is facing is larger than just seeing schools and students and parents and educators safely through this pandemic. It is making sure we come back stronger and fairer. Accomplishing that means ensuring childcare and early education is available and affordable for every family; ensuring every student can get a high-quality public education no matter where they live or how much money they or their families have; rooting out longstanding inequities from our education system by tackling racism, sexism, ableism, and bigotry head-on; and ensuring that higher education is accessible, affordable, accountable, and safe for every single student.
We have a lot of work to do for our schools and students. We have an excellent candidate to get it done, and we have no time to waste. I urge all of our colleagues who have heard from a parent who wants to get their child back in the classroom safely--I am sure everyone has--
to join us and vote to confirm Dr. Cardona as Secretary of Education.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. MURPHY. I ask unanimous consent to complete my remarks before the vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I come to the floor to echo Chairwoman Murray's comments, to suggest and commend to my colleagues the nomination of Miguel Cardona to be the next Secretary of Education.
There is no one better suited for this job in this moment than Miguel Cardona, and I couldn't be more excited on behalf of my constituents, on behalf of the people of Meriden, CT, to be here on the floor to tell you just a little bit about why Miguel Cardona makes so much sense for this moment.
As Senator Murray laid it out for us, this is obviously a moment of crisis in American education. Kids have been distance learning or in and out of classroom settings for the last year. We have had so many children fall behind, especially those with learning needs. We have a lot of kids in crisis. For a lot of kids, home is not a safe place. There is trauma today amongst America's children, and our education system is going to have to bear a lot of the brunt of making sure that these kids are taken care of.
We have a crisis in higher education without students in the classroom, without sources of revenue flowing into institutions of higher learning. We need to make sure that we don't lose classroom slots in colleges and universities, which, of course, is the only thing that allows us to be able to see a bright economic future for our country--expanding access to higher education.
Miguel is made for this moment because he knows how important college is. He was the first member of his family to complete college. He knows how important community is. He came right back to his community of Meriden after completing college and went to work serving his community by taking a job teaching fourth grade in Meriden.
He proved early on that he would go above and beyond the call when it came to the needs of his students. He was a teacher at Israel Putnam Elementary School, room 160. If his kids didn't have what they needed, Miguel would reach into his pockets to make sure they had it. One year, he spent $450 of his own money--money that he probably didn't have as a first- or second-year teacher--to make sure every kid in his classroom had a notebook, a writer's handbook, and a box of crayons. One student told the story of a classmate who moved back to Puerto Rico and of Miguel's organizing a packet of letters from all of his classmates to be sent to him so that he could still have a connection back to Meriden.
He was such an amazing teacher that he was promoted just after a few years in the classroom. He was actually Connecticut's youngest principal when, at age 28, he took over Hanover. Soon thereafter, he was promoted to help run the city's school district, and he was promoted again to be the commissioner of education in Connecticut.
It has been his work over the last year that, I think, caught the attention of educational policy leaders and advocates all across the country because Connecticut was one of the first States to reopen its schools. We did it through a consensus-building exercise that Commissioner Cardona led. He brought together students and parents, administrators, teachers, and teachers unions to come up with a plan to safely reopen our schools. Connecticut reopened our schools faster than many people thought we could, ahead of the curve nationally. He was able to do that because consensus building is a skill that Miguel Cardona has been working on for a very long time.
In 2013, one of his jobs, while he was helping to lead the Meriden school system, was to implement a new teacher evaluation system. You know this can always be very, very controversial, a new system evaluating teachers' performances, but he brought everybody to the table and developed a model that became used statewide. His model and his consensus approach became the standard in our State. He is the Secretary of Education we need right now--somebody who has experience in our classrooms, somebody who knows the value of college, especially to first-generation college families, and somebody who knows how to bring people together.
This is an incredibly important moment for America's educational system. We need to maintain and expand our commitment to equity in our K-12 system to make sure that every single kid--no matter the level of income, no matter the ethnic background, no matter the race, no matter if one is disabled or not--gets a quality education.
This is a moment to invest in accountability in higher education and make sure that we are not wasting taxpayer dollars funding programs and degrees that don't work, that may make money for for-profit investors but that don't end up in skill sets that are going to power our economy. Miguel Cardona is the right person to meet this moment. He is whip-smart. He is a consensus builder. He is a passionate advocate for kids and for teachers and for parents. He is the perfect person for this job and for this moment.
Lastly, let me just share with you how I got to know Miguel Cardona, which, maybe, will serve as a final advertisement for his unique qualifications. This was my old congressional district, and Meriden was part and is still part of the Fifth Congressional District. One of the biggest weekends in Meriden has become the Puerto Rican Heritage Festival, but that festival had sort of hit hard times. It was a decade ago when, maybe, only a couple hundred people came to it until the Cardona family took it over. Miguel Cardona and his family took over the Puerto Rican Heritage Festival in Meriden, CT. Today, 6,000 or 7,000 people come to this festival. You can find Miguel Cardona, on that weekend, every hour of each day of the festival, driving around on his golf cart, organizing bus transportation, working on the entertainment acts, and making sure that Meriden is able, on that weekend, to be able to celebrate its Puerto Rican heritage but then to offer something really constructive, really fun, and really empowering for the community.
Even as commissioner of education, it wasn't beyond him or above him to invest in his community in that way. It is, I hope, an indication of who he is and whom he will remain if the Senate chooses to confirm him into this role, as I hope we will do with a big bipartisan vote today.
I yield the floor.
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