Cardona: Damage Done to the Education Dept.’s Mission Will Take Decades to Fix

Miguel Cardona, who served as the secretary of education under the Biden administration, entered school as a Spanish speaker and has long called multilingualism a “superpower.” 

Cardona, a fellow at the Yale School of Management, through his speeches and other appearances, continues to tell students their ability to speak more than one language is an enormous asset. Not only can it bring them career success, he says, but it deepens their cognitive abilities. 

His praise for the multilingual community runs counter to the current administration’s agenda: President Donald Trump issued an executive order in July designating English as the country’s official language, a pronouncement that immediately sparked efforts to “minimize non-essential multilingual services (and) redirect resources toward English-language education and assimilation.” 

Trump and his allies also rolled back longstanding guidance that kept federal immigration agents off school grounds. Children and their parents have been arrested during pickup and drop-off times, causing absenteeism to spike. And the schools and other groups that serve immigrants are scrambling to stay out of the spotlight, curbing outreach in many cases. 

The dismantling of the U.S. Education Department, too, has left the country’s 5 million English learners with little protection or guidance as to their rights: After a historic round of cuts, the department’s Office of English Language Acquisition, for example, was left with a single staffer. 

Cardona, who also works to shore up the leadership skills of other educators through his Cardona Solutions, said he’s hurt by what has happened to the department whose leadership he left in January 2025.

But even amid the chaos, Cardona sees hope. Trump’s power is temporary, he said. Education lasts a lifetime. 

“Despite what we’re hearing from this administration, the opposite is true,” Cardona said, when asked how he would advise multilingual learners today. “Just wait it out. You don’t have to change your stripes to be successful. I didn’t. Having two cultures and two languages is one of your greatest strengths.”

I caught up with Cardona last week and asked him about the future of multilingual learner education in the U.S. The 50-year-old, who began his career teaching fourth grade in his hometown of Meriden, Connecticut and will be a featured lecturer at Harvard, where he recently completed a fellowship at the Kennedy School, was candid in his responses.

What are your three biggest concerns about the state of multilingual learner education right now?

That multilingualism is not being valued as a superpower, that the funding for basic support is up in the air and that it continues to be an ancillary afterthought in many of our communities, as opposed to a tool to provide a skill for students that can serve them well in a globally competitive society.

Programs serving multilingual learners are being sidelined. What’s happening here? 

It reminds me of when the Supreme Court made a decision about affirmative action and there was an extrapolation of intent. They said, “Now, we can’t have programs that support students from different backgrounds because that goes against what the Supreme Court said.” And so they extrapolate, they make up what it means for implementation.

It’s analogous to what is happening here. “Well, we’ve got to cut DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) so that means no parent support, no translating documents, no language line. We’re going to cut those things from the budget because we’re not sure that we want to continue to support ESL programs because the new secretary said no DEI, that we can’t favor one group over another.”

They’re extrapolating or blaming up to get away with cutting things that they don’t understand — or agree with in the first place. There is an overprescribing of an intent that was really never there. Part of it is to justify budget cut decisions or because in some places, now it’s not chic to promote multilingualism. So why bother?

There are places in our country — Arizona, for example — where there are English-only requirements. So, they took it further. This is what California went through in the ’90s and 2000s with Proposition 227 (a voter-approved measure that required schools to teach immigrant children only in English). And so you have people doing underground work of multilingual education, which is sad, that in 2026 we have people hiding what they’re doing to promote multilingualism when in every other country it’s almost a prerequisite.

Because of what’s happening at the federal level, people have permission now to kind of get rid of some of the programming that we know supports students and families who are learning English — or multilingual programs where students are learning another language.

What is causing some districts and schools to do this? Is it racism or budgetary concerns? 

From my perspective, it’s a little bit of both. “Why are we spending money on these programs when we could spend it on something else?” It’s the low-hanging fruit, and quite frankly, you’re not going to see too many parents of Latino students speaking up at board meetings if they’re worried about being harassed by immigration. Because the browner you are, the more you’re subject to vilification. 

It starts at the top. You’ve got the president calling people rapists, murderers, painting a picture that immigrants are bad people.

To exclude racism would be Pollyannaish on my part, but to think that it’s only that would be minimizing the nuanced realities that many districts face, saying, “If I have to cut, I’m going to cut where I’m going to get the least resistance.”

How does it make you feel to see the Education Department dismantled? 

It hurts because I know the impact it’s going to have on the students furthest from opportunity. The damage that has been done in the last 12 months will take decades to correct. 

Why do you think it will take decades to repair what’s happening to multilingual education? 

I’ll start with the Office for Civil Rights. When you take out the arm of enforcement that ensures students’ civil rights are being protected, accountability is gone. So what does that mean? That it could be the Wild West and no one’s paying attention because we closed seven of the 12 offices whose job it was to make sure students’ civil rights were not being violated. 

When you cut — or threaten to cut — Title III (English Language Acquisition grants) or you run applications for grants through an AI scanner to pick out the words “diversity” or “equity” to make sure you’re not giving grants to those grantees, you’re basically creating a culture of “don’t do this — or else.” 

And people, in order to get the funding they need to provide the basic needs in their districts, are going to move away from programs that could be viewed as helping address disparities in access and outcomes. 

And what about other moves inside the department? 

I see special education going to HHS (Department of Health and Human Services), and I often say they’re sending it to the least competent Kennedy. So, let’s look at what’s happening there. That department has been downsized as well. When you take 50% of the Office for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and you dismiss half the people and then you take the other half and you send them over to the HHS, where they’ve diminished their staff, and now you’re asking them to do the supervision, oversight and support. When you remove that, you’re left with great variance throughout our country in the ability to provide services, support, and accountability. 

I would argue that the red states, the ones who voted for this administration, are the ones that are going to suffer the most — the rural communities where they only have their local public school. They don’t have other options. 

This administration will only last for a finite amount of time. How might a new administration roll back these changes?  

I have hope in not just the federal government picking up where it left off, but I am very encouraged by my conversations with the multilingual learner community. They’re building alliances that do not rely on the federal government — because they checked out. 

They’re developing a framework. For example, Californians Together, (an advocacy group for multilingual learners) is led by the same people that fought Proposition 227 30 years ago. They built an alliance back then and they created what’s called the State Seal of Biliteracy. So, when they came out of that darkness, they said, “We’re going to acknowledge that if you’re multilingual, you’re going to get a State Seal of Biliteracy, a badge of achievement.” And when I was secretary, all 50 states adopted that seal. 

The pendulum is going to swing back, but the federal government is only going to be one player. I’m counting on these coalitions to accelerate the remediation and innovation around English language development. I see that happening across the country.

If you could speak directly to multilingual learner teachers, what would you say? 

Consider yourself blessed and fortunate that you’re serving at a time when our students need you, where you’re providing that emotional safe harbor. Your words are the ones that they’re going to remember — not what’s being said on CNN or Fox News.

Absenteeism is rampant in the immigrant community. How can schools get these students back in the classroom?

This is not the answer for that question, but the first thing that came to mind is vote. We need to get off our asses and see the impact that this had on our students, and we need to be angry. We need to not allow for this to continue any longer than it needs to.

With regard to the students that are right now home, I struggle to look a parent in the face in a community where they’re being harassed by ICE and say, “Send them to school, don’t worry, they’re 100% safe,” because we know that’s not true.

What I will say to those families is know your rights. And also, know the culture in which you’re sending your children. Is that school protecting your child? Will you have alert calls? Does your district have a practice to prevent schools from becoming hubs of immigration (enforcement) efforts? 

In many parts of our country, we’re not protecting our students from having our schools be the places where these raids are happening. I had a student in my hometown get picked up when he was going to an immigration center to check in, as he was supposed to. He missed graduation because he was following the rules.

What do you make of this moment for us as a nation? 

We’re going through a period right now where a lot of the fundamental principles of democracy are being questioned. It’s a stain on our beautiful country’s history. The pandemic of prejudice that we’re dealing with now is harder to lead through than the pandemic of disease that we went through five years ago. We got through the pandemic of disease because we came together. What’s happening now is this pandemic of hate and prejudice is pulling us apart. But if you look deeper, you see stories of resilience and of the power of unity.