Miguel Cardona has been the most destructive education secretary in American history.

If his tenure were not so devastating for American students and families, it might be laughable. But the damage he did to the nation’s children and their parents displays the potent evil that characterizes the entire Biden regime.

Cardona shifted the focus of a department that typically catches the ire of conservatives for its uselessness into one that relentlessly promotes sexually deviant behavior among children and a racial indoctrination scheme. Cardona then helped prompt the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to send their thugs after parents who objected.

“Under Secretary Cardona’s leadership, the Department of Education has made a hash of civil rights enforcement, the federal student loan program, and management of the agency,” Bob Eitel, president and cofounder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, told The Federalist. “The Secretary’s higher education and civil rights agenda is in tatters, the victim of an overreaching radical agenda devoid of common sense and legal support.”

“Billions of dollars in illegal student loan bailouts, the erosion of civil rights in schools and universities, and tanking test scores were not inevitable,” Eitel, who served as senior counselor to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, added. “They are the direct result of astounding misjudgments by the Secretary.”

Teachers’ Unions Force Child Abuse

Cardona took over the Department of Education in the second year of the coronavirus pandemic, well after many knew protocols like social distancing, masking, and school lockdowns were doing nothing to stop or slow the spread of the virus.

The measures were simply the dogma of an autocratic regime hellbent on serving themselves and their friends in teachers’ unions instead of the American people.

Those protocols were prolonged at the behest of far-left teachers’ unions, whose lazy members decided they enjoyed being paid for not having to do their jobs so much that Americans’ children were required to suffer under abuse-level conditions.

As Cardona made mealy-mouthed appeals to opening schools, he was also advancing the exact same unscientific and unattainable standards for reopening invented by gnats like former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci has since admitted that many of his protocols lacked scientific evidence, and were essentially arbitrary.

“With vaccinations and quarantining and masking, students are able to have uninterrupted learning. So now you throw politics into the mix and you see sadly that in Florida there are more children in hospitals, the spread is greater, in many areas it doesn’t seem contained,” Cardona said, attacking Florida for opening schools. He called the move “dangerous” and “irresponsible” despite the fact that children in schools were barely a factor in the spread of the virus.

Cardona went as far as to launch a civil rights investigation into Florida for allowing children to return to school without masks covering their faces.

Across the board, children’s social and academic development were heavily stunted, as reading scores among nine-year-old students plummeted to their lowest point in 30 years, and nearly 40% of eighth graders did not understand basic math concepts.

“These scores are a national scandal. For as long as anyone can remember, student achievement in the United States has been declining,” Eitel said. “Now, our country is left with a workforce largely unable to understand language and math at high levels.”

Those scores, derived from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the “nation’s report card,” have continued to fall across subjects. Last year, amid a crash in history and civics education, Cardona claimed that Republicans were “banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects.”

The “book ban” hoax is advanced by many on the left in order to redirect attention from putting both highly racialized pseudo-history and highly sexualized, pornographic, and even pedophilic materials in front of young children.

Lockdowns, masking, and isolation also directly led to the sharp increases in adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ultimately admitted in 2022.

There was likely one positive outcome to the draconian measures forced on children, however. Despite the destruction allowed by Cardona and others in schools, American parents did gain access to their children’s curriculums, where they found their children being exposed to intense leftist indoctrination.

CRT And Pornography: Parents Are ‘Terrorists’

Parents across the country were shocked to find out what their children were learning in school.

From critical race theory to queer theory, America’s children were being transformed into far-left political activists. The only recourse for many parents to make their concerns known was to speak at their local school board meetings and display the depravity to which their children were exposed.

But that was unacceptable to Cardona and the rest of the Biden administration, so Cardona commissioned a letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) demanding that the Biden administration go after concerned parents as “domestic terrorists.” Attorney General Merrick Garland quickly took the letter and directed the FBI and U.S. attorneys to go after parents.

A large portion of the impetus for the NSBA letter (and a signal of what was coming from federal jackboots who sought to go after parents) were parents like Scott Smith, a Loudoun County, Virginia, father whose 15-year-old was violently sexually assaulted by a male student wearing a skirt in the girls’ restroom.

The boy wearing a skirt was allowed in the restroom by virtue of the county’s policy allowing boys in girls’ spaces so long as they claimed to be some incoherent gender identity.

Smith gave an impassioned speech before the school board where he criticized the handling of his daughter’s assault. After trying to advocated for his daughter, he was ultimately arrested and charged with obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct after his speech.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R-Va., pardoned him in 2023, and he is suing the school district for $30 million.

The Biden administration’s dedication to transgender ideology was so deep that they actually used the U.S. Department of Agriculture to blackmail schools into allowing boys in girls’ restrooms by threatening poor students’ access to free meals at school.

Parents also spoke out about the divisive racial rhetoric that cast white children as inherently evil and non-white children as perpetual victims. To advance that ideology, the Education Department gave over $1 billion in grants to schools over the course of Biden’s term.

The message was clear: The activists that run the institutions of public education in this country did not care if Americans’ children were sexually assaulted or mentally damaged from being taught to hate themselves.

Ripping Apart Title IX

The crowning initiative of Cardona’s tenure was his rewrite of Title IX civil rights law, which governs female equality in education.

The Trump administration worked hard to protect women in school and sports, while simultaneously leveling the playing field for men (mostly) who are accused of sexual assault on college campuses, but Cardona shredded those efforts.

He attempted to redefine sex by including any form of “gender identity” as protected, meaning that maintaining sex-specific areas like restrooms and locker rooms would be a civil rights violation. Young girls would be forced to undress in front of boys and sleep in the same room as them on events like overnight field trips.

While the rewrite did not pertain to sports, Cardona was planning a second set of rules that would require schools to allow men to play against women.

In January, a federal court struck down the entirety of the Title IX rules nationwide, after it had been blocked in more than half of the states.

But redefining sex was not enough for Cardona. He also stripped college students of their due process rights for Title IX investigations.

One of the major achievements of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was cleaning up the “kangaroo courts” that used to govern Title IX investigations when, for example, a male was accused of sexual assault.

The system was rife with abuse and enabled women to succeed in falsely accusing men of assault and destroy their lives. The DeVos rules ensured both the accused and the accuser had proper due process rights.

Cardona reversed them, effectively requiring the accused to prove their innocence, as opposed to being innocent until proven guilty — the foundation of the American justice system.

Cardona’s rules allow for students to be found guilty of sexual assault without even being able to review the actual evidence against them. Moreover, the rules took away the right to a live hearing and the ability to cross-examine the accuser. The evidentiary standard for guilt was lowered dramatically from “clear and convincing” to a “preponderance of the evidence” — often compared to just above a 50% chance of guilt.

Student Loans And Student Aid

Cardona’s Title IX failure was perhaps his most notable, but his incompetence on student aid destroyed higher education opportunities for students, and his elitism carried the Biden administration through two failed attempts to redistribute student debt to the public.

The Trump administration revamped the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in order to make it easier for students to apply for financial aid. When it came time to implement it, which happened under Cardona’s watch, the Education Department was months late and the website barely even worked.

The failed rollout meant that millions of would-be students did not receive financial offers from colleges and universities, forcing many of them to defer or not attend college because they were unable to afford it.

But for students who could afford to go to college, the Biden regime attempted twice to make the American people foot the bill for their degrees to the tune of $400 billion. The second time they tried it was during the election year, effectively bribing voters.

The attempts to make American taxpayers pay for everyone’s college degrees were struck down both times.

“Miguel Cardona was a double whammy because his performance was abysmal while the media coverage of him was never adversarial and often glowing,” Erika Sanzi, Director of Outreach for Parents Defending Education, told The Federalist. “From the FAFSA debacle to the consistent attacks on parents with concerns about his priorities to nonstop pandering to teachers unions, he was a disaster for students. The way education reporters covered him was an embarrassment to their profession and ultimately hurt students as well.”

Perhaps it is a fitting end to a doddering Biden regime that Cardona’s two biggest policy goals — Title IX and student loans — were rejected summarily by the courts. But taking the long view on the failure of initiatives like that does not accurately capture the levels of destruction American children were forced to endure during Cardona’s tenure.

And it could have gone another direction. If the courts were even slightly friendlier to the Biden administration’s ideology, American taxpayers would be forced to foot the bill for the useless college degrees, and girls would be unsafe every day in school.

Cardona still leaves in his wake critical race theory and queer theory, being taught daily at schools across the country whose state or local governments have not banned the harmful curriculums.

It may take the incoming Trump administration cracking down on these schools, and threatening federal money, in order to ensure generations of children will no longer be harmed.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.