Nomination of Miguel A. Cardona

Floor Speech

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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.

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