Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond Should Be Biden’s Choice For Education Secretary

If he is to remain true to his commitment to criminal justice reform that he made to the African American community and to George Floyd’s family during his presidential campaign, Biden must select a Black for Attorney General.

African American civil rights, political, and community leaders have been pressing President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris to appoint more Blacks to major cabinet posts. They met with them last Tuesday, a day after Biden announced his selection of retired four-star Gen. Lloyd Austin, III as the first African American Secretary of the Department of Defense.

He followed that up by choosing Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH) to serve as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. She will be the first Black female to serve in that post since President-Elect Jimmy Carter nominated the late Patricia Roberts Harris for that position in 1976. Although Fudge is ecstatic to serve, many of her allies had been lobbying for her to become Secretary of Agriculture because of her stellar work on child nutrition on agriculture subcommittees.

While these moves look good for the Biden-Harris administration, a groundbreaking decision for Biden would be for him to keep Dr. Linda Darling Hammond as Secretary of Education. Currently serving as head of the transition team for the Department of Education (as she did for Obama-Biden in 2008), Darling-Hammond, as noted in a previous column, would bring wide-ranging education experience to the job.

Given the educational devastation that is being visited upon poor children, and those of color in particular, an individual with Dr. Darling-Hammond’s skill set is sorely needed. In her 2010 book, “The Flat World and Education,” she was prescient in outlining the necessity to address the raging racial inequities that are undermining K-12 public education.

These inequities have been highlighted during the change to remote virtual learning throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Poor children of color are rapidly falling behind their white counterparts in reading, math, and lack access to technology (Wi-Fi reliability and computers) to avail themselves of remote instruction. Students with special needs have been hit the hardest.

A recent poll of New Jersey parents, by the New Jersey Children’s Foundation, found that their children “… don’t have equitable access to the technology, internet, food, and extra support programs necessary for their students to be successful.” They also want to know whether their children are on grade level, and to have greater access to teachers and the social and emotional programs to keep their children on track.

Yet the testing nonprofit, NWEA, in its review of the pandemic-induced leap to on-line learning has found that remote learning has had minimal impact on students’ reading and math progress. Its study, however, largely excluded the nation’s most vulnerable students from its analysis making its findings practically useless for the fastest growing segment of the K-12 student population.

Dr. Darling-Hammond not only has the quintessential educational portfolio, but she also possesses a detailed understanding of the Education Department, having looked in all the nooks and crannies during her previous stint leading the education transition team. That context will be significant in order to undo the devastation that Betsy DeVos has wrought. There is no better prepared candidate available.

In addition, Darling-Hammond is already well-regarded by educators across the instructional spectrum for her research and practice skills. She has also been an activist in many educational organizations dedicated to improving educational outcomes for the nation’s most underserved, poverty-ridden student populations – Native Americans, Latinx students, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, African Americans, and Alaskan Natives.

Another of her positive attribute is that she is African American, which will address, in part, Black leaders’ concerns about having more of their own in high-profile cabinet positions. Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond is the full package.

In the aftermath of the Betsy DeVos debacle in the Education Department during the Trump administration, education will be a key issue that the Biden-Harris administration will have to confront, and it is imperative that they choose an Education Secretary who is up to redirecting the Department’s emphasis back toward K-12 public education. There is no better candidate than Dr. Linda Darling Hammond.