On Wednesday, January 15, President Joseph Biden gave his farewell address to the nation. In it he claimed success on a variety of policy matters and also warned of dangers that face the nation in coming years. The National Association of Scholars stands in circumspect silence towards this speech. We note that many observers expressed gratitude that Biden’s term in office was ending on the relatively benign note of self-congratulation.
We wish to note a few items that the President did not mention in his speech but which do stand as hallmarks of his presidency.
He said nothing about the re-weaponization of Title IX through the Department of Education. He was silent on myriad attempts to cancel debt from student loans. He took no credit at all for advancing transgender rights in education. He neglected to mention his decision immediately after his inauguration in January 2021 to cancel the “1776 Commission.” He failed to point to his stunning success in lowering student achievement in both math and reading. As competency levels plummeted in those areas, he followed through by sidelining efforts to promote “evidence-based reading instruction.”
These accomplishments would have been enough to ensure that his presidency would be remembered for its educational contributions, but there are more.
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It was on President Biden’s watch that the Department of Education (ED) released its new-fangled Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) that proved so dysfunctional that 325,000 first-time financial aid applicants dropped out. This may well have assisted colleges and universities eager to make more room for Chinese and other full-tuition-paying international students eager to pursue American education.
The COVID-based shutdown of schools began under Mr. Biden’s predecessor on March 15, 2020, but he recognized its value and extended it in various ways.
In New York, the public schools opened September 13, 2021, eighteen months after the shutdown began. The “learning loss” that accompanied the shutdowns is a legacy that many of the students will keep as a forever-souvenir. Of course, some percentage of young people will avoid that legacy due to their fatal reactions to mandated—and entirely unnecessary—vaccine shots.
The Biden administration recognized the hardship for colleges and universities that could not collect their usual tuition revenue during the shutdown. To remedy this, Biden disbursed some $75 billion—as of February 2023—in aid to higher education. A substantial portion of this was spent on anti-racist programs and the hiring of thousands of new “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) administrators. As that tide of excess funding receded, many colleges and universities are now laying off their DEI staff.
We should not forget President Biden’s Justice Department’s decision to classify parents who spoke out at school board meetings—mostly about transgenderism—as “domestic terrorists.” The FBI assisted in hauling these miscreants off to face the consequences of their deeds.
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President Biden has been a bulwark of support for the progressive establishment that rules American education. His years in office, however, have paralleled a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who no longer view colleges and universities in a positive light. Surely, it is good that these malcontents be forced into the open.
I am sure that I am missing some of Mr. Biden’s educational accomplishments. Some of those are personal. He pioneered retroactive grade inflation, as when he put himself in the top half of his Syracuse University law school class when he, in fact, graduated near the bottom—76th out of 85. He also awarded himself two additional undergraduate degrees from the University of Delaware, and did not win, as he claimed, the university political science award.
These are peccadillos in a career marked by Don Quixote-sized fabrications, and they take nothing from his real record of contributions to American education at all levels, from Kindergarten through graduate school.
In every case, his interventions will stand for generations as exemplars—of something.
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Photo of Joe Biden from Peoria, AZ, by Gage Skidmore on Wikimedia Commons
