An Open Letter from Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on MLK Day

Just about every January, we have an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to advancing equality, as we honor the daily life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Education and learning is just one of the greatest levers to advance equality and empowerment. Which is since with excellent educators, large expectations, and an fantastic, equitable instruction, all learners, of all backgrounds, can do all issues they established out to accomplish.

Supplying all pupils access to an training that assists them get to their probable is 1 of the biggest civil rights difficulties of our time.

Each individual of our small children has limitless potential and exceptional value. Each day, we should combat for them and their futures. And each of us concerned in that work is portion of the civil rights movement that Dr. King led.

I’m humbled to be in that motion with you.

And I’m happy that due to the fact the President’s initially working day in office environment, the Biden-Harris administration has been battling to dismantle disparities in our community policies, establishments, and communities that consider us even further from what our region stands for: prospect for all. 

In our to start with two years, we’ve safely reopened our community educational institutions and taken significant methods to handle what I phone “the ABCs of the educating profession”—agency, much better functioning ailments, and aggressive salaries for our educators. 

We’re offering crucial advancements in infrastructure and faculty protection. We canceled $48 billion in scholar personal debt for 1.9 million debtors, together with public servants, People in america with disabilities, and pupils cheated by schools that promised them a superior life, but unsuccessful to produce. We announced and proceed to fight for historic college student credit card debt reduction for 40 million minimal-and-center-income folks. In addition to offering funding and contacting for reimagined psychological health supports in our educational institutions, we have introduced bold new community-personal initiatives for recruiting and teaching new tutors and mentors to assistance our college students really feel seen and supported, and for erasing inequities in access to afterschool and summer time understanding courses.

And we’re deliberately partnering with other federal businesses to reimagine high university, so students have much more pathways to get paid sector qualifications and university credits, and graduate improved geared up for careers and larger education and learning.

Throughout this system, we have proudly and unapologetically stood up for learners whose rights to an training no cost from discrimination have been beneath attack. Our faculties are sites of inclusion and respecting the variations that make all our learners special. That is what can make us special that’s what will make us American. 

With the President’s leadership and historic aid from the American Rescue Prepare and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, we have much more funding to do additional in education and learning than at any time right before. These investments and efforts are a down payment on transformational alter. 

We have a likelihood to be the generation that actually transforms our education and learning procedure into one particular that helps make Dr. King’s desire a actuality … by performing alongside one another and by recognizing that all of us are linked. 

In a 1968 speech Dr. King reported, “[W]e are all caught in an inescapable community of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Regardless of what impacts one immediately, influences all indirectly. … I can by no means be what I ought to be till you are what you should to be. And you can never ever be what you ought to be until eventually I am what I should to be. …”

When we provide our children—regardless of track record or circumstance—with a superior-good quality, wealthy education and learning, we empower them to be what they can be.

So, particularly nowadays and in the times forward, let us follow Dr. King’s instance of management and services, getting ways to give a hand up to other folks and make a big difference in our communities.

Collectively, let us work more difficult than ever to increase the bar for learners of all ages and backgrounds … to reimagine training … and to bring the transformative alter that this minute involves and that our college students and households deserve.