We asked experts to grade Biden’s job on education. They gave it a C average

The Biden-era U.S. Education Department, under Secretary Miguel Cardona, endured more than its fair share of crises over the past four years.

Some were beyond the department’s control (COVID-19), while others were the result of its own decisions (the troubled rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA).

How well did the department handle those challenges?

NPR spoke with more than a dozen educators, researchers, advocates and policy experts, including two former U.S. secretaries of education, to find out how they would grade Biden’s Education Department.

The results varied depending on the politics of the evaluator, with conservatives being harsher in their assessments. But there was some agreement: for example, that Biden’s greatest success was in guiding schools out of the COVID-19 era. Most observers also agreed that, when it comes to education overall, Biden will most likely be remembered for a pair of high-profile failures: the FAFSA rollout and his unkept promise to provide broad student loan forgiveness.

The grades: No A’s, two F’s and a lot of in-between

Of the 14 experts NPR consulted for this wholly unscientific poll, the Biden administration got no A’s, a bunch of B’s, two hedgie B-/C+’s, two C’s, two D’s, two F’s and one “incomplete” for work left unfinished.

That averages out to be… pretty average, a C.

President Barack Obama’s last education secretary, John B. King Jr., gave Cardona and his team one of those B’s, “with still much to be determined because there are a number of things that are still being litigated [in the courts].” (More on that later.)

The “incomplete” came from Margaret Spellings, a former education secretary under President George W. Bush. “There’ve been some real misses, but also some room for praise.“

“I want to give them a C,” says Denise Forte, who runs the liberal-leaning Education Trust, though she makes clear, it’s not a C+.

The two most conservative experts on our panel were scathing.

“An F,” says Lindsey Burke, of the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. “There is just very little, if anything, you can point to in terms of success.”

“It’s hard for me to think how it could have gone worse,” says Rick Hess at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI), who likewise gives Biden an F.

Let’s start with the issue that most of our experts thought Biden handled well.

Helping schools through the COVID-19 pandemic

When Biden was inaugurated, in January 2021, only about a third of K-12 students had returned to full, in-classroom instruction after widespread pandemic closures, according to Burbio, an organization that tracked pandemic-era schooling.

The nation’s schools were nearly a year into COVID’s unprecedented disruptions, and Congress, under President Donald Trump, had already voted to send them nearly $70 billion in relief to help districts reopen safely.

Just weeks after taking office, Biden pushed lawmakers to send even more money to schools, saying reopening “can only be achieved if Congress provides states and communities with the resources they need to get it done safely.”

On March 11, 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act, sending schools another $122 billion and focusing it specifically in lower-income communities. This move offered a lifeline to many schools, and Congress included a requirement that local districts set aside at least 20% of their funding to pay for services to address pandemic-related learning loss.

“It was done efficiently. I think they rightly put a focus on learning loss and afterschool programs and intensive tutoring and those sorts of things that we know help students catch up,” says Spellings.

For King, the key to success wasn’t just those ARP dollars. “Secretary Cardona came in with the task of trying to make sure that kids got back in school and that educators could be hopeful again. And he was, in some ways, the exact right person.”

At the time, the debate over the return to school had become bitterly political, with then-President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos pushinghard for schools to reopen, while teachers unions remained skeptical and, in some places, fiercely resistant.

King says Cardona, as a Democrat, former teacher and school administrator, used his credibility “to rally people around the return to school. … I think that was a great service to the country.”

Biden’s student loan accomplishments

The Biden education team’s other notable success may surprise you.

“Ironically, one of their successes,” says Karen McCarthy with the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), “is in the area of loan forgiveness. And I feel like, to a lot of other people, they see loan forgiveness as one of [Biden’s] failures.”

McCarthy is one of several experts in our poll to highlight that Biden pursued two different strategies to achieve federal student loan forgiveness: an ambitious, high-profile strategy that failed (more on that in a minute) and a lower-profile, bureaucratic strategy that succeeded.

The strategy that worked was to focus on improving pre-existing forgiveness programs that Congress had already created, including one for borrowers who work a decade in public service and another that promised relief for borrowers with a severe disability.

When Biden was elected, both programs were difficult to navigate, with thousands of qualified borrowers left on the outside looking in because of technicalities and mismanagement by loan servicers and the Education Department itself.

Cardona and his team expanded the rules of Public Service Loan Forgiveness, streamlined the “Total and Permanent Disability Discharge” program, expanded forgiveness for borrowers who had been defrauded by their colleges and even provided forgiveness to thousands of borrowers who had been hurt or held back by problems with income-driven repayment.

Even the conservatives in our poll conceded that, while they didn’t support these forgiveness efforts, the changes were arguably within the president’s power – certainly compared to Biden’s other, larger loan forgiveness efforts.

On its way out this week, the Biden administration announced that it has approved roughly $180 billion in debt relief for more than 5 million borrowers – “there is no comparison with any other administration,” Cardona told NPR in an exit interview.

“One in eight people with student loan debt have had it relieved. One in eight,” Cardona said.

The problem for Biden and his education legacy is that he had promised to do far more.

The student loan forgiveness failures 

“The student loan forgiveness stuff has been a mess,” says former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings when asked about Biden’s sweeping efforts to provide at least some forgiveness to most borrowers.

There was the first, big plan, to erase $10,000 to $20,000 in debt for most borrowers. That one was nixed by a Supreme Court that chided Biden for executive overreach.

Biden’s Plan B, which would have helped a smaller pool of borrowers, was also challenged in court and, last month, abandoned by the administration.

And then there’s Biden’s loan repayment plan, known as the SAVE plan. It was so forgiving, it rivaled the price tag of his original forgiveness pitch, though SAVE is also now frozen in the courts, again over fears of executive overreach. If it’s not scuttled by a judge’s order, it will likely be shelved by the Republican-held Congress or the new Trump administration.

The Biden administration spent an enormous amount of time, money and human capital creating these three loan forgiveness schemes, attempting to implement them and then defending their legality in court. And for their considerable efforts, they went 0 for 3. Whether you see that as a failure of Biden’s team likely depends on your politics.

Forte, at EdTrust, argues “it was the right thing to focus on.” After all, she says, “the amount of debt that students are carrying, particularly students of color, students from low-income communities, is preventing them from reaching the American dream that everybody deserves.”

On the other hand, Lindsey Burke, who wrote the education platform for Project 2025, says Biden’s most ambitious efforts were legally dubious and “have been slapped down by the courts. So that’s a failure. It should have never happened. Student loan cancellation is bad policy, but it’s a failure in terms of the Biden administration’s ability to advance its agenda.”

In that failure, former Education Secretary John B. King Jr. sees an important lesson for future administrations, who “are going to have to spend a lot more time thinking through, ‘Where can we legislate [with Congress] rather than assuming that executive action is going to survive legal challenge?’ “

In his last week on the job, Cardona insisted to NPR that he believed he had the legal authority to forgive student loans on a grand scale, even if the courts ultimately disagreed.

“I’d rather fight to do as much as possible and get shot down than not fight at all,” Cardona said.

The problem with these high-profile loan forgiveness fights is that they required enormous amounts of time, money and expertise and, according to many on our expert panel, arguably hampered the Education Department’s ability to do other things.

Two years ago, NPR reported that the White House’s unwillingness to limit its loan forgiveness efforts led to a political impasse over funding the office of Federal Student Aid.

The result: The office tasked with managing the return to student loan repayment after a long pandemic pause, as well as the rollout of an overhauled FAFSA, was flat-funded for 2023.

That flat-funding no doubt contributed to the Biden education team’s subsequent struggles.

Experts agree: FAFSA was the greatest failure

More than 17 million current and aspiring college students fill out the FAFSA each year in order to qualify for student loans, grants and more. For many, the form is nothing short of a bridge between students’ hopes and dreams, and college. In late 2023, that FAFSA bridge collapsed.

The short version of this story is that, in 2020, Congress voted to make the FAFSA easier to complete, but that required the U.S. Department of Education to overhaul the online form – and the launch of that new form did not go well.

“My gosh, that was so bad,” says McCarthy, whose group, NASFAA, represents college financial aid administrators. “The FAFSA is normally up by October, and really nobody could start filling it out until January.”

There wasn’t just one problem with the rollout – there were many. (The nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office has outlined them in detail.)

McCarthy says those problems resulted in the department taking months longer than usual to send students’ financial aid information on to schools. “It really is quite amazing that students got aid packages and enrolled in the fall.”

Nearly everyone NPR spoke with about President Biden’s Education Department said the FAFSA was its greatest failure and most think it will likely define Biden’s education legacy.

To Spellings, a former Republican education secretary, the FAFSA debacle was “a huge miss and has residual consequences, now and into the future. It was really a big fail.”

King, a former Democratic education secretary, agrees, saying “the FAFSA debacle, and that’s what we have to call it, set us back.”

Those who previously ran or worked at the Education Department, including Spellings, King and Denise Forte, now with EdTrust, all expressed some sympathy for department staff and the technological challenges the FAFSA overhaul presented.

“I’m not going to disparage the folks that are over at the department. I worked at the Department of Education. Career folks are amazing,” Forte says. “[FAFSA] was a huge, huge undertaking.”

But like everyone we spoke with, Forte says the department should have done better. “All you had to do was look at Healthcare.gov and know that we should have been dotting i’s and crossing t’s on this rollout. And that unfortunately didn’t happen.”

In his exit interview with NPR, Cardona acknowledged “delays and errors” were “frustrating for students and families,” but he was also defiant, insisting that the task of revamping the FAFSA was Herculean and the struggles should not define Biden’s legacy.

“More students every year will have access to federal dollars… because of the work that happened during the Biden administration. And it meant we took some bruises and we learned the hard way on certain things. But the system is better now for the next generation because of the work that we did.”

The latest FAFSA launched smoothly late last year, and Cardona says the department has already processed 4 million applications.

The slide in student achievement under Biden

In spite of the flood of federal dollars schools received through the American Rescue Plan, the pandemic triggered an alarming slide in K-12 student achievement.

Many of the experts who spoke with NPR worry that the funding law’s 20% requirement around learning loss was too low, that the money didn’t buy as much learning as it could have. And they worry that the nation’s schools aren’t likely to see so much funding again anytime soon.

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, the average reading score for 13-year-olds in 2023 fell, compared to 2020 – to its lowest point in 50 years.

Math scores for 9- and 13-year-olds have both fallen considerably since 2020.

There was some hope, in the early days of the pandemic recovery, that those $190 billion in extra federal funding would help schools pay for interventions that could make up for learning missed during the pandemic and maybe even reverse this slide in achievement.

That did not happen.

Research shows the money did help students catch up, somewhat. But learning gaps remain.

“I mean, this will be with these students for years to come. It will affect a generation of kids,” says Heritage’s Lindsey Burke.

Hess was one of several experts who said he would have liked to have seen Cardona and his team bring more attention to these declines, even if it’s uncomfortable. “I mean, if Cardona or Biden spent any time talking about academic achievement, I think I missed it.“

Nearly everyone we spoke with believes these achievement declines need more attention.

“We need to get reading and math focused on, attended to, make folks accountable for it and get back to basics,” Spellings says.

Forte agrees. “Because the pendulum has swung the wrong way in many places.”

“I’ll never be satisfied with the growth,” Cardona told NPR this week, “because I know the potential in our country. But I am proud of the work that our educators have done, and I know that we’re moving in the right direction.”

In the end, the Biden education team inherited two crises (pandemic school closures and sliding student achievement) and created another (FAFSA).

They erased the federal student loan debts of more than five million borrowers, but many more will remember not getting the loan forgiveness Biden promised in August 2022. Whether they blame that failure on his education team or on Republican opponents who used the courts to torpedo Biden’s biggest plans, only time will tell.