Student loan debt and the campus sexual assault debate were two of the higher-education-related items on the agenda during the Senate education committee hearing on President Barack Obama’s nominee for secretary of education on Thursday afternoon.
Obama nominated Dr. John King, former education commissioner of New York state, to lead the education department in early February. King joined the education department in January 2015 and has served as Acting Secretary of Education since the departure of former Education Secretary Arne Duncan in December 2015.
At the hearing, King spoke of the transformational effects of education on his own life. His parents, both educators, passed away when King was still young. King described school as a “refuge” in the midst of difficult times. He said that two teachers helped guide him through it all. “If not for them, I could not have survived that turbulent period, and I certainly wouldn’t be sitting before you today,” he said in prepared remarks.
Although there is less than a year left in Obama’s term, King’s nomination comes at a particularly crucial time in the education sphere with the drafting and enactment of new legislation on elementary, secondary and postsecondary education.
“We need an Education Secretary who is confirmed and accountable to Congress while we’re implementing a law that may govern elementary and secondary education for some time,” said Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. “I want to be sure that we are working together to implement the law as Congress wrote it.”
“We all know that a law is not worth the paper it is printed on unless it is implemented the way Congress wrote it,” Alexander added.
While much of King’s career has been in the K-12 arena, certain high-profile higher education issues received attention at the hearing. Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called campus sexual assault and violence a “growing national crisis” and referenced the oft-cited statistic that one in five women are assaulted at colleges and universities.
