Miguel Cardona was sworn in on Tuesday as the Biden administration’s secretary of Education, taking over an agency at the center of the debate over reopening schools after enduring four years of controversy under former Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Cardona, who was confirmed by the Senate in a bipartisan 66-33 vote, is a former public school teacher who most recently served as Connecticut's education commissioner.

Education advocates believe his experience with public schools will be critical to rebuilding trust in the department among teachers and families and will allow the focus to return to education policy rather than the politics that dominated DeVos’s tenure.

“Fundamentally, I think they are replacing a secretary who had contempt for the mission of the department with somebody who believes in it,” said Jonathan Schorr, a partner at Be Clear Communications who previously served as communications director at the department during the Obama administration.

President Biden stressed when he nominated Cardona for the role that it was important to have an educator leading the department, something critics of DeVos had repeatedly criticized during her tenure.

DeVos was a GOP donor who had long advocated for charter schools and school voucher programs. Her confirmation required former Vice President Pence to cast a tie-breaking vote in her favor.

While in office, DeVos largely unwound Obama-era policies that provided additional civil rights protections to students and protected them from for for-profit colleges. She aggressively pushed school choice and rarely advocated for public education. The final year of her tenure was marked by the shuttering of schools during the pandemic and the Trump administration’s subsequent effort to resume in-person learning.

“The agenda that DeVos brought was less a vision than a program to undo what Obama had put in place,” Schorr said. “And you see a department that has really been decimated by four years of that.”