One has to wonder why Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is so committed to trolling and provoking parents on Twitter. This kind of behavior is sadly to be expected from teachers union leaders, but one would think the head of the Education Department might at least pretend to care that the Democratic Party — his party — just watched a 21-point lead on the issue of education evaporate right before their eyes.

Rather than reflect on why that might be, Cardona can’t stop adding fuel to the fire.

It was bad enough when he coordinated with the National School Boards Association to target parents as potential domestic terrorists for finally showing up to the school board meetings that educrats had long bemoaned for their sparse attendance.

It got worse when he dissolved his own parent and family engagement council the moment he learned that federal law required that he include parents with different opinions than his and the administration he represents. The law did not require that he remove the partisan loyalists he had chosen, but it did require that he expand it to include parent groups that differed with him on issues such as school closures, mask mandates, school choice, and K-12 lessons that divide students by race and teach young children that their sex was "assigned at birth." Instead of simply welcoming a variety of voices to represent the cross-section of parents he is supposed to serve, he took his ball and went home to the comfort of groupthink and partisan politics.

And now he keeps poking the bear with banal platitudes that are completely contradicted by his actions.

"Parents, I’m on your side,” he tweeted on July 23. This is laughable, considering the laundry list of anti-parent actions taken by Cardona’s Education Department is longer than a CVS receipt.

Is he on our side, for example, when he supports school policies written with the deliberate intent of deceiving parents about their own children? Because policies that instruct teachers to hide information about a student’s gender, name, and pronouns from their families seem about as anti-parent as one could get.

About a week later, Cardona sent out another whopper : “Every parent has the right to know that their child attends a school where they feel welcome.”

That sounds nice until one realizes there are countless parents whose children will never feel welcome because they refuse to bow the knee to Cardona’s approved orthodoxy. Students with conservative or even classically liberal views? Not welcome. Students of devout religious faith, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish? Not welcome. Students who are not comfortable with hypersexual material and gender ideology as part of a mandatory curriculum? Not welcome. Students who don’t want to be asked about their pronouns by their teachers? Not welcome. Female athletes who do not believe that biological men should be permitted to compete on girls’ interscholastic teams? Not welcome. Anyone who does not believe that they should be forced to accept students and staff of the opposite sex in their restrooms, locker rooms, and sleeping quarters? Not welcome.

Miguel Cardona and, by extension, the rest of the Biden administration, has made it clear that their version of “inclusion” actually excludes anyone who doesn’t subscribe to a leftist worldview. In recent conversations with high school students, they describe a culture of “forced celebration.” One high school sophomore told me, “It’s bad enough that I don’t agree with them; now they think I’m showing hate if I don’t celebrate their causes. I’m fine with whatever people want to do but don’t make me celebrate things I don’t agree with.”

We just watched decades of academic progress evaporate before our eyes, in large part due to Cardona’s willingness to support catastrophic policies in response to COVID. He and his team fell down hard on the job of educating children, and the achievement data prove it. His time would be much better spent on getting back to the basics of educating America’s children instead of taunting frustrated and concerned parents online.

Erika Sanzi is the director of outreach at Parents Defending Education.