Highlights from Arne Duncan's Twitter Town Hall
During a 30-plus-minute, rapid-fire Q & A between Arne Duncan and moderator John Merrow, we learned that 10 days of testing is too much, merit pay for teachers should be voluntary, and the U.S. Secretary of Education is a Twitter "novice."
For Duncan's first-ever Twitter town hall, thousands of folks sent questions to the EdSec using the #askarne hashtag, and many were outright "hostile," Merrow said. But PBS' education correspondent and the president of Learning Matters managed to get in more than a dozen substantive questions about testing, cheating, teacher merit-pay and charter schools.
Here are highlights from the town hall:
• Duncan is a Twitter "novice" who doesn't follow a single teacher. (Uh oh, will he be updating his "follows" list?)
• Duncan says "every single governor" has said we need NCLB waivers. Even Texas Gov. Rick Perry has expressed interest, @edpresssec later confirmed.
• As for NCLB waivers given in exchange for adopting Duncan's reforms, the
