Arne Duncan's Wars
With drive, ingenuity and a willingness to throw elbows, Obama’s closest friend in the Cabinet has tried to reshape American schools. Now will the backlash erase his legacy?
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is a mild-mannered, even-tempered, introverted kind of guy, but he’s spent much of his six and a half years in Washington in combat. He’s fought with school choice activists, student debt activists, gun activists, for-profit colleges, black colleges, traditional colleges, private lenders, loan collectors, the Tea Party, the Republican Party, and the teachers unions at the heart of the Democratic Party, among other interest groups. He’s in a multi-front war to fix America’s schools, and I recently sat down to delve into some of the wonkier details with Ted Mitchell, a former college president and education venture fund CEO who is now Duncan’s undersecretary. Mitchell spent a half hour patiently explaining to me the philosophy behind the Education Department’s fights—basically, making sure that all kids get a chance to succeed; that schools are accessible, accountable, and effective; and that adults who don’t do their part face consequences—until someone knocked on his door to say our time was up.
Then he started crying.
We had never met before, but Mitchell clearly had something personal he wanted to share, and my dull policy questions hadn’t given him much of an opening. His voice quivered as it finally spilled out: “I can’t let you leave without telling you what a privilege it has been to work with Arne.” He started to add something about fighting for students, but choked up mid-sentence. His press aide started crying, too. It sounds hokey, but I’ve never had an interview take such an abruptly emotional turn.
Education policy clearly inspires a lot of passion. It’s not just about cleverly named initiatives like Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, or arcane regulations defining “gainful employment” and “adequate yearly progress.” It’s about kids and their futures. You can see the intensity in the comments on Duncan’s Facebook page, spewing rage over the Common Core math and reading standards or the national epidemic of standardized testing. Duncan’s loyalists are just as intense, inevitably gushing about Duncan’s constant mantra in policy meetings: What’s the right thing for kids? “Everyone says that,” said Justin Hamilton, a former communications aide to Duncan. “Arne f---ing means it!”
In a cynical town of posturing and spin, Duncan has earned a reputation for saying what he means and doing what he says. At the same time, he has faced growing dissatisfaction with what he has said and what he has done. Duncan has driven far more change than any previous education secretary, but as he heads into the home stretch of the Obama administration, much of that legacy is at risk.
Duncan has used his perch at the smallest Cabinet agency—and his tight relationship with President Barack Obama, his pickup basketball pal from Chicago—to put an unprecedented national stamp on a policy area with a long and strong tradition of local control. He’s helped make major inroads on K-12 reforms that unions despise, like using student test scores to evaluate teachers. He’s helped push big changes in higher education as well: a government takeover of student loans, a harsh crackdown on for-profit schools, a huge expansion of student aid. A department with only 4,200 employees, traditionally considered a kind of Washington backwater, has transformed the policy landscape for 100,000 schools and 5,000 colleges.
But Duncan has also helped unleash a huge backlash—against the Common Core standards, against over testing, against federal overreach in general. This fall, Congress plans to rewrite the main law overseeing public education, and activists on the left and the right have joined forces to try to roll back Washington’s power; the House and the Senate have both passed versions that would defang Duncan’s department, and the Senate vote was broadly bipartisan. Republican presidential candidates like Marco Rubio and Rand Paul have vowed to eliminate the department entirely, while Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie, governors who Arne Duncan's Wars:
