Arne Duncan's Legacy: Growing Influence of a Network of Private Actors on Public Education
Arne Duncan is leaving the US Department of Education in December. Reactions to his legacy have been mixed. Some see him as a heroic reformer, and others a well-intentioned but overreaching bureaucrat. He has been called the third secretary of education for George W Bush or the center of stormy education politics.
As researchers of education policy, we see him differently: the hub of a network of policy advocates. As the head of the federal Department of Education, he actively facilitated private actors' influence on public education policy.
Private actors and connections
From early 2009, Arne Duncan opened the federal agency's gates to a powerful network. He used the network, and was sometimes used by advocates for their own purposes.
Duncan was not just the cabinet secretary who played pickup basketball with the president. He was the head of the department with the highest number (five) of early political appointees who had personal connections to President Obama.
He was joined in 2009 by some of the most powerful members of a Democratic-leaning group of education reformers: among them were Deputy Secretary Jim Shelton, a former leader of education policy at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Joanne Weiss, the Chief Operating Officer at NewSchools Venture Fund who became Duncan's chief of staff. NewSchools Venture Fund is a venture philanthropy firm that sponsors the growth of charter school chains.
In 2009, both organizations were part of a growing network of advocates which Michigan State University political scientist Sarah Reckhow has called the Boardroom Progressives.
These reformers have largely consisted of private actors, including leaders of education nonprofits, charter school founders and other nontraditional school leaders whose essential resources for reform come from the private wealth of major foundations, an approach that Berkeley education professor Janelle Scott has termed"venture philanthropy."
Did those connections matter?
The network that swirled around Duncan gave him ideas that he promoted through the Obama stimulus, and also the skilled personnel to run those programs.
Members of Duncan's reform network were partly the genesis and potentially the beneficiary of a grant program, Race to the Top, that required applicants to expand opportunities for charter school creation, eliminate firewalls between student test scores and teacher evaluation, and commit to so-called "college and career-ready Arne Duncan's Legacy: Growing Influence of a Network of Private Actors on Public Education | The Conversation US: