Education Secretary Arne Duncan To Step Down
After nearly seven years in office, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will step down in December. The former head of Chicago Public Schools came to Washington back in 2009 with his friend — a newly-elected President Obama.
Duncan's tenure was remarkable for two reasons:
First, he got a lot done. A lot. The list is long, so, for the purposes of this short post, let's focus on perhaps the biggest thing he did, which was also one of the first things he did. In the summer of 2009, Duncan made this grand pronouncement:
"For states, for district leaders, for unions, for businesses and for nonprofits, the Race to the Top is the equivalent of education reform's moonshot."
RTTT was a giant pot of stimulus money — more than four billion dollars' worth — offered to beleaguered states soon after the Great Recession. Duncan used it to entice them to make sometimes-controversial changes in the classroom. At the top of that list: adopting new, common standards and evaluating teachers.
Rick Hess is director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and he says it was clear from the start that Duncan wanted to use his bully pulpit to push some big ideas.
"Duncan's biggest legacy is that he dramatically increased the role of the U.S. Department of Education in the nation's schools," Hess says.
When states clamored for relief from the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind law, Duncan was there, offering waivers — again, in return for implementing his big ideas.
Arne Duncan was also a champion of charter schools and a believer in the power of testing to reveal inequality in America's classrooms. At the higher ed level, he oversaw an expansion of Pell Grants, cut banks out of the federal student loan business, and cracked down on for-profit colleges.
The other remarkable thing about Duncan's tenure isn't one of those ideas but how he fought for them all. Hess says Duncan wasn't afraid to butt heads, even if it meant making enemies out of Republicans and traditional allies alike.
"He tackled issues that are difficult for a Democrat — especially a Chicago Democrat to tackle," Hess says.
Duncan's support for testing and teacher evaluation systems infuriated the nation's teachers' unions, which repeatedly called for him to step down.
Why is he leaving now? In a word: family. Duncan told staffers in an e-mail that he wants to return to Chicago to be with his wife and two kids.
This afternoon, the President tapped Duncan's deputy, John King Junior, to succeed him as Secretary. King is former education commissioner for New York state. There, on a smaller stage, he fought many of the same, bruising battles that Duncan did.
The Education Secretary's Greatest Hits
It's been decades since an education secretary had as high a national political profile as the long-serving Arne Duncan, who famously accompanied President Obama from Chicago and even more famously likes to shoot hoops with the president.
Supporters note that Duncan has advocated passionately for narrowing the opportunity and achievement gaps in American's public schools, ending the "school to prison pipeline" and boosting pay for teachers who serve in high-poverty schools.
He has spoken eloquently about the inequities in the system of funding of the nation's schools based on property taxes. As Duncan put it this week at the National Press Club:
"In far too many places the children of the wealthy get dramatically more spent on them than the children of the poor."
But the former pro ball player (in Australia) has also presided over one of the most contentious, partisan periods in education policy of the last several decades, and critics say his own personality has never placed him far above the fray.
"Some of Duncan's battles he can wear proudly because he was fighting hard fights," says Rick Hess of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, "But some I think were the product of his own tendency to dismiss those who had good faith disagreements."
Here's a look at some of Duncan's wins, scores and losses over the past seven years.
K-12
Digging In On High-Stakes Testing
The push for standardized tests predated Duncan. President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind back in 2002, creating a system of federal consequences for states, districts and schools whose students failed to make "adequate yearly progress" on annual tests. The law stated that all students everywhere must score "proficient" by 2014.
Duncan's Race To The Top initiative in 2009 provided incentives to states for tying test scores to teacher evaluations, further raising the stakes on high-stakes tests in a way that was destined to offend teachers' unions.
At the same time, beginning in 2011, with the No Child law well overdue for reauthorization, the administration began granting individual waivers to states to provide flexibility on testing targets that were proving impossible to reach.
High-stakes testing coincided with modest gains on math scores, and relative gains by some minority groups. In combination with the Common Core, testing has also become a focal point of teacher and parent protests nationwide, with some students, notably in New York State, "opting out."
Duncan called the law "tired" and "prescriptive" and stated in 2014 that testing issues were "sucking the oxygen out of the room" in schools.
But he defended annual testing, even as some critics were blaming tests for a wide range of unintended consequences, ranging from narrowing of the curriculum to the en masse closure of urban neighborhood schools to cheating scandals as seen in Atlanta.
The law is now (finally) up for reauthorization and both the House and Senate versions of the bill keep the annual testing requirements in place.
"White Suburban Moms" And The Common Core
Race To The Top, signed into law as part of the federal stimulus package after the 2008 financial crash, was structured cleverly as a competitive grant.
States got points for, among other things, adopting new, higher academic standards. In this way, Duncan and Obama were able to push 45 states initially to adopt what became the Common Core State Standards — before they were even written and without making them an explicit federal policy.
But despite initial bipartisanship, Duncan's advocacy of the Common Core crashed into Washington's current atmosphere of bitter partisanship and the long-standing distrust of a strong federal role in local education.
One of several anti-Duncan Facebook groups popped up: MAD, Mothers Against Duncan. And Duncan was sometimes his own worst enemy, PR-wise.
He famously said that opposition to Common Core and mastering standards in core areas of reading and math had become "a rallying cry for fringe groups."
At an otherwise sleepy state school superintendents meeting in 2013, Duncan suggested that opposition to the new reading and math guidelines was mostly from white mothers whose kids are facing tougher standards and tougher tests.
"And it's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from sort of white suburban moms," Duncan said, "who, all of a sudden, their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, their schools aren't quite as good as they thought they were. And that's pretty scary." The sound bite now appears on Duncan's Wikipedia page.
Duncan apologized for his "clumsy" remarks, but for some it underscored what they saw as Washington's dismissive, arrogant approach to critics of the state standards.
Opponents, including Republican presidential hopefuls, began referring to the Common Core as "Obamacore" in a fledgling effort to link the standards debate with the fight over the president's controversial health-care legislation.
That was the moment, "when I knew that the debate was shifting into the larger context in Washington that was all about seeking partisan advantage," says Stanford University professor Thomas Dee, who heads the school's Center for Education Policy Analysis.
The charged rhetoric often drowned out teachers' legitimate concerns about how to put Common Core into action inside the classroom, Dee says. "It is such a heavy lift to ask the nation's teachers to reinvent their teaching practices around these standards."
The ongoing debate over the standards, in many ways, shows the limitations of the federal role reform in America's highly decentralized education system.
Teacher Evaluations
The nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association, called on Duncan to resign in 2014, charging that he had undermined educators by linking teacher evaluations and school ratings to student test scores.
States that received federal waivers for No Child Left Behind provisions had to include teacher evaluations as part of the deal. Duncan had access to some federal stimulus money that he shifted to school district consortia to expand performance-based evaluations. Did it help improve learning and teaching? The results, so far, are a mixed bag.
Research by Stanford's Thomas Dee suggests that one place it is working is in the Washington, D.C., public schools. "Their teacher-evaluation system has helped drive an entire district turnaround," he argues.
But some districts cashed the federal check and made largely cosmetic changes. Many districts had to return millions in federal funds for not meeting the requirement that they get union buy-in for teacher evaluations.
"I'm not sure Duncan could have done much more on this than he did from his perch," he says. Bottom line for Dee: "Arne has been one of the most influential secretarys in Education Secretary Arne Duncan To Step Down : NPR Ed : NPR:
