The next education secretary: Polarizing, powered by personal story
The nation’s next education secretary is a man driven by what might have been had he not found refuge in public schools.
John B. King Jr.’s mother died of a heart attack when he was 8, and then his father descended into Alzheimer’s disease, leaving King an orphan at age 12. He moved around a lot, staying with relatives. School became the safest, most stable and most nurturing place he knew.
“New York City public school teachers are the reason that I am alive,” King said at the White House this month, after President Obama announced that he would succeed Education Secretary Arne Duncan at the end of this year. “Those teachers created amazing educational experiences, but also gave me hope — hope about what is possible, what could be possible for me in life.”
Quiet and mild-mannered, King is nevertheless one of the most polarizing figures in K-12 education. In choosing him, Obama — whose education policies have sparked backlash from a strange-bedfellows alliance of tea party conservatives and teachers unions — is choosing continuity.
As New York state schools chief from 2011 to 2014, King clashed with parents and teachers over his efforts to implement the same policies — including new teacher evaluations and new Common Core standards and tests — that the Obama administration has pushed hard nationwide.
John King and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan attend an awards ceremony at Patterson Elementary School in Washington. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post)Obama does not plan to formally nominate King as education secretary, avoiding a potential confirmation fight with the Senate’s GOP majority. Instead, King will serve as acting secretary for the final year of the president’s term.
A spokeswoman declined to make King available for an interview about his record and his plans for the department, but after an event at a D.C. school last week, he told reporters that his top priority is “moving forward with the ambitious agenda that Arne and the president have laid out,” from expanding preschool offerings to boosting the number of students who are getting into and through college.
King, 40, has built his career on the conviction that all children should have access to the kind of schools, and the kind of teachers, that he credits with The next education secretary: Polarizing, powered by personal story - The Washington Post: