Education Secretary Arne Duncan Assesses Legacy Programs
When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan steps down from his perch in December, he'll bring to a close a seven-year tenure during which he oversaw more change in the K-12 education space than anyone else who has held the post.
On Thursday, speaking at the Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, Duncan plans to reflect on his work thus far in conjunction with the department's release of two comprehensive assessments of its most significant programs, the Race to the Top competition and the School Improvement Grant.
Since being sworn into office in 2009, Duncan has collected a list of accolades, at least in part due to those two programs.
High school graduation rates are the highest they've even been, at 81 percent, and the number of students taking Advanced Placement exams has increased more than 17 percent since 2011. College enrollment rates for black and Hispanic students have also increased by more than a million since 2008.
In addition, the high school drop-out rate fell from 2008 to 2012 by 27 percent, from more than 1 million to just under 750,000. And the number of so-called drop-out factories plunged from more than 1,800 to roughly 1,000.
But Duncan isn't ready to call them a win, and he certainly isn't convinced the work is done.
The programs' success, Duncan will say, ultimately must be measured by their long-term impact on student learning.
"Because simultaneous change in multiple systems takes time, it is too early to make that determination of success now," Duncan wrote in the two reports. "However, many outcomes are trending in a positive direction."
Whether successful or not, a big driver of the education changes is the $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition, which was baked into the economic stimulus plan and became the Obama administration's signature competitive grant and the hallmark of Duncan's time in Washington.
Duncan argues throughout the report and in advance excerpts of his speech at the Dorchester school, that the administration played a small role in the major education changes that swept across the country over the last several years – a counter to oft-cited criticism, largely from Republicans, that the administration's penchant for competitive grants was an end-run around Congress that forced states to adopt its education agenda.
"Much of this nation has now put the building blocks in place for that kind of transformation — based not on a recipe from Washington, but on ideas and plans developed in states and communities," Ahead of Departure, Arne Duncan Reflects on Signature Education Programs - US News:
