How Arne Duncan Lost The Common Core And His Legacy
Arne Duncan could barely conceal a smirk as he answered the Republican congressman’s question about educational standards that his Education Department had encouraged states to adopt.
“Facts matter,” Duncan, the secretary of education, said, dismissing concerns raised by Rep. Matt Salmon of Arizona that the Common Core standards amounted to a “federal takeover of curriculum.”
“It is not a black helicopter ploy,” Duncan said. “We’re not trying to get inside people’s minds and brains.”
The scene, from a May 2013 budget presentation, would seem unfamiliar now. Duncan is weeks away from leaving his post and surrendering much of his education policy reform agenda. When he announced his impending departure in October, a professor writing for the Brookings Institution quipped that he had become a “bipartisan institution — he attracted vitriol from the right and the left.”
On Thursday, President Obama is expected to sign the first new comprehensive education bill since President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law — a bill that will undo many of Duncan’s signature policy changes and scale back the role that the Education Department plays in overseeing schools. It will specifically prevent the secretary of education from attempting to “influence, incentivize or coerce” states to adopt standards such as the Common Core.
But in that budget meeting just two years ago, Duncan had reason to be dismissive of Salmon’s concerns. His department had offered incentives over the first five years of Obama’s presidency that convinced nearly every state to pledge adoption of the administration’s preferred policy changes. First, 18 states and Washington, D.C., won grants from the $4 billion Race to the Top program for promising to adopt the policy changes. Then, nearly all states applied for a waiver allowing them to duck penalties for missing some of the achievement targets of No Child Left Behind in exchange for signing up.
Those changes included pegging teacher evaluations to student performance on standardized tests and adopting “college and career-ready standards.” And while the department didn’t specify any particular set of standards, nearly every state said it would meet that goal by adopting the Common Core, a set of educational benchmarks in English and math that had been jointly developed a few years earlier by governors and state education chiefs across the country.
At that point, both Duncan and the standards shared broad bipartisan support. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had suggested months before that Duncan’s ability to successfully negotiate with labor unions and drive education policy change made him the columnist’s choice to replace the outgoing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.
The Common Core standards, meanwhile, enjoyed rare approval from both teachers unions and so-called “education reformers,” most notably former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, perhaps thanks to the millions spent by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to get both sides on board. By the end of 2013, 45 How Arne Duncan Lost The Common Core And His Legacy | FiveThirtyEight:
