Duncan Wields $100 Billion to Make U.s. Schools Like Chicagos
“It was absolutely formative,” Arne Duncan, 44, said of working with his mother. He learned that “kids from totally dysfunctional home situations, total poverty, can do extraordinarily well if we give them a chance.”
What he absorbed matters because Duncan is now U.S. education secretary, in charge of improving a public school system that ranks below those of other developed nations in some studies. Hes armed with $100 billion in stimulus money from his friend, President Barack Obama, more than twice the budget of any of his predecessors.
“We want to put unprecedented resources out there, but the tradeoff is unprecedented reform,” said Duncan, who ran Chicagos public schools before taking on the U.S. job in January. He said in an interview he wants to “fundamentally change the status quo” by raising academic standards, holding states and schools more accountable, and luring “the best and the brightest” into teaching.
Obama and Duncan stepped up their efforts on July 24, announcing plans to withhold $4.35 billion in grants from states that bar using student test scores to help set teacher pay.
Duncan also is pushing states to increase the number and quality of charter schools, and says he wants to go national with his most controversial Chicago initiative, “turnaround” programs for schools that consistently fail to meet minimal goals. In some cases, he replaced entire staffs.
Lying to Families
He has visited 23 states fielding suggestions for changing No Child Left Behind, the signature education effort of the George W. Bush administration. Duncan says the law has led many states, including Illinois, to “dumb down” tests so schools will meet the programs federal benchmarks.
States are “basically lying to children and families,” he said in the interview. He wants tougher, nationwide standards while giving states more flexibility in meeting them.
Duncans plans are triggering interest in his seven years as head of Chicago schools, the nations third-largest system. A report released in June by the Commercial Club of Chicago, a group of business and civic leaders, questioned the success claimed by him and Mayor Richard M. Daley.
While there has been “modest improvement” in elementary schools, the “performance of Chicagos high schools is abysmal,” according to the report, partially titled “Still Left Behind.”
Jury Still Out
“The jury is still out on his tenure in Chicago,” Michael Petrilli, vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education research group in Washington, said of Duncan. “But he did put in place a lot of important reforms that theres reason to believe are going to bear fruit over time.”
Among Duncans fans is Louis Gerstner, the former chief executive officer of International Business Machines Corp. who has worked to overhaul U.S. education and has discussed Duncans ideas with him.
“Now we have a secretary of education who may drive national transformation,” Gerstner said in an interview. Gerstner is co-author of a 1995 book on improving schools and chairman emeritus of Washington-based Achieve Inc., a nonprofit group pushing for higher academic standards.
Sue Duncan
Fourth graders in the U.S. rank 15th in international reading scores and 11th in math, according to the Amsterdam- based International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. Russia, Kazakhstan and Latvia were among the countries that outperformed the U.S. in one or both subjects.
The U.S. failure to match student performance in other countries is the economic equivalent of a “permanent national recession,” New York-based consulting firm McKinsey & Co. said in a report in April. Last years U.S. gross domestic product could have been as much as 16 percent higher if the achievement gap had been closed between 1983 and 1998, the study found.
Duncans efforts in Chicago, and now nationally, were set in motion at the Sue Duncan Childrens Center, started by his mother in 1961 in a poor community a few blocks from the more affluent Hyde Park neighborhood where the Duncans lived.