By Stephanie Simon- POLITICO.com | http://bit.ly/1iX19ln
November 27, 2013 05:06 AM EST :: Arne Duncan brought the most ambitious reform agenda in years to the Department of Education — and a determination to use every lever of power to accomplish it.
The results were stunning: In barely a year, more than 100 state laws were passed to open public schools to competition and set tough new standards for students and teachers. Duncan won allies on the right and the left, becoming one of the few Cabinet members with bipartisan support.
But the agenda he began to advance in 2009 has now hit serious roadblocks, highlighting the limits of federal power over education. States are balking at reforms they pledged to implement in exchange for grants and waivers from federal law. An unprecedented $5 billion intervention in the nation’s worst schools has yielded incremental results, at best. A noisy opposition to Duncan’s reforms has emerged — and it only grew noisier this month when Duncan dissed “white suburban moms” for opposing the new Common Core academic standards because the tough tests made their kids look bad.
(WATCH: Arne Duncan sorry for 'white suburban moms' remark)
To top it off, there’s no clear evidence that Duncan’s prescriptions are boosting student achievement, though his backers say it’s still too early to tell.
Duncan still has plenty of ambition; he’s taking up several bold — and controversial — initiatives aimed at transforming higher education. Yet as his signature K-12 programs hit speed bumps, his legacy as a reformer is very much up in the air. Among the ways his reach has been limited:
— Duncan shrewdly dangled incentives to convince all but four states to adopt common academic standards meant to raise the bar for students. But he has no power to force states to adopt associated tests that the federal government has spent $350 million to develop. At least seven have dropped out and others are on the fence; analysts fear that without the tests as a common yardstick, states will be free to quietly lower the bar that Duncan has tried hard to raise.
(Also on POLITICO: Full education policy coverage)
— He successfully prodded states to start holding educators accountable for increasing student test scores in hopes of raising the caliber of the teaching corps. Yet Washington has no sway over how principals rate teachers on other factors — and in state after state, the new systems have yielded the same results as the old, with some 95 percent of teachers rated effective. Other states, meanwhile, haven’t even finished designing the new evaluation metrics or merit pay programs they promised Duncan.
— Even his latest campaign, a PR push to bring more elite college graduates into teaching, shows the inherent limitations on Duncan’s power. He has called for years for school districts to pay their best teachers six-figure salaries — yet he has no way to make that happen, and very few districts have adopted such lavish merit pay scales.
Duncan has been creative in exercising federal power. He dispensed billions in grants under the Race to the Top program and dished out exemptions, known as waivers, to the No Child Left Behind law to states that followed his prescriptions for reform.
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The goal, spokesman Stephen Spector said, was to push states to take “aggressive” steps that will raise student outcomes in the long run. He said much has been accomplished despite the limitations on the department’s authority — limitations that he termed appropriate, given that education has traditionally been a state and local responsibility.
Genial, earnest and very tall — he played professional basketball overseas — Duncan has been a highly visible member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet. He’s traveled to 48 states so far, holding town halls, talking with teachers and pressing governors of both parties to get serious about education. Aides say he never slows his pace.
Duncan has “gotten more done than any secretary in recent memory,” said Charles Barone, policy director of Democrats for Education Reform.
Critics, however, say his strategies have been shortsighted, even naive. States are backing away from promises they made to secure grants and waivers; just this month, Arkansas said it couldn’t stick to its timetable for improving student performance or raising the quality of its teaching force. In most cases, the secretary has little leverage to make states uphold their pledges. In a ritual that strikes even some bureaucrats as absurd, he has begun granting waivers to his own waivers.
“In 2009, Arne was the new sheriff in town, with big boxes of ammunition and a shiny new gun,” said Frederick Hess, an education analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Now, it’s later in the movie and he’s all out of bullets and he’s trying to scare states by shaking a stick at them.”
(PHOTOS: Obama’s second-term Cabinet)
States are rebelling in part because of a frustration with perceived micromanagement from Washington. Duncan has often said that he aims to be “tight on goals but loose on means,” but state officials have a hard time squaring that with his department’s prescriptive approach to reforms, such as its insistence that graduation rates count for 20 percent, rather than 15 percent, of high school ratings in Arizona.
“There’s been a mistrust of states wanting to do the right thing,” said Christopher Koch, the Illinois state superintendent. His is one of just a handful of states that has not received a waiver from the No Child Left Behind Act, in his case because Illinois law requires that tough new teacher evaluations be phased in a year slower than Duncan would like. “We’re a bit frustrated,” Koch said.
Spector, the Duncan spokesman, said the department “has worked hard and steadily to be a good partner with states and districts, offering them as much flexibility as possible to be creative and innovative.”
Indeed, this month, the department responded to states’ complaints about heavy-handed federal oversight by giving them more autonomy. But in a sign of the fraught politics of education, the move was promptly blasted by civil rights groups that fear Duncan is easing up too much and compromising gains for poor and minority students.
Perhaps the most volatile issue is the Common Core, which was initiated by states but which the Obama administration has avidly promoted. The academic standards, now rolling out in classrooms nationwide, have drawn fire from both the left and right. Duncan has described the opposition as silly, but he’s in a tough spot: The more he defends the standards, the more he adds fuel to criticism that the federal government is interfering with local decisions on education.
Duncan’s relationships in Congress also have grown testy. At first, Republicans loved his Race to the Top program, with its requirement that states compete for federal dollars, but many on the right now chafe at Duncan’s tendency to get things done by “executive fiat,” as Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) has said.
The criticism might be quieter if there were clear indications that Duncan’s aggressive approach on K-12 education was driving up student achievement.
But the signals are mixed.
Tennessee, which the administration heaped with praise and cash for adopting Duncan’s priorities early on, showed strong gains this year on the standardized tests widely regarded as the nation’s report card. But Delaware — the only other state to win the first round of Duncan’s Race to the Top competition — lost ground compared with the national average.
Kentucky, one of the first states to fully implement the Common Core, also slipped back. Duncan says Kentucky has improved on other metrics, like the percentage of students who are well-prepared for college.
Some of the jurisdictions that have been most aggressive about expanding charter schools — another key Duncan priority — did very well on the national test, especially Washington, D.C., and Florida. But others did not, most notably Louisiana, which has aggressively implemented the reforms Duncan has championed and has transformed New Orleans into a charter school showcase. (White suburban moms aside, perhaps the biggest gaffe of Duncan’s tenure was his 2010 pronouncement that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”)
Duncan takes pride in a steady increase in national graduation rates and a big jump in the percentage of African-American and Hispanic students attending college.
But his ambitious $5 billion investment in the worst public schools in the nation has yielded only modest gains, as the secretary himself acknowledged last week. The department set out four acceptable turnaround strategies and funded them in 1,500 schools; proficiency rates have actually declined in about a third of the schools and edged up only modestly in many of the rest.
“There’s never been a secretary of Education with this much power,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education history at New York University. “Is it good for kids? I would say — and I would underline this a million times — we have no idea.”
Many reform ideas have bipartisan support, Zimmerman said, but the politics have raced ahead of solid evidence in many cases.
Duncan’s allies push back hard against that interpretation. Some reforms will take time to bear fruit, they say, and others might not be implemented perfectly. But they give him enormous credit for jolting a sclerotic system with new ideas.
“It’s fascinating to watch a lot of armchair quarterbacking” about Duncan’s competitive grant and waiver programs, Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman said. “People never want to critique money that goes to prop up the status quo.”
While Duncan has been most visible in the world of K-12, he has also shaken up the world of higher education and is aiming to do much more.
Duncan helped the president beat back proposals by Republicans to slash Pell Grants for low-income college students; the number of students on Pell Grants has soared. He simplified the college financial aid form. And he expanded programs meant to ease the student debt burden, like income-based repayment plans for loans.
In one of his more ambitious efforts, Duncan tried to crack down on for-profit colleges that left many students deep in debt with no marketable skills. The courts blocked that regulation, known as “gainful employment,” so the department is now trying again, through a tortuously slow rule-writing process.
Duncan is also pressing a novel proposal affecting all colleges, public and private. Duncan aims to to rate each campus according to metrics such as how many low-income students they serve, how much debt their graduates carry and how much their alumni earn. He has talked about tying federal aid to those metrics.
Some college presidents are on board, hopeful that publicizing such ratings will force colleges to hold down costs and focus on meeting students’ needs.
“These reforms are badly needed and long overdue,” said F. King Alexander, chancellor of Louisiana State University.
Others, however, resent the notion that it will take the “federal government coming, swooping in” to set colleges’ priorities straight, said Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University. “The assumption that we don’t care is really where they start,” she said, “and that’s very offensive.”
For his part, Duncan expressed his frustration with the endless sniping and second-guessing in a speech at the National Press Club this fall. He lamented the “alternative universe” inside the Beltway where “the perfect becomes the enemy of the good” and politics “becomes a paralyzing force that props up the status quo.”
And he conveyed the urgency that aides say pushes him daily to drive change.
“Our children,” Duncan said, “have only one chance for an education.”
Politico: Arne Duncan’s Ambitious Agenda Hits Speed Bumps
By dianeravitch | Diane Ravitch's blog | http://bit.ly/IuxqSq
November 27, 2013 :: Stephanie Simon describes the political minefields that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has run into as he seeks to remake American education.
She does not mention that Duncan’s program dovetails with No Child Left Behind, which is now widely acknowledged to be a failed approach.
Nor does she mention that Duncan’s tenure in Chicago, where he honed his present ideas about reform, was unsuccessful.
Duncan is generously praised by the hedge fund managers’ group Democrats for Education Reform.
But critics call him out for micromanagement:
Critics, however, say his strategies have been shortsighted, even naive. States are backing away from promises they made to secure grants and waivers; just this month, Arkansas said it couldn’t stick to its timetable for improving student performance or raising the quality of its teaching force. In most cases, the secretary has little leverage to make states uphold their pledges. In a ritual that strikes even some bureaucrats as absurd, he has begun granting waivers to his own waivers.
“In 2009, Arne was the new sheriff in town, with big boxes of ammunition and a shiny new gun,” said Frederick Hess, an education analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Now, it’s later in the movie and he’s all out of bullets and he’s trying to scare states by shaking a stick at them.”
So many other questions are unasked:
Did his efforts to replace the principle of equity with the strategy of competition for federal aid makes any sense?
Why did a Democratic administration accept the ideology and strategies of its Republican predecessors?
How could Duncan say he wants to raise standards for teaching while giving $50+ million to Teach for America?
What have been the results of Duncan’s unprecedented support for shifting public dollars to privately managed charters?
Why has Duncan been silent as more and more state legislatures enacted anti-teacher legislation?
Why has Duncan been silent as more and more states authorized vouchers?
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