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Monday, January 04, 2016
Arne in the rear view mirror: HOW ARNE DUNCAN RESHAPED AMERICAN EDUCATION AND MADE ENEMIES ALONG THE WAY
byPerry Bacon Jr, NBC News' Meet The Press | http://nbcnews.to/1JTfLgT
U.S.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan visits with 9-year-old Nadia Garcia in a
third grade classroom at McGlone Elementary School in Denver on Feb.
24, 2015. Brennan Linsley / AP file
Jan 2 2016, 2:25 pm ET "" Early in his tenure as U.S. education secretary,
Arne Duncan was one of the most popular members of the president's
cabinet, praised by Republicans like Jeb Bush, invited to play in the celebrity basketball game during the NBA's All-Star weekend and embraced by education experts on the left and right.
But Duncan, who officially stepped down this
week, leaves Washington as a deeply divisive figure. Over the last seven
years, the Chicago native has aggressively implemented his vision for
American education, in a more comprehensive way than perhaps any cabinet
officer in the Obama administration has changed policy in his issue
area. The rise of the Common Core education standards, a huge growth in
the use of data in education and a strong push for accountability on
colleges are among Duncan's signature projects.
Arne
Duncan, left, speaks with a senior student Stephanie Gil, right, after
roundtable discussion with local students, parents and educators at the
Benito Juarez Community Academy in Chicago, Monday, Dec. 16, 2013. Kamil Krzaczynski / AP
Valerie Strauss, an education columnist at the Washington Post and strong critic of Duncan, recently called him "the most powerful federal education chief in the department's history."
"He definitely expanded the role of the
Department of Education," said Tom Loveless, an education policy expert
at the non-partisan Brookings Institution.
By wielding that power, Duncan has become the
rare figure in an era of deep partisan polarization to be hated by many
on the left and right simultaneously. The National Education
Association, the nation's largest teachers union and a powerful force in
Democratic politics, called for Duncan's resignation last year, arguing
he was too supportive of standardized testing.
Earlier this month, Congress passed the "Every
Student Succeeds Act," a replacement to the Bush-era "No Child Left
Behind" law. Included in the ESSA, at the behest of congressional
Republicans, are several provisions that explicitly bar the federal
Department of Education from setting policy for all of America's
schools. Republicans wanted to ensure there are no more Arne Duncans.
Mission accomplished?
Duncan is one of only two members of Obama's
cabinet (Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is the other) to have served
in his post since the start of the administration. And he will leave
office having accomplished many of his goals.
Duncan helped convince 42 states to adopt
education goals based on the Common Core, and 21 of them to use tests
that directly align with those standards, which were created by a
bi-partisan group and attempt to both make U.S. schools more challenging
and the curriculum more similar from state-to-state.
While some liberals dislike charter schools,
Duncan has been a strong supporter of them and presided over a huge
growth in students attending charters in cities like Washington, D.C.
and New Orleans.
He pushed through, over the objections of some
university administrators, a comprehensive "College Scorecard" that
creates a database that makes it much easier to figure out which schools
don't do well in terms of making sure their students graduate and get
jobs after college. Duncan quietly but dramatically changed America's
college loan program, putting millions of students into a
federally-funded program that caps loan payments at 10 percent of a
person's income and forgives most loans after 20 years.
Duncan and his department have successfully
urged school districts across the country to stop suspending students in
kindergarten or elementary school, arguing such punishments are
excessive and tend to disproportionately hit black and Hispanic
students. He and his department also forced some colleges to overhaul
their systems for preventing and investigating rapes on college
campuses.
A move by both Duncan and Obama to highlight the
importance of community colleges has created a growing movement, even
in some Republican areas, to make tuition at those schools free. Amid
the rise of for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix, Duncan
has been one of their strongest critics and used the power of his office
to impose new restrictions on them.
"I came here very hopeful, also sometimes not
sure what the federal government could do and be productive," Duncan
told NBC News in an interview last month as he prepared to leave office.
"It so exceeded my wildest hopes."
It's too soon to tell if these changes have made
lasting impacts on improving college graduation rates, reducing the gap
in performance between minority and white students, or getting test
scores for the U.S. students closer to those of high-performing
countries abroad, some of Duncan's primary goals
.
What's the Best Way to Save for College?
0:42
The early evidence is mixed. The number of high
schools where more than 40 percent of kids don't graduate, dubbed
"dropout factories," has declined sharply under Duncan's tenure, and 82
percent of American students now graduate from high school, a
record-high.
But national exams given recently to students in
4th and 8th grade across the country showed declines in student scores
in math. And scores for black and Hispanic students remained much lower,
compared to their white peers.
A fast start
Taking over the Education Department in 2009,
Duncan had unusually free rein to set policy. He had the strong backing
of Obama, who had befriended Duncan when the two were leading figures in
Chicago politics, and both the administration and Republicans in
Congress were more focused on the economy and Obamacare than education.
And states had two problems that Duncan could
help them fix. There was agreement on the left and right that No Child
Left Behind was flawed. And in the midst of the recession, school
districts were struggling to pay their bills.
Duncan offered states waivers to get out of the
requirements of No Child Left Behind, as well as extra federal funding
through a program called "Race to the Top" that was part of 2009
stimulus bill. But the conditions Duncan set for Race to the Top funding
and an NCLB waiver were that states agreed to a group of reforms that
the education secretary favored, such as creating Common Core-like
standards and not limiting the expansion of charter schools.
By 2010, with little fanfare, Duncan had turned
the Department of Education, traditionally a backwater cabinet post
since the federal government provides only about 10 percent of the money
for K-12 education (states and localities provide the bulk of the
spending), into a powerful force helping set policy in nearly every
state.
"The Obama administration has been very creative
in their use of the bully pulpit to change education," said Anya
Kamenetz, an education writer whose book "The Test" expresses skepticism
about the growth of standardized testing under both the George W. Bush
and Obama administrations.
"They had very little federal money. As much
as he [Duncan] is criticized as a power-monger, he's been a very smart
user of soft power."
'No Child Left Behind' receives a makeover
Opposition rises
But over the last two years, the opposition to Duncan's initiatives, particularly Common Core, turned into a movement.
On the left, many didn't like how the Common
Core standards changed how math and English were taught. The standards
put an emphasis on students reading non-fiction as well as fiction and
learning broader math principles instead of shortcuts to answering
addition or multiplication questions.
On the right, conservatives accurately cast
Duncan as effectively federalizing education policy, dubbing his
education policies as "Obamacore."
And the standards and tests were caught in a
growing opposition from the left and right about standardized tests and
using them to determine how schools, students and teachers are
performing.
Amid the backlash, many states halted plans to
use the Common Core tests, ending the administration's hopes of having
students in nearly all states take the same examinations, which would
have made it easier to compare schools and states to their counterparts
across the country. Even in New York, a traditionally liberal state,
about 20 percent of students opted out of taking the state's Common-Core
aligned test earlier this year, another sign of the growing opposition.
"Politically, I think it was a mistake,"said
Loveless, referring to Duncan's strong advocacy of the Common Core
standards. "It then caused a reaction that caused a rollback. What the
Congress did was they dialed back the powers of the secretary."
Duncan acknowledges this backlash but argues it is more about a failure to communicate his vision than his ideas themselves.
"How we talk about these things at the real
level, to parents, to students themselves, I think has been mixed," he
said in the interview. "We all need to continue to communicate clearly,
to make mid-course corrections, to make adjustments."
Duncan is leaving office just as resistance to
him has reached its highest point. But Duncan was not pushed out by
Obama, who asked Duncan to stay through the end of 2016. Duncan says his
family was ready to return to Chicago.
Duncan's replacement, former New York Education
Commissioner John King, shares nearly all of Duncan's views, to the
frustration of critics of both men.
'This stuff is sticking'
The big unknown is whether Duncan's vision will
outlive the Obama administration. Despite growing resistance to some of
his ideas, the education secretary has set in motion a series of
policies that will be complicated to unwind. Even amid the backlash over
the Common Core, most states have kept the standards in place, in part
because creating education goals and then training teachers in them is
complicated and expensive.
Hillary Clinton has expressed skepticism about
charter schools, but it will be difficult for her to stop their
expansion in cities like New Orleans, where the majority of students now
attend such schools. Clinton has embraced free community college and
made it one of her signature campaign initiatives.
"The fact on the ground is that the overwhelming
majority of states, be they left or right, blue or red or purple or
whatever, they are moving forward with all of these things. This stuff
is sticking," said Duncan.
He added, "Hopefully we have created a political
climate, we've got to watch this, where when politicians start to want
to reduce things going forward, hopefully there will be a public outcry
against that."
Sarah Garland, executive editor of a
non-partisan education news website called The Hechinger Report, said,
"Politically, Common Core may be losing ground fast, but in terms of
what happens in classrooms, this was a sea change for a lot of
teachers."
"It changed how they do what they do. It will be hard to get them to go back," she added.
And Duncan, despite angering many on the left and right, will leave Washington with at least one friendship still intact.
"Arne has dedicated his life to the cause of
education — and sometimes in the nicest possible way, he has gotten on
people's nerves because he has pushed them and prodded them," Obama said
at the signing of the Every Student Succeeds Act.
"Had he not been, I believe, as tenacious as he
was, I think that we would not have as good of a product as we do here
today. And so I could not be prouder of Arne Duncan," the president
added.
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