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The education secretary's greatest hits (quotes Thomas Dee)

October 2, 2015
National Public Radio
"Arne has been one of the most influential secretaries in the nation's history,” says Thomas Dee. "In general his policy prescriptions have been sound ... But it's hard to drive change from a seat in Washington."
By 
Eric Westervelt and Anya Kamenetz

It has been decades since an education secretary had as high a national political profile as the long-serving Arne Duncan, who famously accompanied President Obama from Chicago and even more famously likes to shoot hoops with the president.

Supporters note that Duncan has advocated passionately for narrowing the opportunity and achievement gaps in America's public schools, ending the "school to prison pipeline" and boosting pay for teachers who serve in high-poverty schools….

But the former pro ball player (in Australia) has also presided over one of the most contentious, partisan periods in education policy of the last several decades, and critics say his own personality has never placed him far above the fray….

Here's a look at some of Duncan's wins, scores and losses over the past seven years….

[D]espite initial bipartisanship, Duncan's advocacy of the Common Core crashed into Washington's current atmosphere of bitter partisanship and the long-standing distrust of a strong federal role in local education.

One of several anti-Duncan Facebook groups popped up: MAD, Mothers Against Duncan. And Duncan was sometimes his own worst enemy, PR-wise.

He famously said that opposition to Common Core and mastering standards in core areas of reading and math had become "a rallying cry for fringe groups."

At an otherwise sleepy state school superintendents meeting in 2013, Duncan suggested that opposition to the new reading and math guidelines was mostly from white mothers whose kids are facing tougher standards and tougher tests.

"And it's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from sort of white suburban moms," Duncan was quoted as saying in The Washington Post, "who, all of a sudden, their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, their schools aren't quite as good as they thought they were. And that's pretty scary."

Duncan apologized for his "clumsy" remarks, but for some it underscored what they saw as Washington's dismissive, arrogant approach to critics of the state standards.

Opponents, including Republican presidential hopefuls, began referring to the Common Core as "Obamacore" in a fledgling effort to link the standards debate with the fight over the president's controversial health-care legislation.

That was the moment, "when I knew that the debate was shifting into the larger context in Washington that was all about seeking partisan advantage," says Stanford University professor Thomas Dee, who heads the school's Center for Education Policy Analysis.

The charged rhetoric often drowned out teachers' legitimate concerns about how to put Common Core into action inside the classroom, Dee says. "It is such a heavy lift to ask the nation's teachers to reinvent their teaching practices around these standards."

The ongoing debate over the standards, in many ways, shows the limitations of the federal role reform in America's highly decentralized education system.

Read the entire story on the National Public Radio website.

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