Word: duncan
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...some weekends, when the rest of Washington is on the back nine or a racquetball court, Arne Duncan (whose first name is pronounced Are-knee) can be found playing in three-on-three street-ball tournaments across the nation. On a muggy, overcast Saturday in late July, while 50 Cent's "I Get Money" blares from a set of speakers, the former head of the Chicago Public Schools pounds the blacktop, alternating between playing intensely and walking off to take calls on his BlackBerry. Almost none of the other ballers know who the white dude with the salt-and-pepper...
That may sound like a lot of money--Duncan plans to give his share to charity--but it's chump change compared with the kind of cash he gets to play with at work. The economic-stimulus bill passed by Congress in February included $100 billion in new education spending. Of that total, Duncan has $5 billion in discretionary funding. That money alone makes him the most powerful Education Secretary ever. "I had very little--in the single-digit millions," says Margaret Spellings, Duncan's predecessor. "That's millions, with...
...Duncan's choices could have a transformative impact on America's beleaguered public-education system. On July 24, he stood beside President Barack Obama and announced the guidelines for states to compete for most of that cash. The $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) fund lets states apply for grants that focus on a short list of reforms guaranteed to anger one of the Democratic Party's core constituencies, the teachers' unions. (The remaining $650 million will go to innovative local school districts and nonprofits.) With Duncan handling the ball, the Obama Administration is about to square off with...
...money at his disposal, Duncan is not making it easy to get. To qualify for the cash, states are being encouraged to remove laws limiting the expansion of public charter schools (which are typically exempt from union rules and other regulations), sign on to common standards, develop a strategy to turn around their worst-performing schools and work toward building better data systems...
...disappointment is clear," says Kay Brilliant, director of education policy and practice for the National Educators Association, the nation's largest teachers' union. "If it's going to be more of the same, more NCLB [No Child Left Behind], more testing and minimal support, then we're not interested." Duncan admits he is tackling the Everest of entrenched interests with this particular reform. "It's pretty controversial," he says of the rule. "But to say that great teaching doesn't matter and should be disconnected from student outcomes, to me, is ludicrous...