With drive, ingenuity and a willingness to throw elbows, Obama’s closest friend in the Cabinet has tried to reshape American schools. Now will the backlash erase his legacy?
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is a mild-mannered, even-tempered, introverted kind of guy, but he’s spent much of his six and a half years in Washington in combat. He’s fought with school choice activists, student debt activists, gun activists, for-profit colleges, black colleges, traditional colleges, private lenders, loan collectors, the Tea Party, the Republican Party, and the teachers unions at the heart of the Democratic Party, among other interest groups. He’s in a multi-front war to fix America’s schools, and I recently sat down to delve into some of the wonkier details with Ted Mitchell, a former college president and education venture fund CEO who is now Duncan’s undersecretary. Mitchell spent a half hour patiently explaining to me the philosophy behind the Education Department’s fights—basically, making sure that all kids get a chance to succeed; that schools are accessible, accountable, and effective; and that adults who don’t do their part face consequences—until someone knocked on his door to say our time was up.
Then he started crying.
We had never met before, but Mitchell clearly had something personal he wanted to share, and my dull policy questions hadn’t given him much of an opening. His voice quivered as it finally spilled out: “I can’t let you leave without telling you what a privilege it has been to work with Arne.” He started to add something about fighting for students, but choked up mid-sentence. His press aide started crying, too. It sounds hokey, but I’ve never had an interview take such an abruptly emotional turn.
Education policy clearly inspires a lot of passion. It’s not just about cleverly named initiatives like Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, or arcane regulations defining “gainful employment” and “adequate yearly progress.” It’s about kids and their futures. You can see the intensity in the comments on Duncan’s Facebook page, spewing rage over the Common Core math and reading standards or the national epidemic of standardized testing. Duncan’s loyalists are just as intense, inevitably gushing about Duncan’s constant mantra in policy meetings: What’s the right thing for kids? “Everyone says that,” said Justin Hamilton, a former communications aide to Duncan. “Arne f—ing means it!”
In a cynical town of posturing and spin, Duncan has earned a reputation for saying what he means and doing what he says. At the same time, he has faced growing dissatisfaction with what he has said and what he has done. Duncan has driven far more change than any previous education secretary, but as he heads into the home stretch of the Obama administration, much of that legacy is at risk.
Duncan has used his perch at the smallest Cabinet agency—and his tight relationship with President Barack Obama, his pickup basketball pal from Chicago—to put an unprecedented national stamp on a policy area with a long and strong tradition of local control. He’s helped make major inroads on K-12 reforms that unions despise, like using student test scores to evaluate teachers. He’s helped push big changes in higher education as well: a government takeover of student loans, a harsh crackdown on for-profit schools, a huge expansion of student aid. A department with only 4,200 employees, traditionally considered a kind of Washington backwater, has transformed the policy landscape for 100,000 schools and 5,000 colleges.
But Duncan has also helped unleash a huge backlash—against the Common Core standards, against over testing, against federal overreach in general. This fall, Congress plans to rewrite the main law overseeing public education, and activists on the left and the right have joined forces to try to roll back Washington’s power; the House and the Senate have both passed versions that would defang Duncan’s department, and the Senate vote was broadly bipartisan. Republican presidential candidates like Marco Rubio and Rand Paul have vowed to eliminate the department entirely, while Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie, governors who supported Common Core standards before they began seeking the White House, have joined the conservative retreat from “Obamacore” now that it’s associated with the administration. And the Democrats in the race, including Hillary Clinton, have shown no indication that they intend to continue Obama’s pursuit of reforms opposed by powerful unions.
Even Duncan’s critics describe him as a nice and straightforward man who cares about kids. But those critics are multiplying, and getting more critical.
“If we had a national school board, Arne would be a great chairman,” said Lamar Alexander, the Republican chairman of the Senate education committee and a former education secretary under the first President Bush. “But Americans don’t want a national school board. He doesn’t seem to understand that.”
Duncan is the president’s closest friend in the Cabinet, dating back to his days running the Chicago Public Schools while Obama was a state senator, and they have similar no-drama temperaments, never getting too high or low. They also share a vision of education as an engine of opportunity, especially for the kind of at-risk kids on Chicago’s South Side that Duncan tutored at his mother’s after-school program, and Obama fought for as a community organizer. He’s the ultimate Obama loyalist, determined to keep plugging until the end of the president’s second term even though his family just moved back to Chicago for the school year, and the education reforms he has pushed have been among the president’s most disruptive policies.
While Duncan is undeniably Obama’s Guy, he has occupied a unique niche in the polarized climate of Obama’s Washington. He’s been unusually outspoken on behalf of progressive causes like gun control, immigration and criminal justice reform; he marched in Al Sharpton’s Black Lives Matter protest. Yet he’s forged unusually close relationships with Republicans, including Alexander as well as national GOP leaders like Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels. And he’s so revered by the centrist elites of the Beltway establishment that Thomas Friedman once proposed in his New York Times column that he should be Secretary of State.
That’s partly because education is an issue where Obama really does split the difference between left and right, supporting charter schools that innovate within the public system but not vouchers for private schools, battling teachers unions while defending their collective bargaining rights. But now his school reforms are under attack from the left and right. And unlike his health reforms, which produced a rapid decline in the uninsured rate, or his energy reforms, which generated dramatic increases in solar and wind power, their impact remains unclear as his presidency enters the home stretch.
U.S. graduation rates are at an all-time high, with the biggest improvements for minorities and the poor. Dropout rates are at an all-time low. Test scores are slightly up, with some of the biggest gains in states that embraced the administration’s approach to reform. Sketchy diploma mills are vacuuming up fewer federal dollars. But even Duncan acknowledges that the hopeful signs are not yet proof that reform is working.
“This is the ultimate long-term play,” he said. “A lot of the results won’t be seen for 10 or 15 years. This kind of work, it’s not about tomorrow’s headline.”
Education reform has become a rare bipartisan cause in policy circles, thanks in part to lavish funding by billionaires like Bill Gates, the Walton family and Mark Zuckerberg. But it is not just disruptive in the Silicon Valley sense, shaking up hidebound monopolies and entrenched interests. It can disrupt classrooms and lives. Without solid evidence that it’s achieving its goals, skeptics say, Duncan’s battles are like the faith-based crusades that caused such damage in the Dark Ages. He has cracked a lot of eggs without a finished omelet to show for them, and now his twin pillars of reform, setting higher standards and using tests to make sure kids are meeting them, are increasingly toxic in Washington and beyond. There’s no guarantee the changes Duncan has ushered in can’t be ushered out.
“I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think Arne is decent and honest,” says National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen Garcia, whose union has called for Duncan to resign. “But his reforms are so ridiculous, he’s uniting teachers, PTA’s, principals, everyone. We’re writing each other’s talking points!”
Shortly after I left Mitchell’s office, I watched Garcia and Randi Weingarten, her counterpart at the American Federation of Teachers, hold a news conference outside the Education Department’s front door, featuring two hunger strikers who were protesting the closure of a troubled Chicago high school. One theme was that reformers are betraying the kids, especially vulnerable minority kids, whom their decisions affect every day. Duncan pursued a career in education to address the plight of vulnerable minority kids in Chicago, but the frustration outside the department’s Lyndon B. Johnson building was heartfelt. “I’m hungry, but not for food. I’m hungry for justice,” said a striker named April Strogner.
Then she started crying, too.
DUNCAN DOES NOT have the natural personality of a provocateur, but in his just-saying, matter-of-fact way, he blurts out a lot of provocative things. He has attributed outrage over Common Core to “white suburban moms” who find out “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought.” He has described Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” He called for a name change for the Washington Redskins, and endorsed gay marriage before the president did. He continued to drop verbal bombs in my presence, suggesting that for-profit schools “got a lot of taxpayer money and bought off a lot of folks in Congress,” that “it’s mind-boggling we’ve accomplished nothing in the gun space” since Newtown, that House Republicans are “paralyzed by politics and ideology.” And when people don’t like what he says, well, he doesn’t lose a lot of sleep about that.
“Water off a duck’s back,” he told me. “There are a lot of pressures to maintain the status quo, and if you’re not challenging that, why are you here?”
If you want to understand Duncan, his friends say, you’ve got to start with basketball. He haunted Chicago’s playgrounds as a boy, often running the court with gang members in the city’s roughest neighborhoods. After growing to 6-foot-5, he played college ball at Harvard, then professionally in Australia, where he was known as the Cobra. He’s won national 3-on-3 tournaments, and so thoroughly dominated the 2014 NBA Celebrity All-Star game that actor Kevin Hart, voted MVP by the fans, handed the award to Duncan instead. His circus pass to the WNBA’s Skylar Diggins was a hit on YouTube.
The descriptions I heard of Arne Duncan on the court reminded me of Ted Mitchell’s effusive description of him off the court. In a forthcoming book on Obama and basketball titled The Audacity of Hoop, Alexander Wolff calls Duncan “the beau ideal of a pickup teammate.” He’s unselfish, passing and rebounding more than he shoots. He has amazing vision. He’s a natural leader, calm under pressure. He hustles. But his best friend, the Chicago financier (and former Princeton captain) John Rogers, says those stock descriptions miss his essence.
“Here’s what people don’t get about Arne: I’ve never met anyone as physically and mentally tough,” Rogers told me. “I’ve seen him play with a broken hand. I’ve seen him play with blood pouring down his face. People get the wrong impression of him, because he’s so patient and calm and civil.”
Rogers thinks Duncan got that from his mother, Sue, whose inner-city tutoring program was firebombed by a street gang when he was six. Duncan grew up middle class—his father, Starkey, was a University of Chicago professor—but he crossed racial and economic barriers every time he headed to “Sue’s Center.” He later took a year off from Harvard, where he would write a thesis on the aspirations of the urban underclass, to work for his mother full-time. A gang member once threatened to kill the Duncans if they returned to the center the next day.
“We had an interesting conversation that night at dinner,” he testified at his confirmation hearing. “We…decided that you can’t run. Once you start running, you’ll be chasing your shadow eventually. So we showed up the next day, and luckily he didn’t.”
It was at Sue’s that Duncan grew disgusted with dropout factories that warehoused low-income students and perpetuated cycles of poverty. One summer, he tutored a basketball star who needed to pass a standardized test to play in college. He had made the honor roll at his high school, so Duncan was surprised to learn he was functionally illiterate. “I did what I could, but I couldn’t make up ten years of neglect in a summer,” Duncan told me. “That kid had played by the rules. He had no clue he was so far behind. That happens all over the country, and it’s criminal.”
After his stint overseas, Duncan returned to Chicago to run a mentoring program that Rogers funded for underprivileged kids, a program they later transformed into a charter school. Duncan then went to work for the Chicago Public Schools, and in 2001, when he was only 36, Mayor Richard Daley made him superintendent. He soon earned a national reputation as a reformer, shutting down some failing schools while pouring resources into others, pushing for new charter schools as well as merit pay for teachers. And though unions tend to oppose charters and performance-based pay, Duncan maintained decent relations with the Chicago local.
He also got to know a Democratic state senator named Barack Obama, who shared his not-so-Democratic vision of reform as well as his love of hoops. Duncan recalls a visit they made to a once-failing elementary school on the city’s west side, where a teacher told them the biggest obstacle to improvement was “These Kids Syndrome”—adults making excuses for why “these kids,” as opposed to “our kids,” could never learn. Obama riffed about the experience in The Audacity of Hope, chiding his fellow Democrats for “defending an indefensible status quo, insisting that spending alone will improve educational outcomes.” He empathized with the challenges faced by underfunded schools in poor communities, but he bristled when teachers and administrators blamed their bad results on child poverty, as if there was nothing that could happen in school to help kids with tough situations at home.
“The president doesn’t just get this stuff intellectually,” Duncan said. “He gets it in his heart. It’s personal for him. It’s visceral.”
The AFT endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary; Obama was booed for defending merit pay in a speech to the NEA. But in the general election the unions strongly backed him over Republican John McCain. (On the wall outside Garcia’s office, I saw a copy of the NEA’s endorsement, which Obama had signed: “To Team NEA: Thanks for all your help on my campaign.”) After Obama’s victory, no one knew which side he would take in the education wars. A pro-reform group was circulating a petition calling for stricter accountability for schools and teachers, while a pro-union group had a dueling petition pushing more spending on services for needy kids.
Duncan was the only prominent figure to sign both. He was a hero to reformers, but at a moment when the abrasive Washington, D.C., superintendent Michelle Rhee was on the cover of Time, wielding a broom to highlight her confrontational approach, Duncan was relatively palatable to union leaders. Obama was considering Denver superintendent Michael Bennet, who is now a Democratic senator, but he chose Duncan after a mind-meld interview at his transition offices in their shared hometown.
“He walked by my desk and said: I can’t not choose the best guy just because he’s a good friend of mine,” recalled Obama’s top political adviser, David Axelrod. “Arne had such a missionary zeal for this stuff. And the president has a real sense of urgency about education.”
DUNCAN ARRIVED IN Washington at an extraordinary moment for the nation in general and education policy in particular.
The economy was crashing, and the new administration was preparing an $800 billion stimulus program to try to save it, including an unprecedented $100 billion rescue package for schools. The vast majority of the money went directly to revenue-starved states, averting more than 300,000 teacher layoffs that would have accelerated the recessionary spiral. But with Duncan pushing behind the scenes, congressional Democrats approved $10 billion that would be tied to reform, including $4.35 billion for a state competition called Race to the Top. That one-time infusion amounted to less than 1 percent of annual expenditures on U.S. public schools—the top Democratic appropriator in the House dismissed it as “Arne Duncan’s walking-around money”—but it would have an outsized impact.
That’s because Duncan wrote the rules of the grant competition with carrots and sticks that encouraged states to adopt reforms before the competition even started. For example, he declared that states with union-friendly “firewalls” barring links between test scores and teacher evaluations would be ineligible for the Race, so every state with a firewall ditched it. Duncan also made it clear states could earn extra points by expanding testing regimes, elevating standards, removing caps on charter schools, and making it easier to fire or reward teachers. Within a year, 40 states had already changed laws to improve their prospects in the Race, and 45 states had embraced college- and career-ready standards like Common Core.
Union leaders were furious. They saw the Race as a conservative program, treating teachers like automatons, as if the art of helping kids with unique dreams and challenges could be assessed through a bloodless algorithm. But it was hard for them to kick up too much of a fuss about a voluntary competition when a new Democratic president had just saved so many teaching jobs. They lobbied furiously in Washington—and Duncan did tweak the rules of the Race to encourage union cooperation—but they couldn’t stop the state-by-state tidal wave of change. Even though only a dozen states won major grants, most of the country reoriented its approach.
“What Arne catalyzed was totally unheard-of,” said Rhee, who founded the reform group StudentsFirst after leaving the District’s schools in 2010. “Reformers had been pushing for years, but Race to the Top is what finally got this stuff implemented. It’s funny how adults act like kids. It’s a race! We want to win!”
Race to the Top and another $4.5 billion program for overhauling chronically underperforming schools represented a bold new effort to leverage scarce federal dollars to make sure students really learn. Duncan liked the accountability impulse behind President Bush’s widely reviled No Child Left Behind law, which was poised to impose sanctions on schools unless 100 percent of their students showed “proficiency” by 2015, but he didn’t like the way many administrators had simply redefined “proficiency”—or as Duncan put it, dumbed down their standards and lied to their kids. It reminded him of that illiterate athlete on the honor roll. He was thrilled when Tennessee, which had reported 91 percent proficiency in math before Obama, reported just 34 percent a year after receiving a Race to the Top grant. As far as Duncan was concerned, it showed the state was serious about telling the truth.
The Race had more losers than winners, so there were plenty of complainers—and Duncan himself was dismayed when the independent judges of the competition passed over several reform-friendly states. The media coverage of the Race focused on conflict, like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s allegation that the Obama administration had improperly denied his state a grant. (After a Duncan aide leaked a videotape of the state’s presentation that contradicted his charges, Christie fired his education commissioner.) But Duncan says the joy of the job was dealing with leaders like Republican Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee, who sat in his office and told him that politicians always talk about education, but never do much about it. “What can I do?” Haslam asked. Duncan does not think it’s a coincidence that Tennessee has enjoyed the nation’s largest increase in test scores.
“It was so genuine, so vulnerable,” Duncan said. “So many politicians want to kiss babies and visit schools. Here was a guy who had the courage to challenge his party and the status quo because it was unacceptable for kids.”
Duncan says he’s seen less of that courage in Congress, which he routinely describes as dysfunctional. But he exploited one example of that dysfunction — Capitol Hill’s repeated failures to revise the unrealistic deadlines of No Child Left Behind—to accelerate the administration’s reform agenda. Duncan let states know they could receive waivers from the law’s punitive sanctions if they embraced higher standards, additional help for students in need, and stronger teacher evaluations. The waivers would be even more controversial than the Race.
Again, states were not forced to apply for waivers, and the states that did apply got to design their own compliance plans. Duncan told his team to be “tight on goals, loose on means,” and all but eight states have gotten waivers. But Duncan was pretty prescriptive. For instance, the requirement for stronger teacher evaluations clearly meant linking them to tests. And teachers unions hate test-based evaluations as much as Republicans hate prescriptive federal agencies telling them/states what to do. Dennis Van Roekel, who led the NEA in Obama’s first term, used to meet Duncan for breakfast every month, and says they actually agreed on almost every issue—except testing.
“I constantly told him testing was a disaster,” Van Roekel said. “I warned him if he didn’t bring sanity to the testing craze, everything he was doing would collapse under its own weight. I wish he had listened to me about that.”
At the NEA’s convention in 2011, the union formally declared that it was “appalled” with Duncan’s work. But at the same convention, the NEA endorsed the president’s reelection, as if the education secretary whose family hung out with the Obamas at Camp David was some kind of rogue operative. I heard from several sources that Duncan actually helped negotiate the language of his own condemnation; he’s no politician, but you can’t run the Chicago schools without some sense of politics. “Arne understood the political realities,” a former aide said. “The union needed a target for its anger, and he was happy to take a bullet for the president.” Back then, resentment was starting to build over excessive “high-stakes” testing, and horror stories were starting to circulate about math tests being used to judge art teachers, but the dissension had not yet erupted into a movement.
“Arne saw it early,” said former Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer. “He sounded the alarm at the White House. The fear was the Republicans would join forces with unions to try to kill reform. Arne kept telling us: It’s coming.”
THE THING IS, education policy is not just about kids. It’s also about jobs and budgets and politics. Education is a huge industry with a lot of government money sloshing around. And it isn’t exempt from Washington’s partisan shenanigans. Duncan told me that after Obama pitched universal pre-K in the 2013 State of the Union address, a “prominent Republican senator” approached him on the floor and said: “I love what you’re doing on this. I’m so sorry I can’t help you.”
“He knew in his heart he was wrong. We’re 25th in the world in early childhood education; it’s like the opposite of a profile in courage,” Duncan scoffs. “I don’t get people who come here for a fancy title. I came here to do big things.”
In fact, at least 30 states have pushed new early childhood initiatives since Duncan and Obama began clamoring about pre-K, including deep-red states like Texas, Alabama and Mississippi. He likes to contrast that kind of bipartisan policy success around the country with the petty gridlock of Washington. In reality, though, the Obama legacy on education is stuffed with big things achieved in the capital. The Race and the waivers are obvious examples, but there are others in higher ed, even though Duncan was new to that world.
The administration’s first big post-secondary victory was keeping Obama’s campaign promise to oust private lenders like Sallie Mae from the student loan business. They did no real underwriting, and the government set their rates; they were basically overpaid middlemen, siphoning billions of dollars from the program. But they were influential middlemen. They had juice not only with Republicans who opposed government mission creep in general but with several key Democrats, and an Education Department proposal to take over all loan origination stalled. White House officials didn’t fight for the plan, telling Duncan’s staff they couldn’t afford to alienate Democrats whose votes they needed to pass health care reform.
“We were told it was dead, forget it, the lenders killed it,” one former Duncan aide recalled. “And then, whoa! It just happened!”
It turned out that after losing Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in early 2010, the Democrats urgently needed some savings for a budget maneuver they could deploy to pass Obamacare without 60 votes. The student loan overhaul was a money-saver, so they tacked it onto the health bill, suddenly transforming the Education Department into one of America’s ten largest banks. The move also allowed them to plow $40 billion in savings into Pell tuition grants for low-income students. It got virtually no attention in the hubbub over Obamacare, but it has helped expand Pell by 50 percent, serving 3 million more needy families. Critics grumble that by pumping more federal aid into the college-industrial complex, Duncan is just helping schools jack up their tuitions.
Duncan also used his regulatory powers to address the trillion-dollar student loan crisis, dramatically expanding relief to struggling borrowers. The new rules enable all borrowers to limit their monthly payments to 10 percent of their income and get their loans forgiven after 20 years. That was an expensive move to make without congressional approval. Jason Delisle of the New America think tank says the changes are already costing taxpayers about $11 billion a year, a figure that could soar as more borrowers apply for relief.
But there is mounting evidence that a college degree provides a major boost to future earnings, and Duncan thinks that between the Pell expansion and the loan relief, a degree is now within reach for just about anyone. That’s a big deal at a time when the cost of a degree has soared and state spending on higher education has plunged.
“There’s a perception that college is just for rich folks, and that’s not acceptable,” Duncan said. “A high school diploma simply doesn’t cut it anymore.”
Obama’s top higher education priority is expanding access, and Duncan has been a loyal soldier in that fight. Most recently, he’s been a vocal advocate of the president’s plan to make two years of community college free for all, and he truly loves the idea of converting government-financed K-12 into pre-K-14. But honestly, it’s the president’s plan. As Duncan has learned more about higher ed, he’s begun to worry less about access than outcomes, less about cost than completion. For all the real concern over students graduating with daunting debts, most college graduates pay back their loans. It’s the students who don’t graduate who are far more likely to default; the most expensive degree, he says, is the one you don’t get.
Duncan has gotten especially fired up about diploma mills that leave students unprepared for the job market even if they do graduate. That concern has driven his toughest battle, his regulatory crackdown on for-profit schools and career-training programs.
For-profits enjoyed spectacular growth during the Great Recession, and even Steve Gunderson, a former Wisconsin Republican congressman who is now the industry’s top lobbyist, admits they enrolled too many unqualified applicants who ended up defaulting on federal loans. “We’re the first ones to say we should’ve been more careful,” Gunderson told me. “We were thinking with our hearts, not our heads.”
The department suspected they were thinking with their wallets, which were stuffed with largesse from Uncle Sam; they could bank up to 90 percent of their revenues from federal grants and loans. Duncan insists he has nothing against effective for-profits, but the more he heard of exploitative cosmetology programs and culinary schools that roped in students with bogus promises and failed to move them into decent jobs, the more outraged he got. “It’s crazy!” he said. “We’re paying for vulnerable people to end up with serious debts and a useless piece of paper.”
The department began developing rules to deny federal aid to bad actors, and the industry desperately fought back on Capitol Hill. For-profit programs had given generous campaign donations not only to Republicans, who were already sympathetic on ideological and anti-Obama grounds, but to Democratic leaders like then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was close to the University of Phoenix’s owners and had several for-profit campuses in her district. The industry hired Lanny Davis, a ubiquitous Washington fixer who has worked the capital for clients like the brutal dictator of Equatorial Guinea, to persuade his fellow Democrats that Duncan’s rules would deny low-income minorities access to the American Dream. Davis says the department showed no interest in compromise, even though the Congressional Black Caucus and other Obama supporters were siding with the industry.
“That whole mess showed me that Duncan didn’t understand Washington,” Davis said. “This town is about the art of the deal, and he was on a jihad to root out the profit motive. It made no sense. He was demonizing Obama’s base.”
After much debate within the White House, which was getting blowback from Democrats on the Hill, Duncan announced the for-profit rules in 2011. He then had to withdraw them after the industry sued and a judge ruled that some of the standards unfairly singled out for-profits. But he made it clear he had just begun to fight. He informed Ted Mitchell that revising and reissuing the rules should be at the top of his to-do list as undersecretary. And while Duncan is known for his open-door policy, Gunderson said that door was slammed shut to his industry.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in 22 years around government,” Gunderson complained. “We serve the most vulnerable students; we ought to be the department’s most important constituency. He wouldn’t even meet with us.”
In 2014, Duncan issued even harsher rules that could shut down hundreds of programs whose students have excessive debt-to-income ratios, and so far those rules have survived legal challenges. He has also helped shut down Corinthian Colleges, one of the more notorious for-profits. Gunderson says the administration is unfairly singling out his industry, favoring community colleges (like the one where Vice President Joe Biden’s wife is a professor) despite comparably low overall graduation rates and high default rates. (Community colleges are much cheaper, so their students accumulate much less debt, but Gunderson attributes that disparity to government subsidies.) The industry argues that Duncan is fighting an unnecessary war, since its enrollment has already dropped from a peak of 4.5 million in the recession to just over 3 million, while its default rates and tuition prices have declined as well. As their windfall profits have vanished, for-profit education stocks have cratered since 2010.
Duncan says that’s proof that his war is working, not that it’s moot. “That’s music to my ears, and it doesn’t happen if we don’t challenge the status quo,” he said. “This is the right fight.”
The fight is not over. Congressional Republicans want to block several of Duncan’s most onerous higher ed regulations, including the for-profit restrictions, and their objections to federal micromanagement are echoed by much of the higher education lobby. Alexander says Duncan is “a good man with a big heart and the right goals,” but is wildly exceeding his powers to achieve them.
“He wants to dictate everything from Washington,” Alexander said. “People are fed up.”
Duncan has already had setbacks in a few of his Washington wars. His department tried to rein in a high-interest and arguably predatory federal loan program for parents of undergraduates, but mostly relented after a ferocious outcry from historically black colleges that relied on the program’s cash. The department also tried to create a new college ratings system to fulfill an Obama promise, but recently backed off under pressure from the higher education lobby, releasing a watered-down “scorecard” that provides data without government ratings.
Now Duncan is trying to secure the ground he’s gained in the defining war of his career, the fight over K-12 reform. And he’s taking heavy fire.
AFTER OBAMA WAS reelected, Duncan met with the leaders of the teachers unions in his conference room. Their message was simple: Tests are out of control. They should be tools for instruction, not hammers to sanction. They don’t really reflect what happens inside classrooms. They shouldn’t dominate school. And using the scores of students to judge the performance of teachers who might never have met them was causing chaos in many states.
“We warned Arne that this fixation on testing was a disaster,” recalled Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers. “We said it was making kids and parents anxious. It was making teachers angry. I told Arne: If you don’t fix this, all you’re going to hear about for the next few years is testing, testing, testing.”
In the three years since then, hundreds of thousands of parents have joined the “opt-out movement,” pulling their kids out of standardized tests. Celebrities like Louis C.K. and Matt Damon have trashed the testing craze, while HBO’s John Oliver dedicated one of his trademark rants to the phenomenon. The NEA has called for Duncan’s ouster, while the AFT put him on an “improvement plan” reminiscent of the plans reformers have pushed for inadequate teachers. Weingarten says she worries that congressional Republicans will exploit the broad-based anger at the federal government to dismantle its role ensuring a decent education for all kids in all states. But she also says Duncan has no one to blame but himself.
“This is not a temporary backlash—it’s Democrats, Republicans, rural, suburban, urban, everyone,” Weingarten said. “I believe Arne is very much dedicated to children, but he’s created a terrible mess.”
Duncan agrees that many states and districts have gone overboard with tests; he points out that when he ran Chicago’s schools, he ditched a standardized test he considered redundant. “Where it’s too much, let’s cut back,” he says. But he believes some annual assessments are still needed to gauge the progress of students, their teachers and their schools. He told me 30 percent of the graduates of Massachusetts public schools, among the best in the nation, still require remedial classes when they get to a four-year college. In San Antonio, he said, the figure is more than twice as high. “And those are the kids who don’t drop out!” he told me. “We’re so far from where we need to be as a country. We can’t just walk away from accountability.”
Duncan once hoped to spend a full decade turning around Chicago’s schools, and his friends say he’s been saddened by the instability there since he left for Washington three years early: five different superintendents, vicious labor disputes, the hunger strike by the angry parents who ended up at his department’s door. This time, Duncan wants to finish the job. He’s one of only three remaining members of Obama’s original Cabinet—along with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and budget director Shaun Donovan, the former housing secretary—and none of his top aides at the department have been with him from the beginning. Even his family has left Washington; his son and daughter are attending his old private school in Chicago, which has generated more sniping from advocates. But Duncan plans to stay to the end.
His immediate task is to persuade congressional Republicans not to take away the federal hammer in their rewrite of No Child Left Behind. It’s clear that the final legislation will weaken the Education Department, giving states much more power to set standards and determine what to do if kids don’t meet them, but Duncan is lobbying to make sure it does not leave states entirely to their own devices. At the same time, Duncan is pushing states not to backslide on reform. It doesn’t bother him when Republican governors in states like Iowa and Arizona ditch the name “Common Core” but keep the same standards, or even when states adopt new standards to distance themselves from Obama—as long as the standards are tough.
Of course, that will be a lot tougher to monitor once Obama leaves office. That’s why Duncan is starting to think a lot about the 2016 election. Politics is not his passion; former aides told me he got uncharacteristically snippy after getting roped into a fundraiser for the bombastic (and not very reform-friendly) Florida Rep. Alan Grayson. But he is now trying to figure how to thrust education into the campaign spotlight; he recently met with CNN’s editorial board about doing a candidate forum on the topic. It’s one of those issues that voters always say they care about, but never seem to base their decisions on.
Duncan wouldn’t discuss the 2016 candidates with me. In the past, he’s bashed the general “reverse Robin Hood” anti-spending agenda of the Republican Party, but he’s praised GOP hopefuls (and Common Core supporters) Jeb Bush and John Kasich. He’s appeared at education reform events with Bush, who once emailed him intelligence about Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s thinking about Common Core. “It would just be the kiss of death if I said something nice,” Duncan told me. He wouldn’t talk about the Democrats either, although he did dismiss debt-free college, a key plank of the Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley education plans, as laudable but ultimately tangential to preparing Americans for good jobs. “If you just support the current system and make it free, that would be failure,” Duncan said.
So far, Hillary Clinton’s platform has also focused on affordability, although she has pledged even tougher rules on for-profit schools. She has been vague about K-12 reform, but it’s telling that her first major endorsement came from Weingarten and the AFT. “We knew back in 2008 that there was a big difference between Hillary and Obama,” Weingarten said. “She’s always been about support-and-improve. And now there’s ample evidence that test-and-punish doesn’t work. We just wish the president and Arne had recognized that and changed his course.”
The president and Arne. They really are close—Duncan helped organize the president’s Saturday basketball games before Obama began turning to golf—and there really isn’t much daylight between them on education policies. Liberals who don’t like some of those policies, as well as conservatives who do, have focused their ire or grudging respect on Duncan. But he’s executing the president’s agenda. For example, black colleges feel badly neglected by the administration, which has often seemed less concerned about their precarious financial health and painful legacy of discrimination than the completion rates and debt burdens of their students. Johnny Taylor Jr., president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, says he often has to remind leaders of the schools he represents that their bitter disappointment with Duncan is not consistent with their reflexive defenses of Obama. Taylor says they just don’t want to hear that the first black president is not that into them.
“I keep saying: Stop shooting the messenger!” Taylor said. “Don’t get pissed at Arne Duncan; he’s a good soldier. If you’re screaming bloody murder at Arne, and he’s still not helping you, that’s because the president doesn’t want to help you.”
Axelrod told me he expects Obama to stay involved in education issues in his post-presidency, as “a voice for reform and innovation.” Duncan’s crusades, he said, have been Obama’s crusades. “If Arne was just tinkering at the margins, he wouldn’t be fulfilling the president’s mandate. He was put in that job to be a catalyst, to shake up the system, and there’s nothing he did without the president’s blessing,” Axelrod said. “Politically, it would’ve been nice not to have all these fights with the base, but I don’t think the president would’ve been able to look himself in the mirror.”
The next president is quite likely to feel differently. But as hard as it has been to start turning around America’s educational battleship, it might be just as hard to start turning it back. The rules have changed, not just in Washington but in most of the states. Duncan hopes that as the results of the reform experiment roll in, the backlash will subside, and Americans won’t stand for a return to the old status quo where illiterate kids were deemed “proficient,” where incompetent teachers enjoyed lifetime tenure, where students took out government loans they would never repay to attend sham institutions that wouldn’t prepare them for a career. Ultimately, he says his push for accountability—for teachers, principals, for-profit colleges, and the rest of the education establishment—needs a new target.
“I’ve never heard a politician say he’s anti-education, but they don’t always get beyond the soundbites and photo ops,” Duncan said. “You know, I blame us as voters. We’ve got to start holding politicians accountable, too.”
Source: Politico
The post Arne Duncan’s Wars appeared first on Thurgood Marshall College Fund.