On Saturday, February 6, NPR interviewed Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education. Coincidentally, or not, the New Yorker magazine ran an article about Duncan in the January 4 edition. Both are illuminating.

This column has written about Secretary Duncan and his complete lack of teaching experience or credentials on more than one occasion. I have opined that perhaps having a background in education isn’t the primary requirement for someone to run the Department of Education. The Secretary doesn’t actually teach anyone anything, and I rather doubt that it’s part of the job description. Secretary Duncan oversees a bureaucracy of several thousand and a budget that is, as he has said,  bigger by a function of a lot than anyone else in his position has had. This is especially true of the discretionary funds that President Obama has allocated to him.

In an earlier article on this forum (Oct. 31, 2009), Secretary Duncan’s staff and their credentials were researched. There weren’t any teaching credentials to be found. This is what was found: of the 31 people listed as assistants to Mr. Duncan, 1 has direct experience with k-12 education, 1 has an MA in Education, and 2 are listed as having taught at the University level, which requires no credential, but may require an MA or Phd. The thought that he was being advised by people with actual experience in the education field, at more than the rookie level, went right out the window. The reality of running the United States Department of Education is related more to that of a large conglomerate than any school, especially any elementary or secondary school.

Which brings us back to the article in the New Yorker Magazine. Duncan has been allotted over 70 billion dollars in economic stimulus funds. He says that this amount is greater by a “factor of a lot” than any other Secretary of Education has ever had. His mandate is probably greater by the same factor than his predecessors also. This column has been openly skeptical of quite a few of the policies and claims of the Washington education bureaucrats.

This writer has also been very open to the idea that something should change in order to improve the delivery of education to students in our schools. The job of Duncan and his managers is to guide the process along, to identify things that, on a national level, don’t seem to be doing any good, and to assist in the business of changing them, and to identify those things that are working, figure out the reasons they are working, and duplicate and improve on them. For people who haven’t any in-depth classroom experience it seems an exercise in pure experimentation and lobbying for career points, especially to those of us who have been in the classroom for many years. What other profession regularly has non-professionals in their field telling them how to do their jobs?

What is important in this entire spectrum is that the need for change is constant. Change doesn’t always come from within. It is just as possible that the impetus for change, the mechanism that will move things forward, will come from just about anywhere. Arne Duncan, while not having any teaching experience, with a deep group of advisor’s who don’t have teaching experience, has said what those of us in the classroom have been waiting for. This is from the NPR interview:

“And I would argue quite frankly that this department has been part of the problem. We have been this big, compliance-driven bureaucracy. I’ve said repeatedly that the best ideas are never going to come from me or from Washington. They’re always going to come from great educators at the local level.”

In the midst of running the Department of Education, perhaps Secretary Duncan could take some time, without the press and photo op corps, to spend some time with those of us who actually teach. It’s just as possible that one of us will demonstrate or say something that will move education forward, a direction that it always needs to aspire to.

Leave a Reply