Learning Curve: Duncan: No excuses

By Maureen Downey

Last week, I asked an aide to Education Secretary Arne Duncan why his boss was in a better position to get results than predecessors Margaret Spellings or Rod Paige. His reply was instant:

“Money.”

Thanks to the stimulus, Duncan has a lot more of it than Paige or Spellings, including $4.35 billion in Race to the Top money. Duncan calls it the largest pot of discretionary funding for K-12 education reform in the country’s history.

But as Duncan noted while striding through Atlanta’s Grady High School last week, “You can have all the money in the world, but it won’t make a difference if teachers don’t believe their students can learn.”

This was Duncan’s second visit to Atlanta in six weeks. In both instances, he made clear that he has no patience for teachers and schools that tick off all the reasons that their poor or minority students can’t achieve.

He doesn’t accept the excuses that their parents don’t care, their homes lack books and no one takes them to museums or plays.

Duncan’s counter argument is that he has seen students whose parents were drug dealers go on to attain college degrees. He has seen inner-city children with few advantages blossom and excel.

And he says it’s because someone believed in those children and taught them that neither their poverty nor their parents’ choices defined their futures. Some of that faith comes from the 45-year-old Duncan’s own experiences in South Chicago, where his mother ran an after-school program for poor neighborhood kids.

Kerrie L. Holley was one of those South Chicago kids. Nine years older than Duncan, he attended the after-school math and reading program run by Duncan’s no-nonsense mother, Sue, whom he came to see as a second mother. Holley went on to college, earned his law degree from DePaul University and joined IBM as an engineer. Now based in San Francisco, Holley was named an IBM Fellow in 2006, IBM’s highest technical leadership position. In 2004, Holley was named one of the 50 most important black Americans in research science.

Holley was in Atlanta a few weeks ago, listening to Duncan speak. He served as the younger boy’s math tutor at the center his mother ran. But as Holley recalls it, the bright, young Arne didn’t really need much help.

“That was a bit of an overstatement,” Holley said. “I was tutoring him in algebra when he was in the sixth grade.”

Duncan himself was educated in elite private schools, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and Harvard. Many of his critics contend that he knows only that world, and Duncan does have an unmistakable prep-school sheen.

But as Holley notes, Duncan began coming to his mother’s inner-city after-school program as a newborn and virtually grew up there, coming every day after school and learning and playing alongside South Chicago kids. Duncan saw firsthand the circumstances and challenges of the lives of children in poverty.

Duncan said he believes those challenges can be overcome because he saw it happen many times in the children who attended his mother’s tutoring program.

“Every child can learn and thrive despite poverty, despite problems at home, despite neighborhood violence,” he said.

In deciding how to spend Race to the Top dollars, Duncan wants to reward programs that don’t see a child’s poverty as insurmountable, and that focus on raising academic standards, improving teacher quality and inspiring innovation.

“It is not enough to make the same investment in the same programs,” he said, stressing the need for innovation, quality and results. “We are not going to reward the status quo.”

He also intends to overhaul the landmark No Child Left Behind Act. The current system, which allows states to set their own standards, has led to a dumbing down of standards in many states.

In addition to national standards, Duncan wants to require comprehensive data systems that allow states to track student performance every step of the way. That system would also be able to track teacher effectiveness and relate it back to their colleges of education.

He wants to measure how much a teacher has advanced a student, no matter the starting point.

A teacher who begins the year with students three grades behind and moves them to only one grade behind is heroic and deserves to be celebrated as a success, Duncan said.

He also wants incentives to attract the best teachers to the worst schools, and cited a new law enacted this summer that gives loan repayment breaks to college graduates who enter public service, including teaching.

But local systems have to lead the way, he said.

“The great ideas in education are never going to come from Washington.”