Obama Picks Harvard Grad for Education Secretary

President-elect Barack Obama selected Chicago Public Schools CEO and Harvard Overseer Arne S. Duncan ’86 last month to fill the post of Secretary of Education, touting Duncan’s hands-on experience with public education at a joint press conference at Chicago’s Dodge Renaissance School, one of the institutions that Duncan targeted for reform since becoming head of the country’s third-largest public school system in 2001.

“When Arne speaks to educators across America, it won’t be from up in some Ivory Tower, but from the lessons he’s learned during his years changing our schools from the bottom up,” Obama said during his announcement.
Education experts have praised Obama’s pick, calling Duncan a tough leader but one who is willing to compromise.

“He’s a terrific choice and the leader of an urban school district that has improved with his leadership,” said Thomas W. Payzant, a former superintendent of the Boston Public Schools and a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “It’s going to be great to have a practitioner as Secretary of Education.”

GSE Dean Kathleen McCartney said that Duncan is “not afraid to make tough decisions, like, for example, closing failing schools,” and that he is able to work effectively with teachers unions, unlike other school-system reformers who are “very negative” about them.

McCartney said she and Duncan have worked together on several fronts. In addition to serving on the 18-member GSE annual visiting committee, Duncan proposed creating a now three-year-old partnership between the GSE and Chicago Public Schools, she said.

“One time I was meeting with him, and he mentioned that of the 600 schools in Chicago Public Schools, 100 were going to need new principals for next year,” McCartney said.

To solve this, a program—or “pipeline”—now runs between Chicago and the GSE, where Teach for America alumni who study for one year in the GSE’s principal school leadership program can go to Chicago to become assistant principals.

If confirmed by the Senate, Duncan will have to redraft the increasingly controversial No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2001, which is currently pending reauthorization by Congress.

Duncan has taken a moderate stance in the debate surrounding No Child Left Behind. This June, two opposing camps of educators released manifestos about which reforms the educational system needed: one pushed forcing schools to raise achievement, while the other advocated new funding for school-based health clinics and social programs, saying that schools could not close the achievement gap alone.

Duncan was the only superintendent of a major city to sign both petitions.
Duncan did a large proportion of his education research during his time at Harvard, where he wrote a sociology thesis entitled, “The values, aspirations, and opportunities of the urban class.”

But during his college years, the gangly 6’ 5’’ “Dunk” was known more for his dogged determination to be a basketball star than for his academic pursuits—though the son of a distinguished University of Chicago psychology professor did take a year off between junior and senior year to do thesis research in Chicago, a noted rarity for someone aiming for a pro-basketball career.

“It wasn’t just to work on my thesis—though everyone thinks it was,” Duncan said to The Crimson in 1987. “My mom runs a school in the ghetto and I was working there, teaching the kids, tutoring, coaching, that kind of stuff.”

At the news conference in December, Duncan cited his mother’s after-school tutoring program on the South Side of Chicago—in Obama and Duncan’s home neighborhood of Hyde Park—as inspiration, saying his experiences there had a large impact on his commitment to improving inner-city education, and his love for basketball.

Though Duncan was cut from Harvard’s varsity team his freshman year, he pulled all-nighters perfecting his game until he became co-captain of the Harvard varsity team as a senior. He went on to play professional basketball with the Rhode Island Gulls and in Australia with the Eastside Spectres.

In spending years developing a jump shot that Obama says is better than his own, Duncan has earned a reputation for an infallible work ethic.

“Isn’t that what great teachers, what great educators possess?” wrote Steve Bzomowski, who was Assistant Coach at Harvard when Duncan was on the varsity men’s basketball team, on his blog. “The unwavering belief that their pupils can and should and will succeed.”

—Staff writer Vidya B. Viswanathan can be reached at viswanat@fas.harvard.edu.