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Obama names school head as education secretary
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-12-17 14:42 CHICAGO -- President-elect Barack Obama chose the Harvard-educated chief executive of Chicago Public Schools as his secretary of education on Tuesday, selecting a reformer who has confronted teachers unions and held schools accountable for performance.
Obama named Arne Duncan, a longtime friend with whom he often plays basketball, as secretary of education during a news conference in Chicago. Duncan has been head of Chicago Public Schools, the nation's third largest school district, since 2001. The current education secretary, Margaret Spelling, has called Duncan a "visionary" school leader and reformer who would be a "great choice" to run the US Department of Education. Education secretary faces system in crisis Hundreds of thousands of children in this country do not learn and eventually drop out of school. That is Arne Duncan's problem now. Duncan, Barack Obama's choice for secretary of education, confronted the challenge on a smaller scale as head of Chicago public schools for the past seven years. He managed to raise test scores and graduation rates, and he improved the quality of teaching. But, still, the problem is not solved. Obama acknowledged as much Tuesday as he announced his selection of Duncan: "Look, we're not going to transform every school overnight." "But what we can expect is that, each and every day, we are thinking of new, innovative ways to make the schools better," the president-elect said. He called it "morally unacceptable" not to do better. The 44-year-old Duncan, like Obama a Harvard alumnus, ran an education nonprofit on Chicago's South Side before working in Chicago public schools under former chief Paul Vallas, now the schools chief in New Orleans. He also worked with children in Australia, where he played basketball for four years after college. The new administration must do its work under the umbrella of No Child Left Behind, the accountability law that prods schools to improve test scores each year so that every student can read and do math on grade level by the year 2014. |
