Arne Duncan on NPR’s Talk of the Nation
I listened yesterday to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation.
It was a live stream and I tried to get a question in, but no luck. If I’d gotten through, I probably would have pointed out that charter schools are an urban and suburban concept. Charter schools (which usually target students who are “at-risk”) are also a redundant idea in many of America’s poorer rural corners where in some cases the vast majority of kids qualify as being at-risk. Then I would have asked him if there wasn’t a model available to promote the innovation that charter schools engender, while staying within the current public school framework in impoverished rural areas.
I might also have asked him if it wasn’t time to reconsidered the “supplement, not supplant” provision of Title I. When that idea was made law there was a lot of room in the curriculum and in the school day for supplemental instruction. Today almost everything we do is done because it is required in some way, and the specialists who could do it best often work for Title I and often have their hands tied by that provision of the law.
Oh well, maybe I can catch him on another talk show…
It’s been a busy month so far for Secretary Duncan.
- On Wednesday (June 3rd) he was testifying before a Senate budget committee about the plan to move $1 billion from Title I grants to the Title I school improvement fund. He also “got grilled” (as on source put it) on a proposed increase in funding for the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF).
- On Monday (June 8th) Duncan gave a speech to the Institute for Education Sciences. It was at their fourth annual conference, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC. Among the messages: test scores should play some role in evaluating teachers. But what role? Maybe I’ll blog about that later…
- Yesterday, Duncan attended a policy breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. Politico got him on video talk about playing basketball with the president. The CS Monitor did a story that day featuring Duncan on the topic of national education standards.
In between, he’s done a little traveling on his listening tour – mostly in New Jersey, I think.
