(From The Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2008)
By JOHN HECHINGER and LAURA MECKLER
President-elect Barack Obama is expected to name Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan as his education secretary on Tuesday — choosing a hometown friend who has introduced some education reforms popular with conservatives without alienating teachers unions.
The announcement will come at a news conference in Chicago, a transition aide said. Mr. Duncan, who has been Chicago's top school official for seven years, has overseen the closure of struggling schools, advocated merit pay for better teachers, and adopted a program to use private money to reward children for better grades.
He has straddled two competing factions of the education community: the teachers unions, who push for more funding and smaller classes, and a movement that favors accountability and free-market-style incentives and looks to hold schools and teachers more accountable for student performance.
Those within the Democratic party who supported him say he has improved student achievement, graduation rates and college-going rates in the nation's third-largest school system, which was called the worst in the nation by former Education Secretary William Bennett in the late 1980s.
Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Duncan, 44 years old, is Harvard educated and loves basketball. The two are personally close, with the pair sometimes playing pickup basketball together. In fact, Mr. Duncan, as an undergraduate, was co-captain of the Harvard basketball team and briefly played professional basketball in Australia.
The choice of Mr. Duncan comes as the Education Department faces a debate next year over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, President Bush's controversial education law. NCLB, which took effect in 2002, mandates that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014 and requires that school systems show steady progress toward meeting that goal or face sanctions.
Mr. Obama has called for increased funding for NCLB programs such as teacher training and better testing. He has said he wants to increase spending on early-childhood education by about $10 billion annually and provide a $4,000 annual tax credit to college students who perform 100 hours of community service.
Advocates of the law, including both Democrats and Republicans, believe NCLB's testing requirements provides an important way to hold schools accountable for students' achievement. But critics, including teacher's unions, some education experts and school systems, have complained bitterly about the law's frequent testing and lack of funding.
Many education analysts have spoken of a split among Mr. Obama's presidential advisers, which were seen to represent various factions in the debate over education reform. One of his advisers widely seen as a potential choice for Education secretary, Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University education professor, has been sympathetic to the complaints about No Child Left Behind. Another person believed to be a contender, Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City schools has assigned grades to various schools and tangled more with education unions.
Tom Loveless, an education expert at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, called Mr. Duncan a "safe choice. It reconciles the disagreements within the Democratic Party."
Monday night, Janet Bass, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers, which represents Chicago teachers, declined to comment on the appointment prior to the official announcement, but said: "As we have said in the past, we have a high opinion of Arne Duncan."
Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a political action committee that advocated for Mr. Duncan to be selected as Education secretary, said he had been a proponent of charter schools, or public schools operated by outside organizations, as well as merit pay for teachers — both controversial topics among teachers' unions.
—Rob Tomsho contributed to this article.