Arne Duncan: A Moral Obligation

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke to the delegates to the NEA Representative Assembly recently. It was part of his "Listening and Learning" tour. It's a curious title. To his credit he did field some pretty tough questions after he spoke, but he did do most of the talking.

[Above: Arne Duncan (center) answering questions from a panel before taking questions from the 5,000 or so in attendance. AEA President John Wright is two seats to the left of Duncan. You can watch the entire speech here. There is a link on the right side of the page which will open.]

Duncan spoke about the need to reform not only No Child Left Behind, but also tenure and the ways in which teachers are evaluated and compensated (read: merit pay). He also dropped in a nugget about who should lead schools:

I told the charter schools they need to police themselves or their progress will be stalled. I told the school boards that if they can't improve student achievement - they have a moral obligation to consider mayoral control.

What is mayoral control? It means weakening the powers of your elected governing board-- or getting rid of them altogether-- and handing over control of schools to the mayor of the town or city.

Imagine your mayor running your city and running your school district at the same time. Some people may think this is already how things are done and might not see the risk of having one person in complete control of a school district.

Could you trust a school governing "board" with only one member?

Noted education writer and Gerald Bracey disagrees with Duncan, calling "mayoral control" a weakening of democracy and nothing more than a fancy name for privatization.