Arne Duncan spoke to a packed room last night at the Education Writers Association conference, and got some chuckles by promising not to use his three favorite words during the speech: extraordinary, dramatic and incent.
He spoke a lot about truth and transparency in education and said he feels an "urgency" to improve the system - using both carrots and, when needed, sticks. Some interesting tidbits:
- He gave journalists props for pushing the country to talk about uncomfortable topics like performance gaps and teacher quality. Our friend Elizabeth Green from Gotham Schools asked him to expound on the teacher quality portion of that. He said teaching is a very private profession and there's a need to "de-privatize" it; open it up so that teachers freely discuss their strengths and weaknesses and learn from those who are more successful.
- He said the name No Child Left Behind is "toxic" and we should change it. He talked about aspects of the NCLB law that he likes (the focus on disaggregating data), and those he definitely does not (it's overly prescriptive; too "loose" on the goals and too "tight" on how you get there).
- He complained about state test results being a lot higher than NAEP scores and how that amounts to "lying" to children and parents. (Hmm...if you'd like to see another example of how misleading the current setup is, check out Fordham's report, The Accountability Illusion).
Here are a few more thoughts on the speech, from the Indy Star, Kalamazoo Gazette, and Detroit News.