Secretary of Education Speaks at the National Press Club

Secretary Arne Duncan discussed President Obama’s education agenda in a speech at the National Press Club on May 29, 2009.

A video of the speech is at the National Press Club’s website. Here are text excerpts from the speech.

I found the following excerpts particually interesting:

• You should not be comforted by meeting state standards under NCLB:
  

"When children are told they are “meeting a state standard,” the logical assumption for that child or for that parent is to think they are on-track to be successful. But because these standards have been dummied down and lowered so much in so many places, when a child is “meeting the state standard” they are in fact barely able to graduate from high school."

• A call for transparency, access to information, and data analysis, some of my passions:

"We have to be transparent about our data. We have to raise the bar so that every child knows on every step of their educational trajectory what they’re going to do."

• Assessing and correcting deficiencies. This is fundamental to improvement:

"You should know in fifth and sixth and seventh and eighth grade what your strengths are, what you weaknesses are. And we should be working with teachers and parents, and students should be taking responsibility for their own education to really improve where they have deficiencies, where they have weaknesses."

• How Chicago was able to turn around some of their under-performing schools:
  

"We kept the children and brought in new teams of adults – same children, same families, same socioeconomic challenges, same neighborhoods, same buildings, different set of expectations, different set of beliefs. And what we saw was dramatic changes."