Barack Obama’s second-term Cabinet – Edward-Isaac Dovere – POLITICO.com

President Barack Obama plans an extensive shuffle of his West Wing and Cabinet, with White House chief of staff Jack Lew most likely headed to Treasury and former Sen. Chuck Hagel, a moderate Republican, under consideration for secretary of defense, administration insiders said.

Planning for a second term has been under way for months, with Lew and Pete Rouse, the counselor to the president and Obama’s internal management guru, preparing lists of possible promotions and nominations. The staff process has been gossiped about by the staff, but details have been kept secret, even from insiders. More…

via Barack Obama’s second-term Cabinet – Edward-Isaac Dovere – POLITICO.com.

Who Could Be Romney’s Education Secretary? – Politics K-12 – Education Week

With the Republican National Convention about to kick off, it’s officially time to start speculating about who could be presumptive GOP Mitt Romney’s education secretary if he wins the presidential election.

After all, way back in 2008 (Aug. 8, to be exact), Politics K-12 guessed that then-Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan could be then-Democratic contender Barack Obama’s pick on Aug. 8. So we’re actually late to the dance this year.

Campaign 2012

This time, there’s not a lot of agreement among the Republicans that I polled. This is going to be a tight election and folks are focused on that. Still, Romney, like other presumptive nominees in both parties in past years, has started some preliminary transition planning. When it comes to the U.S. Department of Education, it’s still the very early stage, where lots of people are floating lots of names, folks said. More…

via Who Could Be Romney’s Education Secretary? – Politics K-12 – Education Week.

Flunking Arne Duncan by Diane Ravitch | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

by Diane Ravitch

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan loves evaluation. He insists that everyone should willingly submit to public grading of the work they do. The Race to the Top program he created for the Obama Administration requires states to evaluate all teachers based in large part on the test scores of their students. When the Los Angeles Times released public rankings that the newspaper devised for thousands of teachers, Duncan applauded and asked, “What’s there to hide?” Given Duncan’s enthusiasm for grading educators, it seems high time to evaluate his own performance as Secretary of Education.

Education Matters: President Obama lets me down… again

I have to say at least President Obama mentioned education something that hasn’t happened once in the 547 Republican presidential debates. Though to be honest what could the Republicans say, we wrecked inner city schools so we could privatize them or that we sacrificed our children’s future to make a buck? Unfortunately President Obama can’t say much more and he definitely didn’t during the State of the Union address.

Like most politicians Obama used hyperbole and distorted facts to back up his points. He starts big too when he points to a debunked study that says good teachers can pull kids out of poverty, that the best teachers can add 250 thousand dollars to the lifetime wages of a class. Let’s see 25 kids working for forty-five years averages out to 250 dollars a year, which is hardly breaking children free of poverty numbers. To put that amount in perspective that’s a little more than Mitt Romney made in interest per minute last year. Yes teachers can inspire but until we do something to overcome the inequity between the rich and the middle class and the poor there is only so much teachers can do.

Mr. Duncan, you are a shining example – Topeka K-12 | Examiner.com

Mr. Duncan,

I read your Teacher Appreciation Week letter to teachers, and had at first decided not to respond. Upon further thought, I realized I do have a few things to say. I’ll begin with a small sample of relevant adjectives just to get them out of the way: condescending, arrogant, insulting,misleading, patronizing, egotistic, supercilious, haughty, insolent, peremptory, cavalier, imperious, conceited,contemptuous, pompous, audacious, brazen, insincere, superficial, contrived, garish, hollow, pedantic, shallow, swindling, boorish, predictable, duplicitous, pitchy, obtuse, banal, scheming, hackneyed, and quotidian. Again,it’s just a small sample; but since your attention to teacher input is minimal, I wanted to put a lot into the first paragraph.

Escaping the constraints of ‘No Child Left Behind’ – The Washington Post

By Arne Duncan, Published: January 6

Ten years ago today, President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act. The law has improved American education in some ways, but it also still has flaws that need to be fixed.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for the first time exposed achievement gaps and created a conversation about how to close them. The law has held schools accountable for the performance of all students no matter their race, income level, English-proficiency or disability. Schools can no longer point to average scores while hiding an achievement gap that is morally unacceptable and economically unsustainable.