SM: That is unusual to take a break between your junior and senior year. I imagine most of your peers were in the money business and attorneys and other professionals.
Secretary Duncan: I just viewed the word so differently. I wanted to check myself. Was this something that was just an interest to me or something I wanted to devote my life to? Over the course of that year, it reconfirmed to me that this was home. This was who I was. This is what I wanted to do with my life.
SM: Was there an ‘ah hah’ moment in there that really confirmed it?
Secretary Duncan: There wasn’t one. It just gave me lots of time to think and spend time in the community, and to spend time teaching and tutoring. It reconfirmed to me that this is who I was. It was what I wanted to do. I loved that year. I came out of that knowing that was what I wanted to do with my life.
SM: I’ve watched a number of your interviews on You Tube. In the interviews, you laid out some broad objectives for education, including transforming schools into community centers, incorporating school-based healthcare and extending school days, school weeks and school years. How do we get there? Should we do this at the state level, district level, school level? What are the steps to get us there?
Secretary Duncan: That’s a great question. I think you have to engage at every level. It’s about leveraging scarce resources. What it is fundamentally about is a different vision of what a school should be. I just think schools should be, need to be and I go so far as to say in many communities, must be community centers with a very different vision of what’s going on there and open 12, 13, 14 hours a day with a wide variety with after school activities for students, but also brothers and sisters and very importantly for their parents. In many communities the streets are not as safe as we would like them to be. And from three o’clock to six o’clock are times of high anxiety for parents. I think when schools become true hearts of the community with a whole series of wraparound services in which families are learning together, great things are going to happen with those children. So, what does that mean? It means, I think we all have to behave in different ways. We’re putting significant resources behind what we call safe and healthy students. Community centers will be a piece of that.
What people don’t know in the health care bill that passed, there is $250 million to create school-based health credits. I’m a big, believer in giving not just academic support, but tutoring, physical and emotional health. There is a huge resource there - we’re partnering with HHS with that. I think states have to play. I think districts have to play. The YMCAs and Boys Clubs should think about stopping building new buildings and put all these shared resources, not into bricks and mortar, but into kids. Schools can run schools nine o’clock to three o’clock and Boys and Girls Clubs and YMCAs and other great non profits can run schools from three o’clock in the afternoon till nine o’clock at night.
SM: Is that being done anywhere now?
Secretary Duncan: It is being done. In Chicago, we had 150 schools. There are community schools. We pushed this very, very hard. We had Boys and Girls Clubs actually running some of our schools after school. This leveraged resources. For every dollar we’re spending on this, we’re getting investments of five, six and seven dollars between state and federal non-profit partners coming in. It is a different vision. It is about leveraging resources. It’s not just about money. It’s about thinking differently. These schools, 95,000 schools across the country, have tremendous unmet needs. Every school has classrooms. Virtually ever school has a computer lab. They have libraries. They have gyms. Some have pools. These are great, great community assets that we need to open to the community. Again, the more schools choose to become the heart and the center of the community, the more we have comprehensive wraparound services, the better our students are going to do. If students are hungry and they are not fed, they can’t learn. If they can’t see the blackboard and they need glasses, they can’t learn if we don’t fix that. If their social and emotional needs are not being met they can’t learn. If they are in fear going to and from school, they can’t learn. All these things are critical in helping students fulfill their tremendous academic potential.
SM: Taking that one-step further, I’m in Mecklenburg County in Charlotte, N.C. How does my local school system begin?
Secretary Duncan: I think if there are particular areas of real need, your schools must make a commitment to find ways to be very creative with district resources, with the state resources, with local for-profit and non-profit partners without federal resources to extend the hours. Not just to extend the school day, but extend the hours that the school is open. It is a different vision... schools that are full service community centers with a wide variety of non-profit partners coming in to help students and families to be successful.
Look at where your greatest need is in your local district level and figure out a variety of partnerships that will create this new network of opportunity. It’s a different mindset and a different vision of what a school needs to be for the 21st century. I think the days in which a school can be open six hours a day, five days a week, nine months out of the year, simply doesn’t work for the vast majority of American families and children today.
SM: Let me ask you a different kind of question. You were chief executive of Chicago public schools. When you look at that system as a kind of microcosm for the United States, what lessons did you learn there that you were able use in your current gig as Secretary of Education?
Secretary Duncan: Some were applicable and some were not. Obviously it’s very urban. Ninety percent of our students came from the minority community. Eighty-five percent in the district lived below the poverty line. Obviously I didn’t have as much experience in rural suburban areas. I’ve tried to spend a lot of the last 18 months as I travel in those rural and suburban communities. But the biggest lesson I got was that every child can be successful. There are challenges. Poverty is never destiny. Great teachers make just an extraordinary difference in student’s lives. Great teachers, great principals, great schools are able to do just absolutely amazing things often in very, very difficult and challenging circumstances. Of all the challenges of poverty and violence in communities, our students can do extraordinary things when they have great adults in their lives. That is a huge motivator for me.
SM: You have to start with the premise that failure is not an option and go from there.
Secretary Duncan: Exactly. To get to success is a lot of hard work. To me it’s a sort of cradle to career continuance. You need great early childhood programs. You need great teachers, great principals. Schools must have a real clear culture of high expectations. You need all the wrap around services we talked about. You need to be building that culture around the expectation that the students will go to college. You need to start doing that literally in first and second and third grade. If you wait until junior or senior year, it is too late. If you do all those things - great early childhood, great family involvement, high expectations, wrap around services - Children from even the toughest of communities can do extraordinarily well.
SM: This issue of SEEN Magazine is our Tribute to Teachers issue. What do you see for the future of teachers and what can your department do to help teachers be better educators?
Secretary Duncan: Teachers are the unsung heroes in our society. They are the most altruistic people in our country. This is the thing. Most professions are measured by what you did, what you accumulate. That may be a fancy title, or power, or a corner office or money. Teaching is very, very different. You are measured not by what you get, but by what you give — the knowledge, the sense of self-esteem, the sense of possibilities. So, we have to do everything we can to support great, great teachers and to help teachers continue to grow and learn. I have met with literally thousands and thousands of teachers over the past 18 months around the country. I can’t tell you how inspiring it is and how motivating it is for me to walk into these great classrooms with teachers in a sometimes very tough environment. They literally change these students’ lives on a daily basis. To talk with the students and to hear them talk about when other adults give up on them and sometimes their own family members give up on them and their teachers are there for them... we can’t do enough to support, to recognize, to reward and to shine the spotlight on those extraordinary teachers who, every single day, are changing the life chances of our nation’s students.
SM: What types of things are you now able to do as Secretary of Education to help the teaching profession?
Secretary Duncan: A number of things. I think there are a lot that is frankly broken under No Child Left Behind that we need to fix. I think that No Child Left Behind is far too punitive. There are lots of ways to fail and almost no recognition for success. I think it is very prescriptive and very topped out and it led, and maybe unintentionally, but it led to a dumbing down of standards. It led to a narrowing of the curriculum.
One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard from teachers and students and parents around the country is about this narrowing of the curriculum. I think we need to fix what is broken there and we need to make sure that we are rewarding success and shining the spotlight on great, great teachers. We have to make sure we are giving them the mentoring and support they need. Teacher evaluations are largely broken around the country and meaningless. We need to make those better. We need to make sure we are providing much greater flexibility at the local level. I always say jokingly, but I mean it very seriously, that the best ideas in education are never going to come from me or from Washington. They are always going to come at the local level.
We need to continue to empower our local educators to make a difference in student bodies and give them that flexibility. We are raising standards very significantly, which is huge. Forty-eights states are working on raising high standards for every single child. We have had 41 states already adopt those higher standards. That is a huge step in the right direction. We want to make a massive investment in a well-rounded curriculum, well-rounded education. Yes, reading and math are hugely important, obviously, but so is science and so is social studies, so is foreign language, so is physical education, so is dance and drama and music and theatre. For me, it’s not just about giving those opportunities to children in the high school level, it’s a little late at this point. This is about what we’re doing for first and second graders.
There is a tremendous amount we can do to not just continuing to invest in teachers and put a huge amount of resources there, but for better mentoring and support and encouraging local districts to come up with better evaluations. We really need to make sure we have a high standard for every single child and a well-rounded curriculum and we’re supporting the great work and listening to teachers at that local level. So much of what we want to do to fix NCLB has come from the voices of teachers around the country. Their thoughtfulness has really helped to shape our view. The final thing, we want to make an historic investment. We want to invest $3.9 billion in teachers and principals.
SM: How would that work?
Secretary Duncan: It is part of our EFTA proposal to do much better at mentoring and supporting and developing talent over time. It is a 10 percent increase over previous budgets. Talent matters tremendously to education. We want to invest in an unprecedented level in helping teachers and principals continue to hone their craft. It is an historic increase. This is the largest investment ever for teachers and principals, with a 10 percent increase over the previous year.
The final thing is, I’m much more interested in looking at growth and how much students are improving each year than test scores. I will give you a quick example. If you were my sixth grade teacher and I came to you three grade levels behind and I left you a grade level behind, in No Child Left Behind you are labeled a failure and your school is labeled a failure and ultimately your district is labeled a failure. Not only are you not a failure, you are not just a good teacher, you are a great teacher. That child has made a couple years progress for a year’s instruction. That teacher has done a herculean job, an extraordinary job.
SM: We have to learn how to reward improvement.
Secretary Duncan: Right. I am much more interested in growth and gain and improvement than I am in test scores. I think teachers need more time to collaborate. So, I talk about more time, not just longer days for students and schools open longer hours, but how do we create time for teachers to plan and to work together to have more meaningful professional development and ability to collaborate. I think that additional time for teachers to do this would be hugely beneficial. There is a lot there, but there is nothing more important than investing in the most important thing in education, which is that interaction between the teacher and his or her student every single day. That’s the core of education. That is the heart of what we’re trying to do.
SM: Any final thoughts you would like to share with the nation’s educators?
Secretary Duncan: I can’t say it often enough — just thank you. No one goes into education to make a million dollars. They go into education to make a difference in students’ lives. I’ve just been in awe of the talent and the commitment and the hard work and the passion that I’ve seen. Again, I’ve been to about 38 states and hundreds and hundreds of schools and met with thousands and thousands of teachers and the difference that are teachers are making in our students’ lives makes me extraordinarily hopeful about where we are going as a country. There is nothing more important than giving every single child a great, great education. All of us can point to those teachers in our lives who really changed us. For me it is my high school English teacher. I want every child to have those kinds of opportunities that I was lucky enough to have.