It is hard to find anybody with a bad word to say about Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s young education secretary. Margaret Spellings, his predecessor in the Bush administration, calls him “a visionary leader and fellow reformer”. During his confirmation hearings, Lamar Alexander, a senator from Tennessee and himself a former education secretary, sounded more like a lovesick schoolgirl than a member of the opposition party: “I think you’re the best.” Enthusiastic without being over-the-top, pragmatic without being a pushover, he is also the perfect embodiment of mens sana in corpore sano — tall and lean, clean-cut and athletic, a Thomas Arnold of the digital age.
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Since moving to the education department a couple of months ago he has been a tireless preacher of the reform gospel. He supports charter schools and merit pay, accountability and transparency, but also litters his speeches with more unfamiliar ideas. He argues that one of the biggest problems in education is how to attract and use talent. All too often the education system allocates the best teachers to the cushiest schools rather than the toughest. Duncan also stresses the importance of “replicating” success. His department, he says, should promote winning ideas (such as “Teach for America”, a programme that sends high-flying university graduates to teach in under-served schools) rather than merely enforcing the status quo.
Nor is this just talk. Duncan did much to consolidate his reputation as a reformer on May 6, when the White House announced that it will try to extend Washington, DC’s voucher programme until all 1,716 children taking part have graduated from high school. The Democrat-controlled Congress has been trying to smother the programme by removing funding. But Duncan has vigorously argued that it does not make sense “to take kids out of a school where they’re happy and safe and satisfied and learning”. He and President Obama will now try to persuade Congress not to kill the programme.
Duncan is arguably the luckiest education secretary since Jimmy Carter created the department in 1979. He is being showered with money by his boss. The stimulus bill will provide him with an extra $100 billion (Rs.500,000 crore) to improve America’s schools, the biggest educational windfall in the country’s history. He also has a $5 billion (Rs.25,000 crore) budget for the specific purpose of encouraging educational innovation.
Duncan is the perfect man to capitalise on these opportunities. His mother founded and ran an after-school programme for poor children on Chicago’s South Side. He spent seven years as CEO of the Chicago public schools, the third-largest system in the country, closing bad schools and shifting resources to more successful ones.
President Obama too is passionate about education, convinced that it holds the key to two of his most cherished domestic reforms: narrowing the income gap between rich and poor, and boosting the productivity of the average worker. The president and his wife are living examples of how education can achieve the American dream. On May 6, the president also demonstrated that he is willing to annoy the teachers’ unions, who regard Washington’s school-voucher programme as the spawn of the devil.
Yet it is hard to suppress a feeling that all this is too good to be true. Entrenched vested interests and a decentralised system — with much of the day-to-day decision-making controlled by 16,000 school districts — combine to squash most promises of improvement. The mighty teachers’ unions regularly welcome reforms in theory while destroying them in practice. Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, perfectly described this slippery bunch as “the blob”.
The battle between Duncan and the blob is a crucial one. The result of the battle will determine, first, whether it is worth continuing with moderate education reforms — for if these reforms cannot succeed with $100 billion and a golden boy at the helm, they never will. It will also determine whether President Obama can deliver on his promise to build the American economy on the rock of well-educated and productive workers, rather than the sand of financial speculation.
Clampdown on foreign scholars
A form of protectionism making its way into federal law in the United States has raised concerns about the continued ability of universities to employ international scholars.
Massive government subsidies for banks, car manufacturers and others include a little-noticed provision called the Employ American Workers Act. Added quietly by Congress, it requires that aided firms give preference to hiring Americans. A similar proposal now being discussed would also tighten the rules for ‘H1B’ temporary employment visas for highly-educated workers. Neither measure applies directly to US universities and colleges, which have a total of 126,123 international scholars on their books. But some worry that an ‘Americans First’ movement could make it harder to hire academics from abroad.
“I’d say there is concern about the Act’s impact on international scholars, but it’s hard to say exactly what we should expect it to be,” says Victor Johnson, senior advisor for public policy at Nafsa: Association of International Educators. “If the question is whether this is symbolic of a trend away from hiring international scholars, and whether foreigners who seek H1B visas should be concerned about that, my answer would be not as much as they think they should.”
Nevertheless, according to Johnson, “perception is reality”. “We are in the economic times we are in, and members of Congress are going to do what they are going to do. I hope it is more of a bubble than a trend.”
Two senators, Bernard Sanders, an independent representing Vermont, and Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa, have now proposed bipartisan legislation that would prohibit employers from hiring further H1B visa holders under certain conditions. H1Bs are designed to allow foreign skilled workers to be hired when Americans with the same skills are in short supply. More than a third of international scholars at US universities are on H1Bs. “It’s wrong to bring in H1B workers if we have workers here, and it’s more unconscionable when you have a recession going on,” says Grassley.
Others insist that political pressures pose no immediate problems for the higher education sector. “It is too early to tell whether the economic crisis will have an impact on US higher education hiring from abroad,” says Andy Brantley, president of Cupa-HR, the association of university human resources officers. “As of now, the government has not made changes to the H1B visa exclusions that are applicable to US colleges and universities, so the federal guidelines applicable to them have not changed.”
According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), the number of international scholars employed by US higher education institutions rose 8 percent in 2007-08, the last academic year for which figures are available. “I think the market will continue to be robust because American universities need to draw on a global brain pool, especially in the sciences. Scientific laboratories on these campuses are international, and they are going to continue to look to employ staff broadly and deeply,” says Allan Goodman, president of IIE.
Nevertheless, if the recession is prolonged and if other factors play a part, such as recent fears about a global swine flu pandemic, “those things could change the way people think and behave”, adds Goodman.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education & The Economist)