Arne Duncan Oral History, interview 2

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, everybody. How are you doing?

Fine. How are you, Arne?

I’m doing OK.

Thanks for making time for us. Good to see you again. Let me just review where we are. We covered most of the big across-the-waterfront topics last time, but there were some odds and ends of things that we didn’t touch on. You were very generous to offer more time, and we were less generous just to accept it and say yes. We’re always eager to do more interviews and to hear more. So we’ll dive into those topics. Again, just the ground rules: anything you say is kept under a veil of confidentiality. We’ll get you copies of transcripts to look at, and you can make decisions at that point if you want to make any editorial revisions or hold on to things for a period of time afterward. Do you have any questions for us before we start?

I appreciate that, and am happy to have you use whatever you want. There are no state secrets here.

Terrific. Well, I thought I would begin with something that’s really very timely, and that is: do you have a [basketball championship] bracket?

I have a broken bracket, so yes. [laughter]

But you do have a bracket.

I do have a bracket.

All right. But you’re not feeling very confident in it right now.

I have Kansas winning it, so I’m done. [laughter]

All right. My son has one that’s in a similar situation. Of course those of us here at UVA [University of Virginia] contributed to breaking a lot of brackets early again this year.

We don’t want to hear it. Well, Arne, who’s your backup now?

I’m just watching the show. [laughter]

Very good. Well, there’s a method to my madness. One of the things I had flagged was intercollegiate athletics, and we didn’t talk about that last time. I know absolutely nothing about the relationship between the Department of Education and the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association], if it exists at all. So let me throw that out there to you. Was that a part of your portfolio?

It’s a good question. There is no direct link whatsoever. I had a personal interest, growing up playing basketball and seeing my friends go to colleges and make lots of money for colleges, not get degrees, and come back to Chicago and have pretty tough lives, quite frankly. The one thing I did do—and you’d have to check the timing of all this—I gave a speech and said that they had to raise the graduation requirements to compete in the NCAA. As you looked at the overall graduation rates and the white-black disparities in terms of graduation rates, they were devastating.

It wasn’t by any stretch just me, but they actually did raise the graduation rates. I remember [James A.] Boeheim from Syracuse saying I was crazy. You could check the years: one year the University of Connecticut won it, and the next year they weren’t eligible. So I got some heat there, but I was glad to see that happen. Frankly, it was a very low bar. It should probably have been significantly higher.

Separately from this, when I came out of the administration I co-chaired the [John S. and James L.] Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, so it’s something I definitely have interest in. I spent a small percent of my time with it. But that was my only direct connection there. It was a pretty tough speech. It was pretty quiet when I did the speech. There wasn’t a lot of cheering, but they paid a little bit of attention and actually made some changes.

So the NCAA’s independence is pretty profound then.

Yes. They’re all nonprofit or whatever they are. They’re their own organization.

And Arne, just to follow up on that, was the blowback across the board in the sense of Jim Boeheim saying that you’re crazy because we just can’t hold our players to those standards? Did you get blowback from the black community about the disparity that you were citing?

No, we didn’t.

And your point was, I’m sure, to help both white and black students, students of all races and colors, to have a better life by having better education.

Yes, that’s the heart of it. It gets a little bit insidious. The racial dynamics of—these are broad generalities—largely, white coaches making millions and, largely, black players making nothing and not even getting their degrees. Calling this slavery, that’s way too strong a metaphor, but there’s something about white masters getting wealthy on black labor. The degree is much more important for lifetime earnings than any payment you might get for playing. That’s all changed more recently.

I don’t know if you follow all this. It’s sort of the Wild West now, very different than when I was in the administration. There were some things about the racial dynamics that were particularly troubling to me. There were many teams that had—I’m making these numbers up—85 percent graduation rates for white athletes and 15 or 20 percent for black. There were some schools that had less than 10 percent graduation rates for black athletes. Almost no one’s going pro, as we all know, so they’re selling a dream that’s not real. I was troubled by it. I’ll just say that and leave it there.

Can you talk at all about your enforcement priorities for Title IX and athletics?

Yes. The Office of Civil Rights—Catherine Lhamon, who is just a dynamo, was back there, and some of that stuff got reversed, as you know, with the next administration. But yes, we were just trying to make sure people were treated decently, with humanity. At the end of the day we can get technical on it, but those were some of the toughest meetings. We were meeting with folks who just had been abused.

Crazy stuff was happening, not just Title IX but stuff coming into the Office of Civil Rights. The worst example that I can remember was a high school girl in Alabama who got raped, probably by the football team, and she got expelled for lewd behavior. This is just inconceivable. So where we could, we’d try to step in and challenge folks. I always felt like we were the court of last resort. It’s like the Supreme Court. When you get no justice anywhere else, stuff ends up at the doorstep of the Office of Civil Rights, trying to make sure people are treated with decency.

The consistent number of young women on college campuses who are sexually abused is 20 percent. It’s a staggering percentage, and that’s been true forever. Something about that just doesn’t feel fantastic, so we were trying to make sure they’re heard and listened to and have some redress or some ability to address issues when they dealt with those horrific situations.

In terms of the development—actually, I’m going to come back to athletics, since you were already talking about athletics. I was talking about Title IX and athletics, but we can talk about the sexual harassment piece, too. That’s fine.

I’m interested in big changes in civil rights under the [Barack] Obama administration in terms of the focus on sexual assault and Title IX coverage of that. What was the work that was done with institutions of higher education to get them on board for addressing what was a known problem? There wasn’t consistent attention to it, whereas now, at least, there is far greater attention to it.

Yes. I don’t remember all the details, but it wasn’t just the President. Vice President [Joseph R.] Biden [Jr.] was really outspoken on this and clear. I don’t think we went to UVA, but we did some events together on college campuses. We had the President, the Vice President, and you had Catherine Lhamon. I thought she was extraordinary. We had a really good team working on this. It’s uncomfortable. It’s unpleasant. It’s not anything any of us want to talk about, but it beats sweeping it under the rug.

What I remember is the numbers hadn’t changed over time. It wasn’t like these things were going down. It was a pretty constant 20 or 25 percent for a long time, and that just felt untenable. So we were trying to talk to universities to get clarity around processes and procedures and a standard of evidence, and trying to give women a chance to tell their stories and be heard and have some protection. If disciplinary action was necessary, we would have that as well.

I was always confused about why some of this stuff doesn’t go to the police. I still don’t have the answer. Rape is rape, whether it’s on a college campus or on a street corner, so something was a little bit—what’s the word? Closed in. Some things that happened on college campuses, had they happened in a bar or happened in the street, consequences would have been much more severe. I still don’t quite understand the legalities there.

But anyway, we were trying to talk about this, trying to get college campuses to have a clear procedure, folks to be heard and not having to be in the same room, same dorm, same class as their accuser. I know sometimes things get fabricated, but I think that’s a tiny percent, so I was less worried about that and more worried about the vast majority where really bad things happen and folks thought they had no recourse.

So how would you respond to some of the criticism of what the administration did under Title IX for sexual assault and harassment, that the approach was too pro-victim? In other words, it didn’t fully give due process, you could say, a fair shot, to those who were accused of sexual assault and harassment? How might you respond to those criticisms?

Honestly, I just think it’s factually incorrect. There was absolutely due process. In my mind, the scales were tilted way too far in the opposite direction, and we just tried to level those scales a little bit.

You’re an attorney. You would talk to Catherine about the nuances of standard of evidence and all of that. In my mind, unquestionably, it was the victims of abuse who were being reabused by the system. That compounding institutional trauma is, for me, untenable.

We tried to give them due process, recourse, not trying to take away anyone else’s rights and the ability to tell their story and defend themselves. I truly don’t think we did that. My perception was it was tilted way in the opposite direction, and we just tried to level the playing field a little bit. It’s interesting. I think so often in this situation, but also in other situations, the department’s job is really to fight for the vulnerable, to fight for the disadvantaged. In a perfect world you wouldn’t have to do those things, but far too often, at every level, the vulnerable and disadvantaged get taken advantage of and get quite literally abused. That’s what I was rebelling against or pushing back against.

Yes. Just know that when I frame all these, it’s not because I think that that’s true. It’s just that I’m trying to give you a chance to say—

These are all more than fair questions. And again, you may think there’s truth there. That was not my perception. We weren’t trying to railroad anybody. That was not the goal, to have innocent people suffer. The goal was to have people who have suffered tremendously have a little bit of sense that they could be supported and that we did the best we could.

Was the Clery Act [Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act] helpful, in your mind, in this realm? Particularly for—we see this at UVA now—letting us know what’s happening. We get alerts all the time, not just about sexual assault but all sorts of crimes that, unfortunately, happen on our campus as well as surrounding it and in the town of Charlottesville. But I’m just thinking, as well, so that a parent and a student looking to go to a college can ask how many sexual assaults were there in the last five years and you have that data.

Yes. That transparency’s helpful. My memory is that some folks didn’t follow it, didn’t comply, so it wasn’t just having to act, it’s having folks actually record the stuff. There were cases where universities had zero recorded. So yes, the act is helpful, but you’ve got to implement or execute against it. The act by itself sometimes was, frankly, ignored.

OK. So circling a bit back to athletics, were there any particular successes that you recall that you were excited about during the administration, or any setbacks on Title IX and athletics? It’s definitely understood in the field to be underenforced. Some would say—this may be getting a little too in the weeds—that the three-part test that you all apply that says— I can go over it, if you want, but I guess my question is, Did you feel like there was substantial forward movement during the administration? Or is this an area where it didn’t get maybe the attention that it needed? Because a lot of the headlines for Title IX, the administration, was around sexual assault, not around athletics, but still, that’s really a key component of education, so—

Yes. I don’t remember a ton on the athletics side, either victories or defeats, so I don’t recall anything right now that jumps to mind.

OK.

Arne, let me ask a naive question. What are the carrots and sticks you have as an Education Secretary when you see a problem like sexual violence?

You have enforcement ability through the Office of Civil Rights. You have the ability to fine. At Virginia Tech—you may remember the shooting there—we had to put some fines in place for things that happened there. Those are, I guess, the sticks, the consequences. For all kinds of good behavior—higher graduation rates, serving more Pell students—we couldn’t do anything financially, but we could convene, spotlight, bring people into the White House. I’m a big believer in carrots and sticks, so we were always trying to incentivize and spotlight great behavior, but where you have to take enforcement action, you don’t really have a choice. I guess you do have a choice, but for me, if there’s a problem you have to deal with it.

Sure. Did these issues, in your recollection, rise to presidential attention, or was this something that you were pretty much dealing with on your own?

We handled that.

OK.

To follow up with the carrots and sticks characterization, one of the critiques of federal education law is simply that many of the states just take the money and disregard the conditions that are attached—so true under much of ESEA [Elementary and Secondary Education Act]. They’re doing some of the big things, but then others get left behind. This is certainly a critique that is often leveled about federal education legislation. I’m wondering if you saw evidence of that, of states that were willing to take millions, billions sometimes, and not follow through on their end of the bargain.

Yes. It’s complicated, so we’ll take a couple different levels. I’ll start on the higher ed [education] side first, and I’ll come back to K–12. My frustration—and we definitely didn’t get this done—is that on the higher ed side, there are billions and billions of dollars that go out every year in terms of financial aid, loans, Pell grants, whatever, and 100 percent of that is based upon inputs—enrollment—and 0 percent of that is based upon outcomes. For me, that’s very problematic.

What I’m always looking to do is to understand and reward degree of difficulty. I guess an example is Olympic diving. You have different scores, different point totals, for more difficulty in terms of the dive you’re making. So my point is that if you’re taking a whole bunch of first-generation college students, or Pell grant students, or students new to the country, and you’re increasing their graduation rate, honestly, that’s a higher degree of difficulty than graduating students at Virginia or at Harvard or at Yale.

For me, the goal is never to go to college; the goal is to complete, so we worked on helping them get there. I wish there was some piece of money coming from the federal government that goes to places that are taking at-risk, vulnerable, less likely to graduate students and helping them not just enroll but graduate. Again, it’s the degree of difficulty thing. Maybe you’d get double the Pell for certain students where you’re getting good outcomes, or 50 percent more Pell.

And the converse—we talked about this before—on some of the for-profit stuff, where the graduation rates are really low and you’re leaving people in a worse financial position than where they started. Well, you should have less access to federal money, and maybe no access to federal money. The devil’s in the details. It would be complicated, how you do it, but the fact that it’s a little bit complicated doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, and the fact that as taxpayers we’re expending billions every year, with nothing about outcomes, nothing about quality, that doesn’t make any sense to me.

On the K–12 side, as you know, there’s Title I, Title II, whatever. There’s broad latitude, so I don’t necessarily think states were stealing money. I don’t remember a case where we got a report from the Inspector General that a state was stealing money. I think the larger concern is always whether that money is being used well in ways that increase student achievement and what’s the evidence base behind that. That’s often very nebulous.

My personal opinion is that this wasn’t fraud. I just thought the Title II money, the professional development money, which was $1 billion for the country, was the money I felt the least good about putting out, because I had no sense for what that was doing to make teachers better or how it was improving student achievement. There was little to no evidence base there. So for me it was less fraud or whatever. It’s just that there’s broad latitude and no tie to student outcomes. I guess that’s the common theme. In K–12 and higher ed, there’s no tie to student outcomes.

It seems like you’re all trying to address that in looking at waivers, and Race to the Top, encouraging states, and really requiring states, to look at student achievement as it relates to teacher evaluation, but then there was quite a bit of pushback. Some teachers criticized that as, “You’re blaming me for the students’ home situation or other things. I’m doing a great job, but the student still isn’t performing for reasons that are out of my control.” So how might you respond to criticisms of the link that your administration drew between evaluating teachers and student achievement?

I’ll back up and answer directly. We haven’t talked in a while, so I forget what was said, but [Nadarajan] Raj Chetty, who’s done his massive studies of millions and millions of student records in New York, found that one good middle school teacher raised the lifetime earnings of his class by $250,000. This isn’t about test scores; it’s just what one good teacher can do. You think about putting three good teachers in a row together—or, the converse, three bad teachers in a row, and what that means. That child can be, at that point, two, two and a half, three years behind and never catch up.

What you do for an art teacher, a PE [physical education] teacher, is complicated, but for the basic subjects, what you always want to do is compare apples to apples. If you have a student that’s a high-flyer and fluent from a two-parent home, I’m not looking at their score compared to a kid who has a single mom with eight kids, but you can easily control for the demographics. It’s not kid-by-kid, but in aggregate you can get some sense of this.

For me the goal is a year’s growth for a year’s instruction. I saw here in Chicago teachers who routinely had 2 or 2.5 years of growth for a year of instruction. I had a school that I closed, and I took a lot of heat for that, but the average student in that school was gaining 0.2 for each year, so basically students had to go to school 5 years to gain one grade level in reading. That’s malpractice.

You truly can compare apples—students with special needs versus students with special needs, limited English proficient versus—you can do these things, and it’s almost ironic. For me it was never about a single test score. I just was trying to say that the goal of teaching is for students to learn, and we have to have some measure of student learning that has to be some factor in evaluating teachers. There are lots of other things, professional development, leadership, whatever else you’re doing in the school, but I think teachers dramatically change lives, often for the better, sometimes for the worse, and the fact is that we have no clue who’s doing what.

I always give the analogy—I don’t know if I used this with you—that at the time in California there were 300,000 teachers. I would go to California and say, “Your top 10 percent, your top 30,000, are world-class teachers that literally could teach anywhere in the world, and your bottom 10 percent, your bottom 30,000, probably shouldn’t be teaching, and nobody can tell me who’s in what category in this state. How is that good for kids? How do they benefit?”

Arne, let me ask you a question related to this. This is one of these big-picture questions: How do you manage to maintain the allegiance of a traditional Democratic constituency of educators when you are applying tough medicine to them? Kimberly will know this far better than I do. It sounds as though you are being far more disciplined an influence than your Democratic predecessors in this position. How do you manage to do this?

Or the current administration, to be quite frank. [laughs] It’s a great question. I understand the question—I guess it’s just not how I viewed my role. My job was to fight for kids. I grew up working in communities that were—and my mother’s program was—extraordinarily poorly served by public education. When I ran Chicago Public Schools, I had some of the best schools in the state and some of the worst schools in the state. I had 600 schools, so you had to work at all of those continuums. I honestly thought that if we, as Democrats, weren’t willing to challenge some of those traditional orthodoxies, nobody else would. This is where I was blessed to have a President who was willing to fight for kids.

I can’t remember whether I’ve told you or not, but when he was on the campaign trail and was way down compared to Hillary [Rodham] Clinton—he was not winning at this point early on—he went to the NEA [National Education Association] and talked about merit pay and paying good teachers more, and he got booed. So it was not in his political interest at that point. When you’re fighting for every vote, and you’re down 15 or 20 points, that’s not politically expedient, but it’s actually what he believed.

Our job, or my job, I thought, was to fight for kids and to treat everybody with respect. People hear the punitive stuff, but it was really trying to say great teaching matters, and let’s recognize those great teachers. Let’s reward them and let’s pay them way more. Let’s change the career ladder. It’s basically really trying to honor the profession. I actually think we demean the profession when we act like teachers are interchangeable widgets on some kind of factory assembly line.

It wasn’t my goal to upset apple carts, but it wasn’t my goal not to upset apple carts. My goal was to try and do as best we could for kids. There’s some absolutely fair critique, and I took some heat for that. Politically, he won twice, so it didn’t cost him the election, but I think you have to show some—you’re there for a reason, I think, and I wasn’t there for politics. I’m not a politician. I was there to try and do the best I could, in an imperfect way, for kids, and I think great teaching matters a lot to kids and to families and ultimately to the country.

There are so many directions I could go in. I think one of the things—this is going back to the carrots-and-sticks question, and it relates to our discussion previously about education and federalism. There’s a debate around what role the federal government should play in education at all and, now that we have an established federal role, the nature of that role.

So, for example, here’s one criticism. Let’s just use the teacher example: “You’re making me be evaluated by how I’m performing.” Another criticism might be, “The federal government shouldn’t have any role in teacher quality.” There’s an accepted orthodoxy that the federal government should stay, in some ways, away from curriculum. But then your administration really, in many ways, incentivized Common Core. It didn’t require it, but it certainly incentivized it.

I’m interested in your reflections on the evolution of the federal role in education while you were there, because you obviously shifted it, definitely with Race to the Top. That was a significant shift. Then, before I forget, I want to flag that you all were about to do Race to the Top for equity, I think, and then it just didn’t ultimately happen, so I’m also interested in your thoughts about the federal role in incentivizing fair school funding because the whole system is built on a really broken foundation. But let’s just start with the first question.

It’s a great question. I have my personal, clear point of view that folks might agree with or disagree with. In reflection, I maybe understood some of this coming in; I think I definitely understood more of it coming out and during the time. But I think there are three critical roles that the federal government can play. I think we’re primarily talking K–12, but not exclusively.

The first is the fight for equity, for the vulnerable, the disenfranchised, the special needs kids. You go back to federal shoots up and desegregates schools in the South. It’s really trying to fight for equity. The second bucket is excellence, and we’ll talk about how to do this stuff. For me those were the higher standards. That’s more kids going to college. You don’t want equity at a low bar; you want equity with a high bar. So pre-K, on one hand, that’s equity, until we try to talk about high-quality pre-K, not glorified babysitting. So fighting for equity, that’s Title I, maybe special ed funding, Title I funding, fighting for excellence and having a really high bar. Then the third big one that is way underutilized is innovation. Did we talk about the i3 fund, the Investing in Innovation Fund?

I don’t believe so.

I don’t think so.

OK, sorry. We should have, so I’ll take a quick second. As you know, the overwhelming majority of federal funding is just block grants. It just goes out by formula, to states, largely—a little bit to districts, but mostly to states. What we did with the Investing in Innovation Fund—Jim Shelton, who you may know, Kim, was really the mastermind there. The thought was pretty basic, that if you had a little bit of evidence of how you were improving student achievement, we’d give you a little bit of money, which was like $5 million. If you had medium-level evidence, we’d give you more money, $25 million. I think our top grants were like $50 million.

This wasn’t my idea. This wasn’t Barack Obama’s idea. This was just show us what you’re doing to raise graduation rates so more kids go to college and close the gaps. It had never happened before, so it was revolutionary. It was all carrots, no sticks. No one had to apply, but I remember going to rural Appalachia where there were poor white families. They were doing a lot to increase graduation rates. We helped them scale. We helped them serve more kids, serve more schools, and serve more communities.

I remember—my numbers won’t be exact—we were able to fund about 5 or 6 percent of the proposals we received, so there was huge demand, and we just were able to serve a tiny percent, which sort of breaks your heart. But that’s what we don’t do in education. For every problem we have, and we have lots of problems, it’s being solved somewhere, and I saw many of the problems, I saw some solutions, but what we don’t do is scale.

It’s not like a private-sector innovation that scales and there’s market demand. It just doesn’t happen that way, so in that sense it’s a pretty broken system. We used that money to replicate success, whatever that looked like—and we put a couple hundred million dollars in, which was fantastic. I would love to put a couple billion dollars in.

We went back to Congress. It’s the kind of thing where everyone doesn’t get their slice of the pie. Folks in Congress on both sides of the aisle, to be clear, didn’t necessarily love it, but to me, that’s almost the most—well, those three. I don’t say it’s more important, but those are three, I think, critical roles that the federal government can play, and that last one—all these should be nonideological, but the last one, it’s just about what’s your evidence base.

We did it, I loved it, and I saw the results. I still run into people who say, “You gave us an i3 grant. It changed everything we did.” So it’s pretty meaningful. But basically we did that short term, and rather than us getting 10x [10 times] the money, that basically went to zero. So those are three things I’d like the federal government to play, again, regardless of party or politics or who’s in office: equity, excellence, and scaling innovation.

And what are your thoughts about the federal role in school funding? Some people say that’s been overlooked, that the federal government should really be incentivizing fair funding far more than it does. In many ways, some have said that the federal government is complicit in the unfair funding we have, because we still—sometimes I say “we” because I used to work at Department of Education—but anyway, you, the department, the administration are complicit because you’re still giving out millions and the funding is clearly inequitable, so it’s enabling it.

I think that’s a fair critique. I put that in the equity bucket, and that’s what you’re trying to fight for, again, not for everything to be equal but for equity. Equity means, by definition, different levels of funding going for different levels of need. I think it’s a fair question or critique. We could have done a Race to the Top just on school funding formulas and done nothing else, and not touched anything else. We didn’t make that choice, and we can talk about why, but I do think the federal government theoretically could play a bigger role. Then again you’d get tremendous pushback from Congress, Rs [Republicans] and Ds [Democrats]. That would be the ultimate, “How dare you tell me how to spend my money at the local level?”

There are gross inequities in our country. I don’t have to tell you that. Could the federal government incentivize or penalize? Theoretically, yes. Is there anyone else who could do it? Probably not, but that’s a very tough sell, I can promise you, with Congress.

So do you think it’s the politics? You were saying, “I wasn’t so worried about what was happening in terms of polling or popularity, all of that,” but for this particular issue, is it that the political headwinds are so strong against it that you just can’t get it done?

Well, it’s two things: you would have to test that, and really check whether you could get it done. My gut said that because everything else was so hard, anything trying to look at that would be difficult. For me, always, it’s not just the amount of money that’s spent, but how it’s spent, so I never just equate money with outcomes. I’ve seen too many cases where lots of money didn’t bring you any better outcomes. So, for me, yes, you want to level the playing field as best you can, but that’s an input; that’s not an output, and that’s not the stand-alone goal. The goal is higher graduation rates and more students being successful. More equitable money contributes to that, but that money has to be well spent. That’s maybe a significant distinction where I would draw the line.

I just go back, again, to Chicago. That was one of the first things I looked at for my schools that were dramatically underperforming: Were they underfunded? In fact, they were generally receiving significantly more money than other schools, because we had more equitable funding for them. It was around kids at need. It wasn’t that they couldn’t have used more money. Relative to other folks, they were getting, frankly, way more than their fair share, and still the outcomes were that kids were getting 0.2-year’s growth for the year’s instruction. Money’s important, but for me that’s not mission accomplished at that point.

Arne, can you give some examples of funding? You noted these proposals would come in and you could only fund a very small proportion of them. Are there ones that to this day stick out in your mind that there was a problem, you helped to fund a solution, it worked, and you just wish that you could scale it up and apply it to every part of the country where that same problem was, that would bring the outcomes that you wished?

Yes, there are lots of examples. I won’t recall them all, and to be clear, this was all work that was already happening. There were people who were doing the work and had been doing it long enough, frankly, to have some, or medium, or a lot of evidence. So this wasn’t just someone having a great idea. We didn’t fund that. We probably should’ve done that, it’s like your startup funding. We didn’t do that.

But teacher quality, teacher retention, master teacher, things around reading, things around math, high school graduation rates, college perseverance rates, there were all kinds of different ideas coming from different places that were, I thought, fantastic. I would have loved to have done 10x, 20x, 50x what we did. There was tremendous demand, and there were many, many, many more—Were they all good ideas? I’m not sure, but there were many, many more good ideas than we had ability to put some resources behind. Then you want to sustain that funding. You don’t want it to disappear. That was part of the challenge.

Using that example you gave of Chicago schools, of the 0.2 percent learning increase in one year and that it would take five years to get to a full year of learning increase—I remember in our last conversation, what your mother had done, and what you had participated in as a young person in her tutoring, and helping kids after school. I remember your talking about having public schools as community centers that stay open in the afternoon and the evening so that kids have a place to go and work on their homework or have fun, as well, and play basketball.

I’m always interested—and this was to Kimberly’s question, too—about if that helps, even if that child gets to stay at school and have lots of enrichment until six o’clock, but goes home to a really awful home atmosphere, where there are no extra books to be read, or there’s a single parent with lots of children. What did you see as Secretary of Education that was attacking that kind of problem? Let’s use either math or reading as the result.

I’ll answer that, but I’ll also just push back a little bit. I’ll go back to Raj Chetty’s study, looking at 2 or 3 million kids in New York. I promise you, a decent percentage of those kids went home to very crappy homes and had those challenges, and the difference in their lives despite all that was a great teacher. It can’t just be their job. You need more than that, but I just want to caution that I would argue, particularly in those situations, that a great teacher is that much more important in the impact they can have. So that, for me, is a starting point. The best thing you can do for those kids is give them great teachers.

So then the question is how to get more of those teachers, right?

Right. We can answer that, but then I would say, yes, all the wraparound stuff. Some stuff we saw was schools that were open longer hours, with two generations of programming, programming for the kids and programming for the parents—GED [General Educational Development (test)] and ESL [English as a second language].

I remember seeing in East Los Angeles some fantastic stuff, where those schools become community centers that are serving not just the kids but the families, and GED and ESL, and family literacy nights, and potluck dinners, and counseling. Schools can be those community hubs that serve kids but also their families, their parents. It’s not just the schools by themselves. Can you bring in the Boys & Girls Clubs, and the Ys [YMCAs], and the nonprofits, and the churches, and the faith-based?

That goes directly to my upbringing with my mother. We did 150 of those schools here in Chicago, and we saw all kinds of good results, better academics. The thing I didn’t realize but that was really important was that in poor districts like ours across the country, you have tremendous mobility. Kids are constantly moving because mom can’t pay their rent, and they’re one step ahead of the landlord.

What we found, which I didn’t anticipate, was in our community schools, we hadn’t changed poverty, we hadn’t changed family, we hadn’t changed any of that, but in those schools you actually saw mobility go down, meaning stability went up. Families were still as poor, but somehow they were more attached to the schools. They would find a way, even if they were moving to three different homes, to get the kid back to that school. It’s unfair to teachers if kids are in three different schools in a year. That’s an impossible task for a teacher; it’s impossible for the kid. Stability is so critically important. So that’s a dividend there.

There are lots of ways to try, and there’s no one answer; you have to try and do all of these things together. Even then, it’s always imperfect and not easy, but you can have tremendous impact. I always push back against a theme out there that poverty is destiny, that you’ve got to eliminate poverty, then we can talk about educating kids. I can’t tell you how much I rebel against that. I just think we need opportunity. In fact, the best way I know to alleviate poverty is to give kids a good education, give them a chance to break those cycles. That’s what I saw in my life. I hate poverty, but I don’t want to wait for poverty to end. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. What I do want to do is get great teachers in there.

So to try and answer your question directly, one thing I pushed hard on is that we have 15,000 school districts in local control, and that’s supposed to be fantastic. I would go everywhere and say, “Show me one district where they systematically identified their most successful teachers and the most successful principals, and then incentivized them to go work in the poorest communities.” There wasn’t one district doing that. There wasn’t one. There was one that was doing a little bit—this is getting a little dated—Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina was putting in a principal and about five teachers. It was good; it wasn’t everything you needed.

I remember talking to one of those principals, and he said, “I was going to retire.” He was very successful in a more affluent area, was asked to go work in a poor school as a principal, and he said, “I took that as the honor of my career, the honor of my lifetime, to have that opportunity.” That’s the mindset you want to have. When you prove you’re the best of the best, you get to do this really tough stuff. In fact, we have all of the other perverse incentives—more money, easier jobs—to go work in wealthier districts and more affluent communities. Our whole approach to the talent pipeline in getting the best talent where you need it is just totally broken, and that’s a huge problem.

Well, thank you. That is so enlightening.

Enlightening and troubling.

Yes, at the same time, I’m sad to say.

Arne, you mentioned local control, which was hammered again and again when they were trying to reauthorize ESEA. It was one of the chief criticisms of No Child Left Behind, and it’s definitely a central focus in education, law, and policy. I’m interested in your thoughts about local control. This relates a little bit to the federal role, but have we put local control so much on a pedestal that we’ve gone too far, because kids aren’t getting served? Or do we have that right balance of local control? I’m interested in your thoughts because you mentioned the phrase “local control,” and you said we’re supposed to have some control, but I’m interested in your elaboration on that point.

Yes. I’m pretty strongly opinionated on this, and I always use the analogy that we don’t have 50 state militias, that our national defense is really important to us, so we have a military for the whole country, and I think a great military’s our best defense, but I would say a great education system is our best offense. We have 15,000 school districts; we don’t have 15,000 militaries protecting us.

If we truly believe, now more than ever, that—it’s almost impossible to get a good job without a high school diploma. It’s very hard to get a good job with only a high school diploma. That if we’re in a flat world and we’re competing for the good jobs, high-knowledge, high-skill workers, that we want in our communities and our states and our country, then that has to be a national priority. I get the history of local control, but your point on the funding issue, that we’ve seen some progress but it’s still wildly—it’s based upon property taxes. By definition, that’s an unfair formula.

We’ve seen some movement of late, and Illinois has gotten better than when I was with the schools, but that’s a fundamentally unfair thing that exacerbates the divide between the haves and the have-nots. I think I can make a compelling case for social mobility, for educational and economic opportunity, and, quite frankly, now for our democracy, that if we fail to educate and fail to see this as critical, vital to our national interest, that our country’s in real trouble in terms of losing democracy—and related—losing economic opportunity.

In my mind, that argues for making this a national priority and a larger national role. That’s I’m sure the minority viewpoint there, but I don’t think we solve the education crisis we’re facing with 15,000 militias.

So how, though, would we make it a national priority?

That’s a great question. It’s easy for me to say. It’s a much harder thing to articulate—

Yes. What does that mean?

I’d go back to those three buckets of equity, excellence, and innovation, and I’d go to massive investment in places that are really willing to work there. You could have a base of funding for everybody, but if you’re really trying to move graduation rates in some communities from 60 percent to 90 percent, with business as usual, that ain’t happening. It’s not happening nationally.

Coming out of COVID and the pandemic, and how far kids are behind now, and who got hurt the most, and who never returned to school—for me it’s this national emergency. I don’t feel any urgency, I don’t see any real leadership there, and I’m just desperately worried about this generation of kids, just losing them forever, and that is untenable. We’re going to lose a bunch. So that would be my short answer, not fully fleshed out ideas, that you put a lot of resources behind people who are going to fight for equity, who are going to fight for excellence, and where you’re seeing great ideas on the innovation side, that you play heavily there.

What you have, I would argue, is a passive system—even a pass-through, in terms of the block grants—at the federal role. We challenged that pretty significantly, but you could take that to a whole different level and play a much more active role, and put a lot of money behind places that are really willing to do what’s right for kids and less money, no money, behind places that are not. That’s incredibly hard politically on all sides, geographically, Rs and Ds, but if you decide the status quo isn’t good enough—I thought it wasn’t when I was there, and I still think it’s not now—if all you do is feed the status quo, well, then you’re going to get the status quo. There’s no other way to look at it. But if you want to get better results, you have to be willing to try something different, and we can have lots of debate of what that looks like.

I just keep going to that innovation piece, where it’s scaling their ideas, not our ideas, not my ideas, not whoever. That, for me, is the real test. I could be right about something, but I could be dead wrong. President Obama could be right, but he could be dead wrong. But if you show me you’re taking graduation rates from 63 percent to 78 percent, you’re doing something right, and let’s help you help more kids. It almost breaks my heart how common sense that feels. That doesn’t seem like some brilliant idea, but we’re not in the game. We’re not in the game.

I’ll give you one more that we didn’t do enough on: more diversity in our teaching workforce. You look at our teacher diversity, it’s horrific. Our teachers look nothing like our students across the country. Is that going to naturally fix itself? It’s actually not. I think if left to its own devices, it will, if anything, probably get worse, because folks of color have more loans in college and more debt and more family responsibility, and they might desperately want to teach but have to go do something else because they can’t afford to teach, and other kids who are more privileged can do that. So if somehow you’re dissatisfied with the lack of diversity in race and gender in the teaching workforce, then you’ve got to play differently, and if you don’t play differently, you’re not going to get there.

So you definitely once in remarks talked about education as a civil right, and you also said all kids need a high-quality education. Do you think one way to make education a national priority is for there to be a federal civil right to a high-quality education?

Yes.

OK, great. Terrific. Russell, go ahead.

I actually have a set of more mundane questions because I think that, projecting ahead, people who would come to this interview would be curious about the interior life of the Education Department when you were there. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the people who populated the department, particularly in the leadership positions, who you relied on for what, what their strengths were. If you want to comment on weaknesses, that would be terrific, but just tell us a little bit about what the Department of Education was like while you were there.

Well, first, as you guys know, the vast majority of employees at any of the agencies are career service. They’re there for the long haul. You could check the numbers, but my memory is maybe there are 100 or 150 or 200 of what we call political appointees but thousands in the career service. The talent there, actually, I thought was generally extraordinary, way better than what I thought.

When I first started, I don’t remember, but literally it was probably three or four of us quote-unquote “political appointees,” and everybody else was career. Remember, you got the Recovery Act money very, very quickly there. I remember I’d come in every Saturday and meet for a couple hours with the career staff. I’d think I had some great idea and they’d say, “Arne, we tried that in 1983 and it was a disaster, and it’ll be a disaster now.” [laughter] But I just learned to count on them implicitly.

I don’t want to joke, but I didn’t know how money got out the door. Was there a Briggs truck? What happened? [laughter] And how do you do this and get it out rapidly? The big thing is, I didn’t want any scandal. I wanted it to be clean. We’re trying to build credibility and trust and respond to an emergency. They assured me, “Arne, we know how to get money out the door. We’ve been doing this for a while.”

I thought, OK. I don’t know if you’re printing it in the basement or what’s happening. But from just the mechanics of running the federal government with integrity, to different ideas, different education thoughts I had—”invaluable” doesn’t describe it, but, yes, beyond invaluable. That’s all I can say. Some folks had been there for 20, 30 years, and some were relatively new, but these were folks that were true content experts. When you think about the range of issues, there’s no way I could be an expert in even a small handful of those. You really had to rely on the folks around you to give you their best thinking. So I’m going to start there. The career service was just fantastic. Yes, not everyone was an A, but overall they were just extraordinarily helpful.

Then in terms of the team I tried to build, I’ve always tried to do the same thing. At that point I’d never built a national team before. I tried to build a really strong team in Chicago. I just was blown away by the level of talent and commitment and the folks who were willing to take huge pay cuts and move from the West Coast to the East Coast. I hated that some people would leave their families. For me, it was really to be part of the Obama administration and some sense of the opportunity to do something special.

I was trying to bring really diverse talent, not just race and ethnicity but business leaders into it and obviously educators, but folks from the faith-based community, folks from the nonprofit sector. So you could have some culture clashes and some differences of opinion, but I thought that was hugely important, and to have folks from all kinds of different walks of life come together, really no ego, just trying to make a difference.

We made plenty of mistakes and there was stuff we’d do differently, but I almost took for granted, which you shouldn’t, that we didn’t have a scandal. I don’t remember one. I don’t remember a single thing where we did something that was odd or political or whatever. No money disappeared; no people got in trouble. We just tried to make the best decisions we could in a short amount of time on an issue we think is of national importance, and having that diversity of views was huge.

It was interesting. I don’t want to talk about individuals, but there’s a culture in D.C. that just was new to me, where you have what they call the “principals” and the “staffers.” People sit around the inner table, and people sit around the outside of the table, and all those dynamics were a little strange to me. But I was not from D.C., so some of the skill sets I needed were with people who had D.C. knowledge and expertise to navigate that for me.

Those were some of the smartest people I’ve ever known. Not all, but many, were a little reluctant to give me their opinion on a certain issue. What they were used to doing was teeing up these decision-making memos and pros and cons. I’d say, “Well, what would you do?” And they’d say, “Well, here are the pros and here are the cons.” I’d say, “Got it. I can read them, [laughter] but tell me: what would you do?” I was just trying to get them to know I had confidence in them.

I would make my own decision, but they were the experts. They knew this stuff better than I ever could, and I truly did want to know what they thought. So I tried to cut through that culture of principals and staffers. We’re all experts in different things, and I care about your opinion.

The counter to that would be there are times when I’d make a decision around higher ed but have the K–12 people weigh in, not just the experts. Sometimes it’s the forest for the trees. Sometimes they see that we’re too much in the weeds, and it’s like, Oh, yes, of course, that makes sense. I was just trying to break some of the cultural norms there.

Then the final thing was just saying that every decision we made, we just assumed it would end up on the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post. They didn’t all, but many did. I just wanted to hear all the hard debate at the table. It didn’t mean we’d make the right decision, but I didn’t want ever to be surprised by something or learn about something down the road, so please challenge me, tell me I’m crazy. What are we missing? What’s the downside? Let’s really hash all that out and be our worst critics. OK, if we go this route, what are the five things that we’re going to get pushback on? We should anticipate that, and welcome that, and be ready to answer. So that was, culturally, how I tried to shape it and build it over time.

You need people to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear, and that, too often, doesn’t happen—having people who were smart but who were strong enough to say what they wanted, who knew that I desperately valued that. They were actually doing me and, more importantly, the country a disservice if they didn’t give me their best thinking. I just wanted to know their best thinking.

Did you have a Deputy Secretary?

Yes, I had two. I had Tony Miller as a deputy, and then I had Jim Shelton. Actually, I had three. John [B.] King was at the end, before I left. So yes, three.

So, serially, a single deputy rather than a pair of deputies.

Correct. I had a deputy, an Under Secretary. The deputy I had was more operational. People can structure it in different ways. The Under Secretary was my higher ed person. My chief of staff—there are different ways to structure it, but my deputy was a little bit more internal-facing.

Were those basically assigned to you from the White House, or did you pick them yourself?

It’s a great question. I had 100 percent discretion on everything. I didn’t know that that was unusual and what a gift that was, but in all those key hiring spots, those were all my picks, and honestly what a blessing that was. Had it been a different way, I probably wouldn’t have lasted that long. [laughs] I guess I’ve always been able to build my own teams. That’s been really lucky, and not everyone’s that fortunate.

I remember Tony Miller coming to meet me. I’d never heard of Tony Miller. He came to meet me in Chicago. We thought about him for a different role and ended up making him deputy. But yes, he was a friend of a friend, and I just was really impressed. Jim Shelton I tried to recruit early and couldn’t get him, and he eventually came. John King was a commissioner in New York, and he came over later. But those were all folks that I just had a lot of confidence, a lot of faith in, and it worked out sequentially for different reasons.

OK. Other questions on this?

Well, since we’re on the department, what about the conservative view that bubbles up every now and again related to this national versus local control, that we need to just abolish the U.S. Education Department?

Yes. I just say the same thing: should we abolish the military? [laughter] I see it as two sides of the same coin, one’s offense, one’s defense. If we didn’t need a military, I’d love to put all that money into education, and maybe we should do a lot more there, but for me it’s just that.

Do you abolish the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]? Where you have overwhelming national interest—NIH [National Institutes of Health]? I can’t think of a single example where we have overwhelming national interest, national security at stake, where we don’t play at the national level. I would go the opposite direction and think that because it’s of such critical national importance, and because we’re so far behind, I would elevate it dramatically.

There’s always going to be a state role, there’s always going to be a local role, but the weight of those scales I personally believe is wildly in the wrong direction, given the critical importance of it today and how far behind we are.

So to follow up on that, Arne, we all see most currently this split—national versus local. Parents need to be determining what their children are learning and what topics they’re learning. We know it’s been picked up by the right wing, the culture wars, focusing in on the topics to be taught, and particularly as it relates to race or LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer]. Were you seeing some of that? We certainly were seeing some increasing racism as a response to President Obama’s election and then his presidency—

Yes.

—the rise of the Tea Party, and against the nationalization of health care and that sort of thing. Were you seeing the roots of what we’re seeing currently during your time? Then, what are your thoughts about what we are seeing now as relates to race?

Yes, that’s a great question, and I think you hit on it, Barbara, that you saw the early manifestation, early innings of this with the Tea Party, and it’s morphed in a different direction. I just always try to be very clear. I absolutely want parents engaged. I desperately want parents more involved, but what I want them involved in is, Does my community have access to high-quality pre-K? What are the graduation rates at my high school? What are the college-going rates?

I would argue that you don’t want to put parent empowerment—you don’t want to put the genie back in the bottle. You want parents fighting for their kids. You just want them fighting for things that actually matter for their kids. If they’re fighting against CRT [critical race theory] and it doesn’t exist, that’s a whole lot of wasted energy. It’s good political energy that’s bad for education. If you have them fighting against “wokeness,” whatever the hell that means, that’s wasted energy. If you have them fighting against drag shows—I worry a lot more about our kids being shot. I worry a lot more about guns than I do about drag shows.

I hate the culture war. It makes no sense to me whatsoever other than, people know better. It’s clearly a good political tool. But I want parents demanding more of all of us. I always say the critique of me in Chicago and in D.C. was that I went too fast, and there is absolutely some truth to that, but my self-reflection is that I went too slow both places and that I would go even faster, that our kids have one chance, and we’ve got to go. What I would have loved in Chicago, and D.C., would have been parents knocking down my door saying, “I don’t have access to AP [Advanced Placement] classes. I don’t have STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] classes. I don’t have technology. I don’t have enough after-school programs, and damn it, Arne, if you don’t do better, I want you out of here.” You want that pressure. We don’t ever get that.

Actually, you guys can look at this—it’s fascinating. If you survey parents, overall, parents say their school is great, but the nation’s schools are bad. Same thing to do with our congressmen. My congressman is good, but Congress is bad. That’s called cognitive dissonance. It can’t be true, but that’s what they believe, and that’s where I got in some trouble. I went to communities and said, “Your graduation rates are too low. Your college-going rates are way too low.” These are parents that have paid a lot in property taxes. They thought they were buying something, and it was easier to attack me than it was to face that, I’m living in a neighborhood where the schools aren’t as good as I think they are.

These are deep, deep cultural issues. I don’t even want to say it’s left versus right. I wish Republicans were fighting for higher graduation rates and not for this other stuff. I wish Democrats were fighting for higher graduation rates and more access to pre-K. I want the pressure. I want the pressure being for things that actually change kids’ lives. I don’t think CRT has changed a kid’s life for better or worse yet. It just hasn’t happened. I don’t think drag shows have changed a kid’s life for better or worse yet. I do know not having access to good classes, not having access to AP, not having access to college counselors, I know that changes kids’ lives.

It’s on all of us to better educate parents, better mobilize them, better encourage their voices. That should cut across political parties in an ideal world. As Democrats, I don’t want us to concede that ground to Republicans. I want us to come together behind this stuff, and let’s figure it out.

Kimberly, we’ve got about 15 more minutes. Are there things on your agenda that you want to be sure we get to?

I asked a lot of questions I ripped off of yours, so— [laughter]

Well, I’ll open the door. You mentioned Joe Biden earlier, just sort of tangentially. Did you have much of a relationship with the Vice President? What can you tell us about his role in the administration?

Yes. I knew President Obama well before coming to the administration, but the first time I met the Vice President was when they came to Chicago to announce that I was going to be the nominee for Secretary of Education. I’d never met him before, so that was quite an honor, and he made quite an impression on my mother. I’ll never forget that. [laughter]

How so?

It was classic Biden. He was extraordinarily nice and wrote a long, handwritten letter to her afterward, which was pretty remarkable. I ended up spending a lot of time with him. We traveled a lot together. I traveled probably way more with him than I did with the President, and whether it was community college, or college, or high school, or labor stuff, we spent a lot of time together. I built a great relationship with him. His wife, as you know, still is a college professor teaching at the community college level, and I did things with her as well. So I was blessed that he became a tremendous ally and asset and partner, and to have that alignment—the President, Vice President, me—that probably doesn’t always happen, and that worked out wonderfully well. I was really blessed to have a chance to work with him.

It makes sense the way you describe it, but I’m not sure that education is an issue that people naturally associate with Biden, at least at the vice presidential level. A lot of foreign policy stuff, but—

Obviously he had lots of deep foreign policy experience, where the President had less of that, but I can’t tell you how many—somebody could count—we did lots and lots of visits to schools together across the country. It was really important to him.

Let me ask you a question about the international dimension of education. Is it the case that developments abroad in education register at all here, or do we tend to be kind of insular in our thinking about what education ought to look like?

That’s a great question. We should have talked about it. I do think we tend to be way too insular. We created an international summit that we did for I forget how many years, and we ended up having two dozen countries that we would convene. We did it all over the globe, and we’d bring in the education ministers and the heads of the labor unions as well. Those were amazing meetings and conversations.

There are always some cultural differences, but the commonalities are so much greater than the differences. That was hugely important learning, getting to build those relationships and hear their struggles and think about how we worked this stuff through. I don’t want to say there’s nothing, but there’s very little that’s uniquely American in terms of, it’s so unique that other folks can’t make us better or challenge our thinking. Those are big things to convene and organize, and there’s a lot to do, but I felt they were extraordinarily helpful.

When you’re the Education Secretary, you’re the only one in the country, by definition, so it’s a little bit lonely, but when you’re talking to 15 or 20 other folks—we would try and meet with high-performing countries or rapidly improving countries, and it was just very helpful. We met with secretaries, with labor, and would come back together. There were some similar dynamics in different places. But I remember whenever I thought about my job being difficult, I’d think about the South African education minister, and her degree of difficulty made my job look like a walk in the park. Talking to her about what she and other people were dealing with was extraordinary to hear. So yes, there are so many learnings, and it wasn’t that one place had it all figured out, but if you can beg, borrow, and steal for five or six of them and put it all together, that gets pretty interesting.

Did you have a relationship with Secretary Clinton?

We never really worked together. We sat almost next to each other in the Cabinet meetings, but I don’t ever remember visiting a school or doing something directly with her. I did work with USAID [United States Agency for International Development], which was under the Secretary of State. I worked in Haiti, and that was really impactful. I go to Haiti every year now. That really hit me extraordinarily hard. That was with USAID, which is part of the Secretary’s department, but not directly with her.

There’s a huge educational dimension to the Defense Department, right?

Yes. We talked about how we did a ton with the Department of Labor, just to go through it, because the community college money actually came through Labor. We did a ton there. All the school lunches come from the Department of Agriculture, so [Thomas J.] Vilsack. We went through this stuff before. So you had to work with all those folks.

We actually recruited a guy from Defense to come work with us, and they have DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], which you may have heard of, in the Department of Defense. That was influential in our thinking about some of this i3 stuff we did, Investing in Innovation. We had a guy named Russ Shilling that came to work for us that had experience there working in the military.

Sorry, one last thing: the Department of Defense has its own set of schools across the globe. I visited some of those schools, and for all the fuss about the Common Core, a lot of my thinking was shaped by those military families that were going to six, eight, ten different states, and the wild disparities. I just thought we’ve got to better serve these military families that are sacrificing everything. Hearing their heartache at the different levels of the grades they were at, it made no sense whatsoever. That was actually pretty helpful in my thinking of how do we better serve these families that are sacrificing everything for us.

One thing that occurred to me in terms of thinking about the department is when you think about how the federal government is really a partner to states and then, to some degree, to districts, were there any ways in which you felt like states didn’t fully utilize the resources available? There are vast resources available in the department in terms of research, data, and expertise. You were talking about all the career people being such experts, and I’m wondering if, in some ways because of our understanding of federalism, that resource is underutilized by the states in any way?

That’s an interesting question. What I can say—and this is really what I love, to take political party out of it—I could manage 50 relationships, 50 governors. I could do that. Fifteen thousand districts, that was a little too much to do. I knew certain superintendents. I was a superintendent, so that was sort of my world. But I decided, where can I play? For me to play at the 15,000 districts level, I couldn’t manage that, but I could manage 50 governors, 50 states’ “chief school officers” is what they were called. I could wrap my arms around that.

What happened naturally is certain folks gravitated your way, and you ended up spending more time with them. Certain folks had less interest or maybe no interest. Your plate’s more than full, but I think it’s just like a coalition of the willing. So you worked with a set of folks, and I’d like to think we added real value to what they were doing. You’d have to hear that from them.

So a fair question is, were there other folks that we could have also added more value to? We partnered on the waiver stuff pretty significantly with states. But I think I gave you the example: we talked a lot about free community college. We never got that done. Governor [William E.] Haslam did that in Tennessee. Governor Haslam happens to be a Republican. He took our idea, technically a Democratic idea that came out of our administration. We didn’t execute on it, and he implemented it and did it beautifully and really led the way there, and other folks have followed in his footsteps. But that’s the kind of relationship in a perfect world you would always have, people trying to figure out how to work together and play off each other. I don’t know if that answers your question.

Do I think were we underutilized? I’m sure we were in some situations. I think other folks we spent a tremendous amount of time with, and hopefully we added value and didn’t waste their time. But people could figure out if they wanted to talk more or talk less.

I have a question that arises in part from the previous conversation about local versus national but also from issues related to what’s being taught, and what subjects are allowed, and what books are allowed. It’s coming to the top of, at least, my agenda, as a higher ed professor, and that is academic freedom, free inquiry, because we see it under attack now at all levels of education.

I was in Central Florida recently doing a lecture on a historical topic, and the two elderly ladies who drove me back to my hotel said, “Oh, you should come back to Orlando soon.” I said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I’m coming back in a few weeks.” And they said, “What is your topic there?” I said, “academic freedom.” One of the women—seriously—said, “Are you able to talk about that?” [laughter] Russell and I have been at this a long time, many decades, and I had to stop and say I had never had a question like that about any topic. “Are you allowed to talk about that?” But, irony of ironies, are you allowed to talk about academic freedom? So Arne, are you thinking about this and its impact, certainly, on higher ed but down the chain, too, to K–12?

Yes. I think we’re all thinking about it a lot, and it’s terrifying. I never thought we’d be here. I never anticipated that this is where our country would be. I’ll go back to where I started. I worry about our democracy, and I worry about the dividing line. We have race divides, we have class, but really the dividing line being around educational opportunity.

My general sense is that where folks have a chance to be educated, they’re not going to allow those kinds of things to happen. They’re not going to want someone to think for them, and they’re not going to want someone to remove books from their children’s classrooms. But where folks are less educated, they’re more willing or more susceptible, I should say, to that fear-based, “Only I know what’s good for you.” That’s the irony of the Right’s parental choice: they’re actually doing anything they can to remove parental choice, so it’s a total disconnect between rhetoric and reality. If you’re telling me what books I can read or not read, that’s not giving me any parental choice. That’s micromanaging.

I do understand that we have a generation of parents who have lost jobs, lost industries, who worry their kids are going to be less well off than they are, so they’re terrified. When you’re terrified—and, again, not irrationally terrified—you’re much more susceptible to, “I am the only answer,” whether it’s here or [Adolf] Hitler or whatever, I see those strains extraordinarily clearly. It isn’t that there’s one easy answer, but if we were giving every child in this country a great education and they were able to think independently and had a chance because of skills they’ve gained to make a living and support their family, that would strengthen the heck out of our democracy. That would save our democracy, and if we don’t do that, I worry we’re in real, real trouble here.

You guys have been at it for a while, and for you to say you’ve never seen anything like it, I feel that. I feel that every day. That’s real, and that’s a horrible feeling, but we’ve got to deal with reality. I just want to keep fighting to give every kid, and poor, white, whatever, it doesn’t matter. What are we doing to help those kids learn to think for themselves, and think independently, and build some bridges with kids that don’t look like them? The only place I know how to do that is in schools. I don’t know where else to do that in our society. So I feel that pressure acutely.

We’re coming up on our appointed hour. Let me ask you about the outgoing transition. Do you have any reflections on what you were experiencing and confronting with the new administration coming in?

I left the year before the transition, so John King had to deal with that. You can interview him, but it’s sort of heartbreaking. There basically wasn’t a transition. The [Donald J.] Trump folks were told they couldn’t talk to him. So that was not as smooth. To the best of my knowledge, there was no real transition there. Looking at academic freedom, they weren’t allowed to speak, which is really deep.

I got my timeline crossed. Go ahead, Barbara.

What prompted you to leave when you did, Arne?

Just family considerations. It was complicated. My kids were in school and coming back home. I would have loved to have done eight years, and did seven, but in terms of my kids’ transition in schools, for my son it would have meant three schools in three years, and I thought that would have been a lot. I don’t like transitions. [laughter] And for my daughter, it would have made an extra transition. So for my family’s sake, it was the right decision. Frankly, education was a big driver of that. It was time to do it. Had we wanted to stay in D.C. we could have done that, but we really wanted to come back home here to Hyde Park in Chicago, and, for better or worse, that was the driving factor.

So it was transition.

Yes, it was transition. Some families commute back and forth the whole time, and we’re just a regular old family. That wasn’t us. The last four or five months I commuted. That was horrible, that was a hard time. I would have loved to have done all eight, but that just didn’t quite work out family-wise, and I was beyond blessed to do the seven.

Kimberly, anything else?

This has been such a pleasure.

It has been, and it’s especially interesting to interview somebody who generates the admiration when you’re reading the books and conversing with them. We’re deeply grateful for your service and also for being very generous and liberal with your time.

It’s important. You guys are so thoughtful, and you made me think about a lot of stuff. Remember, I’m not living this every day anymore, so [laughter] it’s good reflecting. That book you sent, that’s the definitive book of that time, so that was worth the price of admission. That was worth all these interviews, so I owe you for that.

Well, thank you very much. We’re very proud of our research staff here, and I have already communicated to the two guys that run the shop that you had high praise for it.

That impressed the heck out of me, and obviously your own camaraderie. It’s been a real pleasure, so thank you.

For us, as well. If we can ever return the favor, let us know. I understand from outside communication with Kimberly that she’s got some ongoing research projects that might benefit from a side conversation with you at some point, so I know she’d appreciate that.

She knows how to find me.

Definitely.

Take care, guys.

Thanks so much.

[END OF INTERVIEW]