Farewell, Arne Duncan!
As Secretary Duncan hangs up his jersey after seven years of leading the U.S. Department of Education, speculation is already underway about the next secretary of education. President Obama has selected Deputy Secretary John B. King, Jr., as acting secretary-designate, but the real focus is on the next administration in 2017 and beyond.
The higher-education policy issues for the next presidential administration are likely to remain much the same as current priorities: student loans and debt burdens, Pell Grants, cost, campus safety and sexual assault, access, accreditation, diploma mills, teacher quality, accountability. College students and presidents alike are grateful to Duncan for enlarging Pell Grants and improving the federal student-loan system, and we hope his successor will continue to champion student financial-aid solutions.
But on many other issues, particularly quality and accountability, the question is whether a new administration will continue Duncan’s style of broad criticism and onerous regulation of all higher education because of deficiencies in cases at individual institutions, or whether new leadership will establish a more nuanced approach to achieve mutually satisfying solutions to the challenges we share. We can hope for the latter, but so much depends on the experience and leadership characteristics of the secretary.
Higher education today is about so much more than traditional undergraduate education, and the new secretary must understand the big picture. The department’s own data warehouse reveals some of the depth and complexity of this industry, starting with the remarkable range of nontraditional characteristics of students and the vast array of academic programs across many degree and credential levels.
But the Duncan-era policies have tended to treat higher education almost like K-12 schools, assuming a monolithic curriculum taught to a largely immature student body across a defined period of time. Lost in the blender are the distinctive differences among students and programs and missions and institutional types that make American higher education the greatest learning and research system in the world.
The next secretary of education must have real experience on the front lines of education, including at least some time spent in advanced learning beyond a baccalaureate degree. Teaching experience is also important for the development of a national educational leader with a well-rounded educational philosophy and broad perspective on the fullness of the intellectual enterprise that is higher education in America.
Arne Duncan spent his postgraduate years after Harvard playing professional basketball in Australia, and so it’s not surprising that his legacy includes sports metaphors — a competition (Race to the Top) for K-12 schools and a scorecard for colleges. We can debate whether these and other outcomes of Duncan’s tenure can or will produce durable educational changes over time, but too often the “solutions” of the Duncan era have felt ill-suited for the complexity of higher education. Initiatives with “one size fits all” mandates magnify isolated challenges while diminishing overall achievements.
For example, the torrent of data that is the College Scorecard now leads to the creation of lists that set up inappropriate comparisons of random factoids with no recognition of the real differences in circumstances for first-generation low-income students, nontraditional students, women, and minority students and the differences among schools that, as a matter of mission, choose to serve many different student populations.
We need the next secretary of education to express confidence and pride in American higher education as one of the most important assets of this nation, the steward of the American treasury of knowledge and innovation. We’ve heard more than enough rhetoric from the current Education Department about “shaming” colleges and “cracking down” on universities, threats that have simply managed to alienate many academics from the administration they once supported. Too often, the message the American public has heard is that college is a scary, violent, and expensive place that fails to educate students — a strange and misguided rant from an administration that also claims it wants to increase college access and degree attainment.
The next secretary of education needs to listen more to the practitioners than to the philanthropists and corporate titans who have a skewed view of the purpose of higher education. The outsized influence of a few major foundations, with their insatiable thirst for data, has inhibited the ability of real practitioners to get a seat at the table of policy formulation.
Algorithms are not solutions. Practitioners can testify to the daily realities that explain why all the data in the world will not improve graduation rates if we don’t also solve for student motivation and personal responsibility, preparatory deficiencies, poverty and child care, parental illiteracy, and homelessness — all realities for too many college students today.
The next secretary of education must be someone with empathy, understanding that those conditions are real impediments to academic success, not dismissing them as “an excuse.” Perhaps the next secretary of education can lead a White House summit that brings together the faculty and academic advisers and health-center leaders on our campuses, since those are the people who know the real deal about what it takes to make students successful.
The best secretary of education I ever knew, Richard Riley, often gathered college presidents for conversations, knowing each of us by name and always showing genuine interest in our work. Secretary Riley could hear critics without dismissing them as “silly,” could and did invite humble practitioners like teachers to the table to discuss their concerns and ideas about educational improvement. Such good colleagueship has been missing for many years at the Department of Education.
I hope the next secretary of education can restore some of that human quality without which educational policy becomes an obstacle rather than a facilitator of change and improvement on behalf of our students. Ensuring great educational results for our students is the ultimate goal that college presidents and the secretary of education can share passionately.
Patricia McGuire is president of Trinity Washington University.
