By my calculations, it's been more than three weeks since the Obama Administration announced a new appointment for the Department of Education. Secretary of Arne Duncan is in place, of course, and people have been nominated for three Assistant Secretary positions: Peter Cunningham for communications; Carmel Martin for policy; and Russlynn Ali for civil rights. But that's it. We still don't know who the Deputy Secretary or Undersecretary or Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education will be. Tick, tick, tick.
So in the meanwhile, let's turn our attention across town to the Obama White House. As any veteran of the Bush Administration can tell you, the people staffing the President can wield enormous power. So White House personnel are key, a 6 out of 10 in terms of importance.
Here the staff is on board, and is rock solid. Two key individuals are worth mentioning: Robert Gordon, who has the Orwellian title of Associate Director for Education, Income Maintenance, and Labor at the Office of Management and Budget; and Roberto Rodriguez, the education policy staff member on the Domestic Policy Council. By all accounts, Robert and Roberto will make quite a duo.
Robert was most recently a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he wrote about the virtues of No Child Left Behind and charter schools, the need for teacher tenure reform, and other reformy topics. This paper he wrote as part of the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, along with Tom Kane and Doug Staiger, provides some insight into his thinking. The team illustrated that teacher effectiveness over the long-term can be predicted quite well by teachers' student achievement results in their first few years on the job. The implication, they argued, was that the doors should be thrown open to lots more potential teacher candidates (through alternative certification and the like), and then the lowest-performing newbies (as measured by student achievement results) should be let go before they get tenure. You get the picture; this was not a paper that thrilled either the ed schools or the teachers unions.
Robert also served as an aide to Joel Klein and helped him implement his ???weighted student funding??? initiative. That one angered all sorts of middle-class parents who feared that dollars would be drained from their schools and sent to poorer ones. (Which was essentially true???and the point.)
It's a little harder to get a good read on Roberto, as he's spent the last several years staffing Senator Ted Kennedy, and thus doesn't have a paper trail of his own to point to. But Kennedy remains fully supportive of the accountability thrust of No Child Left Behind, which indicates that Roberto does, too. It's a little harder to know where he is on charter schools, or how tough he'd be willing to play with the teachers unions.
Still, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and will declare this White House education team ???Red Hot??? on reform. Do you agree? Cast your vote below.
