An Audacious Hope for Arne Duncan

By Ellen Balleisen

Her name was Paige, she lived in Chicago, and by the age of 11 she had been in the 3rd grade for three years. Her previous teachers disagreed about why she wasn’t learning and how she could best be helped. And in a 2005 New York Times article about Paige’s predicament, various education experts and administrators weighed in on the policies that had resulted in her three-year stay in 3rd grade, and her eventual placement in a middle school special education class.

Arne Duncan, now President Barack Obama’s secretary of education, was one of those interviewed. At the time, Mr. Duncan headed Chicago’s public schools. Before his school system implemented a tough retention policy, he told the Times , the schools were just "perpetuating the cycles of poverty." Yet he also said he didn’t think students should be held back three times.

Mr. Duncan didn’t offer a clear plan to address Paige’s problem, and neither did anyone else quoted in the article. But several mentioned high-quality early-childhood education as the way to avoid persistent failure in elementary school. A parent leader at Paige’s school suggested that Paige would not be in such dire straits if her mother, a high school dropout, had been more involved in her daughter’s learning...