Secretary Duncan will continue to work and maintain a residence in D.C. but commute to spend weekends with his family, as many cabinet Secretaries have done. Obama doesn’t intend to nominate King or another candidate for education secretary before his presidency ends in early 2017, said a White House official, who wasn’t authorized to comment by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Advertisement
In 2012, Duncan on the same day as President Obama endorsed two pieces of legislation seeking to prohibit anti-LGBT discrimination in schools: the Student Non-Discrimination Act and the Safe Schools Improvement Act.
With the departure, Mr. Obama is losing one of his remaining original cabinet members.
His department also attracted much attention by launching investigations into how campuses handled student allegations of sexual assaults and harassment, aiming to change attitudes toward social life and drinking among young people. The program became a flashpoint in the fight over federal involvement in education. The latter was a goal long sought by many Democrats.
Duncan apologized for his “clumsy” remarks, but for a few it underscored what they saw as Washington’s dismissive, arrogant approach to critics of the state standards. King’s tenure as commissioner of education in New York was a turbulent one, especially in his clashes with teachers unions through his aggressive push to link scores on new Common Core-aligned tests with teacher evaluations. He also worked to protect students from poor-quality career programs through new rules aimed at curbing questionable practices. The changes do little to help those students who drop out of for-profit schools before graduation.
Duncan “has been a valuable partner in advancing excellence in education across the nation and in addressing the many challenges and opportunities facing our institutions of higher education, particularly public universities”, Napolitano said.
Much of that inaction involves the department’s lackluster efforts in policing its loan contractors.
King had been working as a senior official in the Education Department under Duncan.
Both of these were policies the Obama administration promoted. “The government is actually very adept at collecting. It can’t be overstated”, she said. He relinquished his role as commissioner in January 2015 to join the Department of Education. Many Republicans say the requirements provide unnecessary federal interference in school curriculum. The moves came after the White House set up a task force on campus rape, and after student activists protested and called for greater transparency.
Advertisement
It was a bold plan which meant to spur innovation in the staid world of K-12 education reform, and was largely seen as an incredibly exciting moment in education, where states could take hold of their destiny and overhaul their current education system. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who frequently clashed with Duncan as chairman of the Senate’s education panel.
