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The very tall man who will be Obama's education secretary. (Via Flickr)

The New York Times’ Sam Dillon reports that Arne Duncan will be the next secretary of education. The president-elect is to announce tomorrow. Obama sources do not disclose to Dillon what Duncan will do about No Child Left Behind, testing, teacher quality, or tenure. And the mystery stays alive!

An easier-to-unwrap question I’d like to look into: Was Joel Klein ever actually in the running?

UPDATE: More context by request. Duncan, the schools chief in Chicago, is a safe choice that signals only what we had already been told, that when faced with all-out policy brawls, Obama would prefer not to pick a side. In the ongoing, raging war over education policy, Duncan had the stamp of both sides, the nameless reformers (idealocrat reformers?) and the teachers unions, or at least of Randi Weingarten, the union leader. By choosing Duncan as his education figurehead, Obama has avoided two wars. (more…)

Today’s Times story on Clara Hemphill is a cute and concise portrait of the challenges the city’s complicated high school admissions process pose to middle class parents. But a reader who is going through the process right now writes in with a complaint: Essentially, tell me something I don’t know.

We know the application process makes middle class parents’ hair turn gray, she writes. But the point of centralization was not to please middle class parents. It was to make the process of finding a high school fairer for all the city’s students. The real question the reader would like reporters to ask is, has the new structure done that?

She says there are signs of bumps — the sort that would make the system tough for a poor parent to navigate. She writes:

Plus, the real story that is not getting out there is how little time the high schools have to handle the high school admissions process and the kids they already have.
Some schools simply don’t have time to read all the essays and tests and conduct the interviews. One school I called to find out if my son would get an get an interview said: “We didn’t have time to grade the third round of tests, we are really behind, so we don’t know what is going to happen.’’

Congressman George Miller

As the Education Secretary fight nears an end, everyone is trying to figure out how to describe the two sides of the battle for Barack Obama’s affection. But I don’t think any of the recent descriptions — from the Associated Press (“reform advocates”) to Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter (“bomb throwers”) to The New Republic (“Reform School”) — live up to the standards of my New York Sun editor, Ira Stoll, who declared that the word “reform” is hopelessly imprecise and banned it from my writing.

All the more reason to turn our name-those-reformers contest into its final bend. The newest entry is from George Miller, the chairman of the House’s education committee. Jonathan Alter reports:

Rep. George Miller, the leading voice on education in Congress, told me recently that “the debate is between incrementalists and disrupters, and I’m with the disrupters.” So is Bill Gates. The father of disruptive software is ready for another revolution.

The disrupters may not be a real word (or at least a word entered in my computer’s dictionary), but it is a neat proposal. It’s the same distinction Randi Weingarten makes between herself and Joel Klein. As she told the Times, her vision is “sustainable and incremental change.” Klein wants “radical reform.”

But I still have some concerns. (more…)

Speaking of Chicago, the New York Times has picked up another Chicago public school teacher to blog this year. Victor Harbison, a high school history and civics teacher, is taking over the space that used to be filled by Will Okun, a Chicago alternative school teacher who’s now writing a book. Harbison’s first post, just before the election, described his enthusiasm for what he termed “participatory civics” programs:

Imagine the difference between having a student read a candidate’s health care proposal and take a quiz on it versus having that student read the proposal, then knock on a voter’s door in a swing state and explain it. After one student did just that, she told me: “I was so nervous. What if I mess it up? It could cost John McCain a vote. A real vote.”

I’m looking forward to reading more from Harbison, but just as Leonie Haimson recently asked on the NYC Public School Parents blog why the Times’ parent blogger is from Los Angeles, I wonder why the city’s paper of record couldn’t find a hometown teacher to highlight.

A colleague drew my attention to this fascinating video, tied to The New York Times Magazine’s screens issue. It plays a series of young people’s faces captured while they played a video game.

I wonder what would it look like to videotape the same kids in class.

(For more on the notion that schools have something to learn from video games, see this Times story, this story I wrote for the Village Voice, and this Web site, the home of Marc Presnky, an educational consultant who has made a career out of the idea.)

The nonprofit pro-mayoral control advocacy group that was originally titled MASS, for Mayoral Accountability for Student Success, is now called Learn NY, and its official first day of existence is today. The group has close ties with the Bloomberg administration, but it is not being funded by the mayor, officials said in a background press conference with reporters this morning.

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters has already done impressive digging into the group’s media strategy. A spokesperson for the group confirmed to me today that the blog commenter Haimson noticed voicing his passion for mayoral control is indeed on the payroll of Learn NY. Brian Keeler, an online-media specialist who ran unsuccessfully for state senate in 2006 with the help of a following he built at Daily Kos, has been posting positive comments on this blog, Leonie’s, and others. He is also an employee of the Web design firm that built Learn NY’s Web site and will write a regular blog on the site, the spokesperson, Julie Wood, said.

Something that will surely be asked — especially by critics of mayoral control and the Bloomberg administration, including Haimson — is how much of a “MASS” organization Learn NY really is. (more…)