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Arne Duncan meeting the Senate.

Here‘s where you can see it happen.

Right now, Barbara Boxer’s saying she likes Duncan and intends to support him.

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…)

CORRECTED: The original version of this post reported unconfirmed details about the origins of StopJoelKlein.org. The site was created by a collection of groups including Time Out From Testing but not including any New York City public high schools, a creator, Jane Hirschmann, said.

Considering the opposition Joel Klein has engendered in his seven years as chancellor, it’s surprising that no one registered the domain name StopJoelKlein.org until last week.

But it wasn’t until Nov. 10 that somebody registered the domain name. That was the same day the New York Times profiled Klein as a front-runner for appointment as U.S. Secretary of Education. StopJoelKlein.org is now being used as a petition to oppose a Klein-led U.S. Department of Education, although the site does not make public the number of “signatures” it has received or who has signed on. (more…)

Teachers are signing up in droves to oppose a promotion for Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

An online petition opposing Klein as Secretary of Education has collected more than 2,000 signatures since it was created Monday by a California education professor, Duane Campbell. The petition has attracted attention from dozens of Web sites, including those of Gotham Gazette and the progressive Nation magazine.

Many of the petition’s first signers were parents from New York City and educators from across the country, as Leonie Haimson pointed out on the NYC Education News e-mail list.

But increasingly, it appears to be people identifying themselves as New York City public school teachers, both active and retired, who are signing on. (There are 80,000 teachers in the city; most, obviously, have not attached their name to the petition.)

Below the jump, several teachers’ recent comments: (more…)

Scholastic Administrator magazine has a Q&A with Schools Chancellor Joel Klein this month. A revealing nugget is who Klein suggests for Obama’s Education Secretary (hint: as he has said to reporters here, too, he’s not suggesting himself):

Q So who would you choose as U.S. Education Secretary?
A Someone with Michelle Rhee’s talent and passion. Or someone outside the box—maybe a venture capitalist.

Scholastic also asks Klein about the divide between Democrats on education:

Q Is too much being made about the “divide” between Democrats on education?
A The divide is between those who are and aren’t ready to enact radical reform, which means taking on a power structure that has controlled the debate for decades, defined the problems in education as something education can’t fix, and bestowed influence at every level.

(Hat tip to Alexander Russo)

Rumors are swirling that he could be named the next Secretary of Education, but Schools Chancellor Joel Klein doesn’t appear to be going out of his way to please the president-elect.

In an article about Barack Obama’s education policy in today’s Wall Street Journal, Klein criticizes the idea of holding schools and students accountable without relying on standardized tests. Obama has pledged to reform the federal No Child Left Behind law in part by decreasing accountability systems’ reliance on standardized testing.

From the article:

Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City schools, expressed skepticism about using alternative testing. “If you water down accountability, if success or failure depends on the eye of the beholder, you run the risk of letting down kids,” he said.

If Schools Chancellor Joel Klein really ranks among Barack Obama’s choices for Secretary of Education, it might not even matter whether the New York City schools are any good.

At least that’s what one public relations expert says.

Patrick Riccards, a PR executive who specializes in education communications, wrote on his blog, Eduflack, yesterday that Klein would make a good Ed Sec pick because the chancellor has led a “revolution in public education.” But no sooner did he post than Riccards received a torrent of protests from New York City-based readers, who used the comments section to argue that Klein’s claims about higher test scores and increased parent engagement are inflated.

Riccards, who is based in D.C., immediately agreed that he has a lot to learn about New York’s schools. But then he wrote:

Does this change the possibility of Klein joining an Obama administration? I think not. The Klein story is still one that is well known and one that is well respected (well, maybe not as respected by UFT). In ed reform, believing you have done something is almost as important as actually doing it. And most believe we have improved NYC public schools.

Chancellor Joel Klein (via Flickr)

Today’s Washington Post singled out Chancellor Joel Klein as a potential Secretary of Education pick for the now-in-formation Barack Obama administration.

Is Klein angling to get the heck out of Gotham? If he is, he’s not saying.

Smiling broadly, Klein told reporters this afternoon that he hadn’t spoken to the president-elect and that it would be “presumptuous” for him to comment on whether he’d accept a job that hasn’t been offered to him. “I have a job,” the chancellor said.

Not to keep beating the same drum, but where now-President-elect Barack Obama will land in the education wars is still a mystery.

Today’s Washington Post suggests he could bypass the peacemaker, middle-ground approach by choosing as his Secretary of Education one of the fiercest warriors in the education battle: Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. That would be a bombshell decision to side decisively with that nameless movement that includes Klein, Obama adviser Jon Schnur, and D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. On the other hand, Obama has also been seeking advice from representatives on the other side of the education wars, including Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who was still stumping for him at Teachers College just days ago.

Highlighting the coming crossroads are two statements that came out late last night and early this morning, reacting to Obama’s election.

The money manager and philanthropist Whitney Tilson, who was an early Teach For America staffer and who serves on the board of Democrats for Education Reform, says Obama will have to fight power to transform education. I assume this means longtime power brokers such as the teachers union. Tilson’s e-mail:

The single most important decision President-elect Obama will make in this area is picking his Secretary of Education because — let’s be honest — with so many urgent priorities (the economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, healthcare, etc.), Obama himself isn’t going to have the time or political capital to spend on education reform in the early part of his first term, so the Secretary of Education is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting.

But he/she won’t be able to do it alone.  Reforming our schools will also depend on all of us continuing to be involved to keep PUSHING.  As Obama has said many times, “power does not concede easily”, so take a day to relax and then let’s get back to work!

On the other hand, teachers union president Randi Weingarten emphasizes that Obama will have to work together with the union:

At a time when the focus on strengthening public education has been all but eclipsed by other issues, Sen. Obama has shown both deep understanding of, and real interest in, the need to ensure every child receives a world-class education. The members and leaders of the American Federation of Teachers welcome President-elect Obama’s commitment to working together to strengthen public education. We look forward to partnering with him and with members of both parties to fulfill this promise.

Maybe the choice is not which side to take, but whether to take a side at all.