April 16 (Bloomberg) -- Education Secretary Arne Duncan plans to spend a record $5 billion to transform U.S. schools by rewarding states for innovation, providing merit pay to teachers and creating a national scorecard to identify failing schools.
The Education Department has already distributed $44 billion of its $100 billion in stimulus funds to stave off the firing of teachers, Duncan said yesterday in an interview in Washington. An additional $5 billion will be given as an incentive to states that are "fundamentally willing to challenge the status quo," he said.
Duncan, 44, the former head of Chicago's public schools, said the retirement of 1 million teachers in the "next couple of years" gives the U.S. an opportunity to attract and retain a new generation of educators. He said he plans to enlist President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama to help recruit teachers, and then reward the newcomers for working in struggling schools and districts.
"Talent matters tremendously," Duncan said. "If we can bring in this next generation of extraordinary talent, we can transform education, and our ability to do that over the next couple of years will shape education in this country for the next 25 or 30 years."
Duncan also aims to remake the No Child Left Behind law to set national standards of performance while giving states and school districts more flexibility about how they meet those goals. Under the current law, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, states set their own standards for determining what constitutes an adequate education.
‘Lying to Children’
"We're basically lying to children and families now," Duncan said. "When a child and a parent hear they're meeting the state standard, the logical assumption is that they're doing OK. In fact, in many places, if you're meeting the state standard, you're barely able to graduate from high school."
Too often, states weakened their goals so more schools would achieve them, leading to a "dumbing down," he said.
"We need national standards, and assessments to measure them," Duncan said. "The idea of having 50 states designing their own standards is crazy."
Believer in 'Outcomes'
The scorecard would include "a series of metrics that we'd put out every single year," he said. "I'm a big believer in looking at outcomes. I'm going to look at high-school graduation rates and college graduation rates."
The goal would be to expose discrepancies among schools and districts to force change, he said.
"I'm really hoping that transparency and truth is going to spur a sense of outrage amongst parents," he said.
Duncan said he is focused now on saving teaching jobs. As many as 600,000 teaching job may be lost because of the recession, Duncan said, citing a study by researchers at the University of Washington.
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