I recently spoke to Duncan about the entrenched obstacles he’s long felt are keeping kids in the United States from succeeding in school—and about what he’s learned from his experiences trying to combat them. An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation is below.

Alia Wong: In what ways do you think Chicago was a good training ground for your later role as the U.S. secretary of education?

Arne Duncan: There were three different experiences in Chicago that shaped me. First, there was my mother’s after-school program, [the Sue Duncan Children’s Center], where my brother, sister, and I pretty much grew up. My mom’s whole philosophy was that 10-year-olds taught 5-year-olds, and that 15-year-olds taught 10-year-olds, and so on, so from a very young age we were both teaching and being taught. The neighborhood in which we worked happened to be all African American, it happened to be largely poor, and unfortunately it suffered from a significant amount of gang violence. But I grew up with friends who had this amazing, amazing potential … I took a year off from college to work with my mother full-time to figure out if [working as an educator] was just a part of who I was or if it was actually who I was. During that year I decided that I wanted to find a way to follow in my mom’s footsteps.

The second piece was running the I Have a Dream program [which provides long-term academic support to students who attend underfunded schools or live in housing projects] for six years with my sister and others to build upon my mother’s work. We worked with a group of students from when they were in the sixth grade through their high-school graduation. I learned so many lessons there about what’s possible when kids have high expectations and tremendous support.



And then finally, it was leading the school district, which for me was a chance to apply so many of the lessons I had learned throughout my life and also preparation for me to go to D.C. At the citywide level, I started to think about scale, and how you can have big-picture impact. What I didn’t know going into D.C., by the way, was rural America.

Wong: Back in Chicago, it seems like the largely negative responses you got to your decision to close some public schools really struck a chord with you. Can you talk more about that? How, if at all, did that experience inform your approach to the role of U.S. education secretary?

Duncan: To be clear, we closed a very small handful—about half of 1 percent of CPS’s 600 or so schools in my first year. And there were a lot more openings than closings happening; every year we closed, say, three, we’d open eight or 10.

We should always be trying to fix and improve schools, and in the vast majority you can. But when you look at the results at those schools we closed, they had kids that were just falling further and further behind every single year they were there, and it was never the kids’ fault. Kids have one chance to get an education. I was happy to make some tough calls, happy to take a little bit of heat, when I knew in my heart that what we were doing for kids wasn’t good enough and we could do better.