Greg Toppo

USATODAY

PHILADELPHIA — In his first major speech, the acting U.S. Secretary of Education John King apologized to the nation’s teachers.

Speaking to a small group of teachers, students and local politicians here last month, just three weeks after taking over the post, King admitted the USA’s education debate over the past few years has been “characterized by more heat than light,” and that despite reformers’ best intentions, “teachers and principals, at times, have felt attacked and unfairly blamed for the challenges our nation faces.”

King acknowledged the attacks had come from as high up as his own federal agency in Washington, D.C., where he’d served as a top advisor to former Education Secretary Arne Duncan for more than a year.

"All of us — at the local, state, and federal level, the Education Department included — have to take responsibility for the climate that exists," he said. ”There is no question that the contentious tone has made it harder to have productive conversations."

The admission is less stunning when you consider the source: King, 41, is a former social studies teacher and middle- and high-school school principal. By all indications, he is the first school principal ever to serve in the top education job. He also spent several years as New York State’s education commissioner, the first African-American and first Puerto Rican to fill the role.

The Philadelphia speech marked what King himself has called a “reset,” not just in rhetoric but in the Obama administration’s approach to education in the year or so that it has left.

Armed with a sweeping rewrite of the contentious No Child Left Behind law, King is turning teachers' heads, not only by recounting his own childhood experiences with inspiring teachers — in his words, they “saved my life” — but by forcefully saying the kinds of things they desperately want to hear: Schools should eliminate unnecessary, redundant or unhelpful tests; schools should strive to provide a well-rounded education; teachers should mentor chronically absent students, and that hardships such as poverty, hunger, violence and poor health play a role in whether kids succeed in school.

Although teachers’ groups have largely supported President Obama since 2008, their relationship has at times been strained. They’ve pushed hard against many of Obama’s policies, focusing their wrath over the years on Arne Duncan, his longtime education secretary. Delegates to the National Education Association's annual convention in 2014 passed a resolution calling for Duncan to resign. Duncan, among the longest-serving in Obama's Cabinet, stepped down last December, saying he wanted to rejoin his family, who had returned to their native Chicago over the summer.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten at times sparred publicly with Duncan over testing, academic standards, charter school expansion, teacher collective bargaining and other issues. Last year she toldPolitico, “I believe Arne is very much dedicated to children, but he’s created a terrible mess.”

Weingarten didn’t really savor the prospect of King as a replacement, saying last October that her union was “disappointed” in the choice, in part because of King’s “obsession with testing” during his two years as head of the New York system. The state was an early adopter of tougher Common Core standards, and state officials — including King — clashed with parents and teachers over plummeting test scores and teacher evaluations.

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In October, when Obama announced King's selection, Weingarten crossed her fingers, saying in a statement, “We can only hope that King has learned a thing or two since his tenure in New York.”

Fast-forward four months: She now says she has watched his evolution as acting secretary (the Obama administration has said it will forego Senate confirmation). She is, she said, surprised and pleased.

“There are a lot of people in New York who are really skeptical with him being the Secretary of Education,” she said in an interview. “Having said that, I must admit that since he’s taken the reins of the department, I have seen a willingness to listen to educators.”

The two now work just blocks from one another in Washington, D.C., and they have sat down for a handful of private monthly breakfast dates centered on education policy. “Frankly, they’re much more robust than the conversations I ever had with Arne Duncan,” Weingarten said. “We’ve had a couple of these breakfasts, where there’s a real give-and-take about issues, not just feeling like you’re repeating the same lines out of a play, over and over again.”

King’s improbable rise began in Canarsie, Brooklyn, a working-class neighborhood situated midway between Coney Island and John F. Kennedy International Airport. Both of his parents were career New York City public school educators, but King’s mother died when he was 8; his father, suffering from undiagnosed Alzheimer's disease, died when King was 12.

Family members took turns caring for him, but it was teachers, King has said, who saved his life, making school safe and engaging, staging productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Alice in Wonderland. They introduced him to challenging books and mathematics, The New York Times, the ballet and museums, “exposing us to the world beyond Brooklyn.”

In college, King overachieved, earning a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University, a master’s degree and education doctorate from Columbia University's Teachers College and a law degree from Yale.

In between degrees, he taught high school social studies in Puerto Rico and Boston and co-founded Roxbury Prep, one of a growing number of “no excuses” charter schools that use strict discipline, longer school days and close attention to data to improve the skills of their mostly minority, low-income students.

“The types of environments he creates are ones that have high standards for everybody and a deep sense of humanity, of what people need,” said Teresa Rodriguez, a history teacher who worked under King, both at Roxbury and at City on a Hill, another Boston charter school.

“The reason I followed him to Roxbury Prep was because when I started working for him at City on a Hill, I said, ‘This guy is smarter than I am, he works harder than I do. This is the type of person that I would like to work with.’ He is someone that saw the whole picture. When I was just trying to do lesson plans, he was trying to figure out how to make the whole school better.”

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Rodriguez introduced King to Melissa Steel, an old classmate from Williams College who was teaching kindergarten in New York City. They began dating and Steel eventually moved to Boston. They're now married, with two young daughters.

King would go on to help found Uncommon Schools, a New York-based charter school chain.

“He gets kids,” Rodriguez said. “He’s a fun guy. But at the same time he understands there needs to be a structure and a system.”

Though "no excuses" schools have flourished — Uncommon now comprises nearly 50 schools, including Roxbury Prep and two other schools in King’s native Canarsie — many educators have criticized them as overly rigid, the kinds of schools that middle-class families would never consider for their kids.

Rodriguez, who would eventually teach at Roxbury Prep for 13 years, said it may be a “no excuses” school, but “it’s also a place that pays for funerals for kids when they die,” she said. “It’s a place that drives kids to interviews and takes kids to summer programs. It’s a place that follows kids through. I think it’s easy to say it’s ‘no excuses’ if you walk in the hallway and there’s no talking. But at the same time it is a place that … for the years that I was there had a deep commitment to students and families.”

For his part, King said he is trying hard to pierce the “false dichotomy” that says schools alone can overcome factors such as poverty or, on the other, that schools are powerless in the face of such factors.

“I think both of those are wrong,” he said. “I’m very clear that schools can’t do everything, but the fact that we can’t do everything doesn’t mean we don’t have a responsibility to kids’ academic experiences. You want to make school as good as possible for kids, and as powerful an experience in their lives as it can be.”