Anne Bubnic's List: ARRA/ Arne Duncan

Turning a school around may mean replacing its leadership or teaching staff, or converting it into a charter school, Duncan said today in a speech in Washington. Charter schools operate under contracts with school districts and are exempt from many state and local regulations that govern traditional public schools.

Access this archive of the April 27th ASCD webinar to learn how the $100 billion of stimulus funds devoted to education programs can be used for school improvement activities, including professional development.

Article on School Reform and Charter Schools by Arne Duncan for the Wall Street Journal.

The top education official in the Obama administration says that federal stimulus dollars for school districts are meant to be spent over two years, which aligns with the position of L.A. school officials in their ongoing political war with employee unions over looming layoffs. The comment by Education Secretary Arne Duncan is significant because unions have been campaigning for district officials to spend as much of the stimulus money as needed to save jobs now. District officials have countered that employees must agree to conditional salary concessions if all jobs are to be saved. District officials have argued that federal stimulus money should be split over two years, in large measure because both years are likely to prove economically dire.

Charlie Rose's interview with Arne Duncan (Mar 2009).

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced that nearly $4 billion is now available for California under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. This funding will lay the foundation for a generation of education reform and help save hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs at risk of state and local budget cuts. California will be eligible to apply for another $2 billion this fall. California is the first state to be approved for the first round of state stabilization funding.

Texas Impact brings you footage of US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan highlighting the ambitious goals of the ARRA education funds. Video comes from the ARRA Implementation Briefing on Friday, April 3, 2009.

Secretary Arne Duncan will travel to 15 or more states in the coming months to solicit feedback from a broad group of stakeholders around federal education policy in anticipation of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The tour will gather input on the Obama administration's education agenda, including early childhood, higher standards, teacher quality, workforce development, and higher education.

To save the school, he fired the entire staff and put a nonprofit group in charge. New principals and teachers were brought in to set the school on the right path. "Sometimes it takes a fresh start," says Don Feinstein, executive director of the Academy for Urban School Leadership, the nonprofit group that took over Howe in September and now runs a total of eight "turnaround" schools along with six teacher-training academies in the city.

Third, there’s more great ideas about what works around the country than ever before. What I’ve said repeatedly is I don’t have to come up with any great ideas. My job is to listen, to learn. And that in every inner-city community around the country and many, many rural communities, there are extraordinary schools, great educators who are beating the odds every day.

My job is to listen to them, to invest in them, to take to scale what works. And there’s been this blossoming of entrepreneurial ideas and energy around education over the past 10 to 15 years. And we know what is possible: Regardless of socioeconomic challenges, regardless of family background, when children have a chance to get a great education, they do very, very well.

The United States Department of Education this week urged states to "act now" to get their applications in for stimulus package funding. Education Secretary Duncan said that states should act as quickly as possible on State Fiscal Stabilization Funds to help move reforms forward and to protect teaching jobs that are at risk.

Profile on U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Learn more about his passion for quality education and plans for the department.

Two key Democrats in Congress have expressed skepticism about the Obama administration’s proposal to shift $1 billion out of Title I grants for districts into the separate Title I school improvement program in the fiscal 2010 federal budget.

To avoid being caught short when stimulus money runs out, school officials should use the short-term federal funding to upgrade technology and improve the tracking of student data, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told eSchool News in a wide-ranging interview on June 12.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is offering federal cash incentives to achieve one of his top priorities: developing national standards for reading and math to replace a current hodgepodge of benchmarks in the states. Duncan said June 14 that the efforts of 46 states to develop common, internationally measured standards for student achievement would be bolstered by up to $350 million in federal funds to help them develop tests to assess those standards.