Dog poop and education policy: First-day stories on ed secretary-designate Arne Duncan

Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan was named by President-elect Barack Obama as his Secretary of Education today, and the commercial media gave almost as much play to dog poop and basketball as to education policy. It was left to the trade press to mention any implications for higher education, which are sparse at any rate.

A squib in today's Inside Higher Ed notes, I think correctly, "Duncan has not been a player on higher education policy, although it has been widely assumed that the education secretary would be selected primarily for K-12 credentials."

The Sun-Times has a couple of stories and an editorial:

• The story of the announcement at a Chicago school was by political reporter Abdon Pallasch. He noted that Duncan and Obama play basketball together and quoted Obama's advice to elementary school children during a classroom photo op: "I want to make sure that my daughters ... take care of their dog. ... You've got to feed your dog. You've got to walk your dog. And then if they do their business, if they got some poop, you've got to make sure that you're not just leaving it there."
  
  
• Another story, by city hall reporter Fran Spielman, said Duncan leaves "big shoes" to fill in the city schools. Said Mayor Richard Daley, "You always want to keep somebody. But, this is a special opportunity for what he's accomplished and what the people of Chicago have accomplished in education. ... No other city has done what we're doing Arne Duncan for eight years has been at the helm of this. He's not a superintendent who stays inside the box. He's always thinking outside the box. That's his greatest asset. He'll bring the same commitment to the Department of Education that needs it." A little bit more substance there.
  
  
• And the editorial gets into several matters of substance: "We respect Duncan for sticking to his guns: he is passionate about fixing chronically failing schools, and he wouldn't retreat. But he also listened and made adjustments. Time will tell whether [his school reform plan called] Renaissance 2010 is a success, though early results look promising.
  
  
• "Those qualities -- vision and compromise -- will serve Duncan well as education secretary.
  
  He is not an ideologue fueled by a belief that there is one single answer to fixing urban schools. Under Renaissance 2010, he has approved a broad range of schools, including an all-boys school, a school based on a Roman Catholic model and a virtual school."

Perhaps most important for those of us who work with the accountability piece in higher ed, the Sun-Times' editorial said this: "Duncan always took a pass on the education fad of the day, choosing instead to invest in long-term approaches supported by solid research."