GOVERNING IN THE WORLD W LEFT THEM:

The golden boy and the blob: Is Barack Obama's education secretary too good to be true? (Lexington, 5/07/09, The Economist)

IT IS hard to find anybody with a bad word to say about Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s young education secretary. Margaret Spellings, his predecessor in the Bush administration, calls him “a visionary leader and fellow reformer”. During his confirmation hearings Lamar Alexander, a senator from Tennessee and himself a former education secretary, sounded more like a lovesick schoolgirl than a member of the opposition party: “I think you’re the best.” Enthusiastic without being over-the-top, pragmatic without being a pushover, he is also the perfect embodiment of mens sana in corpore sano—tall and lean, clean-cut and athletic, a Thomas Arnold for the digital age.

Since moving to the Education Department a couple of months ago he has been a tireless preacher of the reform gospel. He supports charter schools and merit pay, accountability and transparency, but also litters his speeches with more unfamiliar ideas. [...]

Mr Duncan is arguably the luckiest education secretary since Jimmy Carter created his department in 1979. He inherits a much richer legacy from the Bush administration than most people imagine, with mounting evidence that George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act did something to boost educational achievement, particularly among poor children. And a growing number of Democrats, many of them black, think the party needs to distance itself from the teachers’ unions. Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, argues that “as Democrats we have been wrong on education, and it’s time to get it right.”