Arne Duncan

The Scrapbook doesn’t spend a lot of its time surfing tired bureaucratic websites that look like relics of the 1990s, but our interest was piqued last week by a quotation on the “Kids’ Zone” page of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics: “Our attitude towards ourselves should be ‘to be satiable [sic] in learning’ and towards others ‘to be tireless in teaching.’ ”

The Scrapbook doesn’t spend a lot of its time surfing tired bureaucratic websites that look like relics of the 1990s, but our interest was piqued last week by a quotation on the “Kids’ Zone” page of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics: “Our attitude towards ourselves should be ‘to be satiable [sic] in learning’ and towards others ‘to be tireless in teaching.’ ”

Last week, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate forged an unlikely alliance when they agreed in committee on a rewrite of the federal education authorization law. Both liberal Democrat Tom Harkin and conservative Republican Mike Enzi crafted the bill, which promises to limit the federal mandates put forth originally in No Child Left Behind.

But Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who has been pushing hard for Congress to pass education reauthorization, isn't fully pleased with the result.

The president has decided to take a tack on the largest federal education law he certainly wishes were available in budget battles: bypassing Congress and legislating through administrative agencies by offering states waivers in exchange for education policies he favors.

Recently, Education Secretary Arne Duncan no doubt thought it radical to say that teachers should get a $60,000 yearly starting salary and top out around $150,000. He’s hoping this could shift teaching from attracting undergraduates at the middle or low ends of their classes, as it does now, to attracting high-performers who are evaluated, pushed, and paid accordingly.

“No continuing resolution to fund the government that fails to reduce spending will pass,” Alabama senator Jeff Sessions said yesterday at an education spending hearing. “It won’t pass the House or the Senate. We are going to fight for spending cuts this week, next week, next month, and next year.”

The hearing’s sole witness, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, was just as determined in his defense of the education budget requests made by the administration.

So says the New York Post, which reports that Education secretary Arne Duncan edited a speech so that he wouldn't be criticizing the controversial "last in, first out" employment in a speech to teachers' union members in Denver:

President Obama was asked recently about "Waiting for 'Superman,'" the Davis Guggenheim documentary about public education which depicts a handful of qualified inner-city students competing for a limited number of spaces in charter schools.

The new documentary Waiting for "Superman", which premiered last night at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., follows several American students in suffering school districts and the reformers trying to fight and change the education system. But it was Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools and one of the film's subjects, who vocalized perhaps what many in the audience had been thinking during the screening.

President Obama missed a host of opportunities to remedy Washington’s fever of polarization during the health care debate. Instead of forging a bipartisan coalition and ratcheting back the campaign-style rhetoric, he agreed to a one-party strategy and consistently demonized his opponents with over the top rhetoric.

Mr. Obama also falsely raised citizens’ expectations that one bill or a new government program could remedy all that ails us. Government is no wonder drug.  It cannot deliver all the life altering promises on the president’s wish list.