Over these next few weeks, 56 million American kids will start kindergarten through 12th grade. Even before an assignment or test is handed out, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has a grade for the system: B.

"we've stagnated," Mr. Duncan says of the U.S. educational system. "Other countries have passed us by."

Few dispute that. An evaluation by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked the United States 18th among 36 countries in secondary education. Almost 25 percent of U.S. students fail to graduate from high school on time; in South Korea, it's 7 percent.

Mr. Duncan says the long-simmering debate between liberals and conservatives is a false choice; both are right. American schools need more money and more resources, yet without changing the performance-based system and more accountability, they won't make much difference.

The former head of the Chicago school system and onetime Harvard basketball star an oxymoron he acknowledges ?the 44-year-old Mr. Duncan wants to change that.
 
He is perhaps the most ambitious and energetic U.S. education chief since the department was started about 30 years ago. He is spending a record amount of money and making sweeping demands on the educational system.

"with unprecedented resources and unprecedented reform, I think we have a chance to make a fundamental and historic breakthrough,"she said in an interview.

Many in the American school-reform movement, from leading business figures to involved social entrepreneurs, agree. the president and Arne have made more progress in education policy in the first 200 days of the Obama administration than in the first seven months of any new president in American history,says Jon Schnur, head of New Leaders for New Schools, which trains principals to take over troubled schools. Mr. Schnur took a leave at the beginning of the year to help Mr. Duncan get started.

The Obama economic-stimulus package contained $100 billion for education. Much of that was to stave off cutbacks at the state and local levels.

Still, a considerable piece of change is geared toward initiating new programs largely predicated upon school systems?meeting four conditions: upgrading teacher quality; adopting more rigorous academic standards; overhauling the lowest-performing schools; and creating systems to better track student progress. Congress gave Mr. Duncan wide latitude in implementing these
conditions ?a size and scope other education secretaries could only dream about.

A policy centerpiece for Mr. Duncan is almost $5 billion for the ace to the Top initiative, federal money that will be distributed to states that make the most measurable progress in improving educational outcomes and school districts that devise innovations that can be replicated elsewhere.

In suggesting how to win Race to the Top funds, Mr. Duncan is emphasizing charter schools, which, while a part of the public system, are operated independently and often permit more innovation. The lure of this money and the prestige of winning it have already led seven states, including Mr. Duncan home turf of Illinois, to remove limits on the growth of charter schools.

He would also tie teacher evaluations and pay more closely to how much student performance improves. Mr. Duncan has been the driving force among 47 states and the District of Columbia collaborating to devise a common set of internationally competitive reading and math standards. (The holdouts are South Carolina, Alaska and Texas.)

In many states, he notes, the standards are so low that the child who is meeting them is barely able to graduate from high school and is totally underprepared to go to college.?Mr. Duncan, a favorite of President Barack Obama, his Chicago pal and sometime basketball-court mate, has a lot of leverage. He also faces resistance.

A recent study by Stanford University found mixed results on charter schools, which began in the 1990s and now number 4,600. In 17 percent of cases, especially in high-poverty areas, charters provided clearly superior education to the traditional public schools. But more than a third of the schools were actually inferior to the public schools, Stanford researchers found.

Teachers and their unions are skeptical about linking instructor evaluations and rewards to student test scores, arguing that it only would encourage teaching to tests, not creating richer learning experiences for children.

The largest teachers’ organization, the National Education Association, finds particular resistance in a number of its state affiliates.

Even Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has an urban focus and a history of working with school reformers, says: “By doing this through regulation and not legislation, I worry that Arne will get some short-term results, but he’s not creating long-term educational reform,” she said.

Mr. Duncan takes these criticisms in stride. He agrees there are lousy charter schools and says there needs to be pressure to close them, noting he shut down three in Chicago.

“We’re going to continue to use the bully pulpit,” he said, “to replicate success and shoot down failure.”

Thus he wants more accountability while contending that, when charter schools work, they are run by “education entrepreneurs, innovators. You have to free them from bureaucracy.”

Mr. Duncan insists that test performances will only be a part of evaluating school systems and teachers, and vows that these “performance-based plans” will be devised “with teachers, not to teachers.”

“Somehow in education we’ve been scared to talk about excellence,” he says. “That has to change.”

Ms. Weingarten appreciates both the openness and the drive that Mr. Duncan brings to this task. “Arne is very affable and very tough at the same time,” she says. “He listens, but he’s a guy on a mission.”

(www.eduwo.com, Jainlyn&Charlotte)