By Amanda Paulson Stacy Teicher Khadaroo The Christian Science Monitor
As students head back to school educators nationwide are implementing controversial school reform wrought by Arne Duncan. Pushing competitive market approaches and armed with unprecedented funding and support from the president he is possibly the most powerful education secretary ever.
Growing up in Chicago Arne Duncan learned early that education was a stark dividing line sometimes literally between life and death.
At the South Side after-school center that his mom founded he knew kids whod made it all the way to fourth grade unable to read. And on the asphalt playgrounds of that rough area he
shot hoops with boys who later died in gang warfare.
Mr. Duncan thought hed glimpsed the worst kind of circumstance that can swallow up young people.
But then on the desolate plains of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana the secretary of Education met Lame Deer High School freshman Teton Magpie. And that as Duncan recounts with a surge of emotion was a vivid glimpse at an even lower rung of despair in the American education system.
Sitting in a circle with students and teachers and in the native American tradition passing a feather to the person who had the floor Duncan listened to the usual litany of requests for computers and fancy equipment.
But an air of defeatism pervaded the place: In the past six years only eight students have gone on to four-
year colleges.
Duncan was incredulous.
And then Teton spoke. More than anything he said he just needed challenging classes and mentors so he could be the first in his family to go to college.
Duncan says he was hit by how mentally crushing it is to grow up surrounded by poverty 70 percent of the reservations adults are unemployed and a sense that even school the one place that might afford the opportunity to climb out of it was letting kids down.
Sometimes we need someone to come in and give us a little hope because hope dies Teton says now recalling that day in 2009 when he met Duncan and how the secretary has kept in touch to encourage him.
