Education Reform? Secretary Arne Duncan Weighs In

Welcome to Politics Bites, where every afternoon at It's A Free Country, we bring you the unmissable quotes from political conversations on WNYC. On the Brian Lehrer Show, U.S. Education Secretary, Arne Duncan discussed his new plan for education reform.

At the NBC Education Summit in New York in September, Secretary Duncan launched a national teacher recruitment campaign. Among its goals is to increase the number, quality and diversity of teachers, particularly in high-need schools. Duncan says the ethnic and racial diversity in the current workforce is not as diverse as the student body, and something needs to be done about it.

I'm very concerned that increasingly, our teachers don't reflect the great diversity of our nation's young people, and so making sure we have more teachers of color and particularly more men, more black and Latino men, coming into education is going to be a significant part of this Teach Campaign.

Duncan expects the retirement of as many as one million Boomer generation teachers over the next four to six years, and these teachers will need to be replaced. He says right now, the door is open for reform.

Our ability to attract and then retain this next generation of talent to come into education will shape public education for the next 30 years. It's just an amazing once-in-a-generation opportunity.

But it's also a necessity, he says.

We have to educate our way to a better economy. We have a 25 percent drop-out rate in this country. We're losing about a million children each year from our schools to the streets. That's just economically unsustainable and it's morally unacceptable and we all have to work together and challenge the status quo.

Listen to the whole interview on the Brian Lehrer Show.