Homeroom with Sal & Arne Duncan - Wednesday, October 14

Hi everyone! Welcome to the homeroom live stream. Uh, we have a really exciting conversation today with Secretary Arne Duncan, uh, Secretary of Education under Barack Obama.

Uh, but before we get into that, I will give my standard of announcements. Uh, first of all, just a reminder that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit. It can only exist through donations from folks like yourself. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate and making a donation.

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Special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fasting of Artists, and the many other supporters, big and small, across the board. Those dollars make a huge difference in our ability to serve really the country and really the planet. Keep learning through this really, really tough period.

I also want to remind everyone about the "Homeroom with Sal," the podcast, which is, as I said before, it's a way to consume this live stream in a way that is safe while you are driving. Although you can also consume it when you are not driving, so anywhere you get your podcasts, look up "Homeroom with Sal." It's a slightly modified version of these live streams.

So with that, I'm excited to introduce someone uh, who is an expert on all things education. Uh, someone who I look up to and uh, consider to be a good friend. Uh, Secretary Arne Duncan, former Secretary of Education under the Obama Administration and Managing Partner of Chicago Cred. Arne, thanks for joining us!

I'm thrilled to be here! And so I just got to say, just as a parent, as a dad, you've been so helpful to my two kids as they were growing up, and just really, really appreciate everything you're doing for millions of kids not just across the country but across the planet.

Whatever I can do to be helpful to you, um, I just want to be a good teammate to your extraordinary work. So thank you!

No, thank you! Actually, you know, obviously we've interacted many times over the last few years, but I just had a flashback to the first time we met, which was on video conference. You were Secretary of Education, Khan Academy was like only a year, you know, we were on top of a tea shop and I had a video conference with the Secretary of Education. So I put on a jacket, I put on a tie.

Uh, but by the end of the conversation, I felt so comfortable with you that I said—and then, you know, they had stopped recording—I said, "Arnie, can I tell you a secret?" And you said, "What?" And I stood up and I was wearing shorts! And so that was all very prescient for the COVID world. You've always been ahead of your time.

Boy, I've always been ahead of the time! I mean, now even shorts I consider formal. But anyway, we don't have to go—

So, sorry, I mean, maybe a good place to start. I mean, where—obviously, you know there's three multiple layers of crises going on. There's a healthcare crisis, there's a—an education—there's an economic crisis, and there's an education crisis. And I think those really are where everyone's minds are.

You know, you've been Secretary of Education. If this pandemic were happening in 2012, or actually, you know even earlier, what do you see as a role for the federal government? How—what do you think needs to happen to make sure that people keep learning?

Well, let me just add to those, unfortunately, that long list of crises you talked about. I would just add a, you know, a health crisis, a public health crisis of systemic racism that we are still trying to reckon with and, you know, all the inequities that we know exist across every part of our society.

Um, education is not exempt from that, and systemic racism is part and parcel of our educational system, and happy to talk about this. So the challenges are many, and let me be very clear: we made more than our share of mistakes. Happy to talk about successes, happy to talk about failures, but I can tell you, Sal, from the bottom of my heart, as we came to work every single day trying to do what was right for children.

And I would say education is the ultimate bipartisan issue, nonpartisan issue. There's nothing political about more kids having access to pre-K and raising high school graduation rates and having more young people, you know, go on to college once they graduate and attracting and retaining great, great teachers and, you know, doing more technology as you've done so well.

So for me, this has never ever been about politics; it's about policy. What I promised you we would have done is me and my counterpart at Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, who was the former governor of Kansas, would have been locked at the hip. Tom Frieden, who ran the CDC, he was a remarkable leader in the medical space. We would have been very, very transparent and open and honest as you know information—we're learning more things, you know, every week, every day—we still are.

You have to constantly be communicating with tremendous transparency and urgency but also humility to the American public. I promise you we would have taken this extraordinarily seriously. I promise you we wouldn't have buried it like the current administration. I promise you we wouldn't have called it a hoax. I promise you we wouldn't have put a stigma behind wearing masks.

Um, and it's just interesting, you know, my focus has always been on educating kids and giving them a chance in life and trying to break cycles of poverty through education. But this has brought another lens. Our first priority, our first responsibility is to keep children and parents and teachers alive and safe and healthy.

And so that's the framework through which we would have taken on this work every day. I will say, I—you know, again, I just—it's just my—I'm always honest.

What is—you know if you were, whatever the next administration is, if you found yourself or you're advising the next Secretary of Education, what levers are there at the federal level to help us as we go through what's hopefully a short few months of continuing, kind of this COVID strangeness, and then what needs to happen after COVID to make sure that the damage isn't long-lasting? What can you do at the federal level? That's what's always really interesting. What can the Secretary of Education really do here?

Well, there's so much that the next administration has to do, and let me just give you, you know, a couple different things to think about. Um, I will always start with pre-K. We have to get our babies off to a good start; for me, that's the best investment we can make.

We got to stop the—the producer saying, "If you can tilt your camera a little bit," sorry, I don't want to tilt it down a little bit you're getting cut off by your name there. There you go. Perfect!

Okay, sorry, I didn't want to—is that okay? Much, much better. Yes! Sorry, I gotta work on the technical side of this stuff.

So people are sitting behind the scenes today. I'd start with a massive investment in pre-K and getting more and more children across the country ready for school.

Secondly, we have to close the digital divide. The next administration could do that with the FCC. We got to make access to devices, to Wi-Fi, to the internet as ubiquitous as as electricity and drinking water. Kids have to be able to learn anything they want, anytime, anywhere—inner-city communities, rural communities, suburban communities, Native American reservations—that has to be the norm.

We have to think very differently, as you and I have talked about, about the school day, the school year, the calendar. Having summer off for everybody doesn't make sense. We have a lot of kids that need to catch up.

You know, lengthening the time which kids have a chance to learn is so important. I think we have to think differently about the length of time we ask kids to go to school. We've had a kindergarten through 12th grade model. This worked well for the last hundred years. I don't think it's suited well at all for the next five or ten years, let alone the next 20 or 30.

I think we have to move to a pre-K through 14 model and make that the norm. And then finally, for those kids that have been most impacted by the COVID slide and then summer slide, and then, you know, may not be back in school this fall—and that could literally be a couple million kids, Sal—so these are not small numbers.

I would love to see a national tutoring initiative where we can work with those children physically, virtually to try and help them catch up. Um, we can't allow them to have a last year because we lose a year; we may lose them forever.

And so there's so much that the next administration has to do. Work with tremendous urgency. Invest—I would say a great, you know, a great military is our best defense, but a great educational system is our best offense as a country.

We need an administration that truly understands that we have to invest in kids and ultimately in our families and our communities in our country.

And I couldn't agree more with pretty much everything you just said. I mean, just taking them one by one, you know, the digital divide, that's one you and I have talked a lot about. Obviously, even to start accessing Khan Academy and other resources or just participating in digital learning or distance learning, you need it.

What's your sense of what it would take to get, you know, make it so like no family in the country does not have sufficient internet access, just like clean drinking water, heating, like you mentioned? You know, my back of the envelope calculations, it's a—it’s one percent of the trillion that we're throwing around to stimulus right now and it seems like everyone's behind it.

So what would—what takes us across the finish line?

Yeah, what always I guess gets both gives me hope but frankly infuriates me is, Sal, this is not like a cure for cancer. This is not putting a man on Mars. This is simply a lack of vision, a lack of political will, a lack of courage, and frankly a lack of caring about our nation's kids.

So the amount of money would be, you know, a couple billion dollars, you know, whatever—we'll figure out what that number is. Um, it is not overwhelming. You have the FCC, an E-Rate that has access to billions of dollars that could be used in a different way.

And so the funding issue here, to your point, is basically a rounding error. It's just believing in kids and understanding we need to help every child wherever they are find their genius, you know, find what they love to do, you know, find what they want to do with their lives.

And I say all the time that, you know, talent is evenly distributed in our country; opportunity is not. We got to close the opportunity gap. We got to make sure opportunity meets that talent wherever and everywhere that it is.

Digital divide, that seems like a no-brainer from a federal Department of Education point of view. It's a small percentage of the multi-trillions of stimulus that we're putting out there.

These other things that you talked about, like the school day, this calendar, uh, allowing for a competency-based learning—I don't think you said it, but I've heard you other times say things like that—or a tutoring program. Can that happen at the federal level, or is that something that kind of the federal can influence the states to do?

Yeah, both of those—all of the above. So let's sort of take it one at a time. So for me, the E-Rate, you know, the E-Rate program that's a federal program—that's at the national level—and again, this is a national crisis. This is—has to be a national initiative.

So you do you do that closing the digital divide. We can't leave that, you know, locality by locality, community by community, state by state. We do that for every kid.

Now, you know, why are we waiting? What are we waiting for? So that leadership has to happen there. I think it's something like a national tutoring program and what you're getting going in terms of volunteer initiative is extraordinarily important. I just want to help you do that and see that scale.

That leadership can come at the federal level. More resources for pre-K, um, that can come at the federal level. We invested during the Obama administration more than a billion dollars in pre-K—it's one of the things I was most proud of. We just need to do more of that and work with Congress to do that.

Some of the stuff, as you said, is very, very local. Thinking differently about the calendar, the school day, the school week, summers—thinking about a pre-K through 14, you know, model for education in America rather than K-12.

Um, those are things that absolutely would need to happen at the local level. What the federal government could do is they could provide resources to help people think about those things, help them model it, you know, try and scale it, learn what works, what doesn't.

You have an amazing opportunity always to convene at the federal level, um, to put resources behind innovation and creativity. And so again, whether it's hard dollars and some of the stuff or just leadership and vision at the federal level that you can play an extraordinarily important point, uh, part in helping give kids a chance in life.

No, that makes a lot of sense. And we're—I mean told by our technical team, Arne, if you just touch your screen every now and then, it might be because your iPad is going into screen saver mode, so just, you know, give it a little love every few minutes and it'll be—it'll be good.

So we're getting a ton of questions. Uh, you know, there's a question from Scott Yang saying, "Yo Sal, when can things return to normal?" And I'll extend it because I think, you know, Scott is referring to normal in the school system broadly. And obviously you referred to this, you know, the notion of teachers aren't feeling safe, fully protected.

We clearly don't have a vaccine out there. What are you hearing as, you know, the best practices that school districts are doing to navigate these times? Some people are fully open, some people aren't, some people are kind of hybrid. What would you advise the school district right now to get up and running?

A couple thoughts. First of all, school districts—schools—they're not islands. They're not bubbles—they exist in community. And so the best thing, if we truly care about kids, the best thing we can do is to beat down this virus in our communities. And we have not done a good job with that. We've lacked discipline.

We've opened bars before we opened schools, which didn't make any sense. I think the way we have to think about this is going to be public health first, public education second, and then reopening the economy third. It's got to be in that order: public health, public education, reopen the economy.

We've done that all backwards, with disastrous results. So that's the most important thing we can do.

The second thing I'll say is that, uh, I think school districts, in the absence of federal leadership, have shown just unbelievable, you know, creativity in doing this. So how you open carefully, how you open slowly, how you open with the most vulnerable children first or the youngest children's first—we're seeing fantastic examples around the country.

As you notice now, we haven't seen big outbreaks where districts are opening up. They're doing it carefully, they're doing it thoughtfully. Um, kids are really adhering to, you know, to wearing masks and social distancing.

Um, we're seeing, frankly, less of that at the college level in higher education. And so schools, I think, are leading the way in terms of how we get there.

The final point I'll make—and this is a really important one to me—I don't want to go back to quote-unquote "normal" because normal didn't serve millions of children well enough.

We have to—that's not—that's not a high enough bar. We have to use this time to reimagine, reinvent education, do it through a lens of equity—of equity! What's fair? What's just? How do we close these opportunity gaps? How do we give every child a chance to be successful?

And we have to use this very, very dark time to try and leapfrog to something to be much better for our, you know, 53, 54 million children across the country who are going to school.

Yeah, that makes sense. What's your sense, you know, when we talk to a lot of districts—even the ones that have been able to mostly close the digital divide—they're also talking—I have a school teacher who shares the cul-de-sac in our neighborhood. She teaches fifth grade and this is in a middle-income, upper-middle-income neighborhood.

She's telling me that in her class of 30, there are two or three kids that are just disengaged, and she thinks they have internet access, but maybe they're—they don’t have the supports at home.

And what we're hearing in large urban school districts is the problem's much, much worse. Even when there is internet access, how do we reach those kids, or what do they need? What kind of support can we give them?

Yeah, that's so important. And let me say first that we have so many in, you know, in school systems and individual schools. You have so many different responsibilities, and it's not just the education part.

Now, I will come back and answer that. The first thing that schools do across the country is they serve tens of millions of kids two sometimes three meals a day. And throughout the pandemic, starting in early March, we've done a weekly call with school districts across the country who, through all of this, as physical buildings shut down, those schools continued to be food distribution centers and drive-throughs in front of it—just amazing leadership and hard work to make that happen.

Um, secondly, we have to take care of kids' social and emotional health. And so telehealth, teachers, counselors, you know, psychologists, social workers reaching out to children, um, many of whom are dealing with a lot of trauma before this—many of whom are dealing with, unfortunately, a lot more trauma now due to the pandemic, due to economic insecurity, due to systemic racism, due to food insecurity.

We have to take care of those kids, and then we get to the education part.

So as we talk about, you know, so much, you know, high tech and internet and broad broadband—all that's great, but to answer your question directly, the most important thing I think we can do now to reach those kids who may have disappeared, who are struggling—we have to do—we have to go old school. We have to go visit them at their homes.

And it's been fascinating. With the young man I work with here in Chicago, trying to reduce violence on the South and West sides, uh, the past few months I've spent more time than I ever have on porches, steps, and just sitting and talking to guys, you know, at their house, on their block, in their neighborhood. I have to say it's been—it’s been an amazing learning experience.

And just not sitting behind a desk, you know, not having them come to our offices, although we're glad to slowly be opening our physical offices, but just meeting them where they are and listening and getting a sense of what's going on has been invaluable in building our trust and building our relationships.

And so there's no substitute for—again, teachers, whoever is, you know, again, maybe not in the playbook—in the traditional playbook, but this is not very non-traditional time. I would just strongly urge, not just teachers, but educational leaders to go find those kids, go to their homes, talk to them, talk to their parents, find out what's going on, find out what we can do to help them re-engage.

And I always say when kids are struggling, when they're, you know, when they're not able to participate in school, when their behavior isn't, you know, isn't great, um, for me that's always a symptom of a problem. And the problem is much deeper, and we got to not deal with the symptoms here; we got to deal with the root causes, whatever they may be.

No, it makes a ton of sense. And you alluded to it—I mean, tell us a little bit about the work that you're doing now at Cred. Uh, what—what is that work? Why have you kind of put your—you know, you could be doing anything in education or beyond. Why are you focusing your energies there?

Yeah, so I'm obsessed, just laser-like focused on reducing gun violence in Chicago. And I would tell you, so I started to lose friends to gun violence when I was a teen. I'm 55, and how—so that's 40 years ago. Honestly, I think that hap—when that happens, it, it shapes you and probably scars you in some ways—a little bit difficult to talk about.

Um, during my time leading the Chicago Public Schools, there's a whole bunch I was really, really proud of. We can talk about that all day, but on my watch during my seven and a half years leading Chicago Public Schools, on average, we had one of our children, one of our students killed every two weeks due to gun violence. It was a staggering rate of loss, and thank goodness it was never in school.

But it was, you know, and it's going home, on the bus, walking to the corner store, shot through a living room window, you know, 7:30 in the morning, you know, getting ready for school, and I just feel—I don't feel we—I know we, as adults, fail to keep our kids safe.

And when our family moved to D.C. in 2009, very naively in hindsight, I thought we were rock bottom. I thought we couldn't get any worse in terms of violence, and for a whole host of reasons, things got a lot worse in seven years we were in D.C.

So coming back home, Chicago has given me every opportunity, you know, educationally, academically, athletically, socially, culturally. I owe this city everything for me to come back here and not deal with this crisis didn't feel right.

So we're just working directly with the young men on the South and West sides most likely to shoot and be shot, and helping them move out of that life and start to be the real strong community leaders they need to be to take our city to a much, much safer place.

The level of fear and trauma that our children are growing up with on the South and West sides is unimaginable and it's not right, it's not fair, it's not their fault, and we're trying to break those cycles.

What do you think is the major lever? I mean, you talked about just that door-to-door work, making connections with young people. Is that really the core work, or are there other levers?

Yeah, this work is very, very complicated, so I don't want to ever oversimplify. So I'll just say there are five—what we call five pillars to our work.

So one is street outreach. We have guys who, you know, formerly were in the, you know, in the gangs, in the cliques who have what we call LTO—licensed to operate—who they work to mediate conflicts. Actually, it's crazy—this past weekend, Saturday night, one of our street outreach workers actually negotiated a hostage situation. The police stood down and let him handle it because he had the—the relationship was unbelievable there.

So in street outreach, that basically is our HR function; they bring young men into our program. Once guys come to us, we do four other things. Um, every guy has a life coach. We always say experience can be the best teacher, but it doesn't have to be your experience.

Our life coaches have lived often very tough lives but have come out the back end and want to give back and want to help out. They're remarkable.

We have a clinical team. The amount of trauma our guys are dealing with is extraordinary. We see all the time that hurt people hurt people. We have to help guys heal and deal with a lifetime of trauma.

We have an education team. We've had well over 100 guys get high school diplomas. We have a set of folks actually in college now and it's been fantastic to see that happen.

And then we have a jobs team, and ultimately our goal is to move guys out of the street economy into the legal economy, and we have jobs teams that help in that transition. Um, guys work with us for, you know, nine months, a year, 15 months, then we have about, uh, four dozen employers who hire at the back end.

And so those are the five pillars that give us a chance to give guys a chance in life, and I always say after you were giving them not a second chance but a first chance.

No, that's incredibly powerful, incredibly important work. Um, one question here—I know we're running low on time—from Facebook, Carl James Markhart. It's about higher education. With the cost of university education in the States at a record high and with COVID-19 demonstrating the extent to which university education is self-taught when online resources are readily available, how can the next government improve access to cost-effective tertiary education which lead to accredited qualifications that are valued by employers?

Big questions.

Yes, I think this, you know, this pandemic is forcing us to be creative and think very differently about education. So what can be delivered—not just what can be delivered online? Maybe what's even better delivered, more effectively, more efficiently delivered online?

Um, we're gonna have—we're coming out of this much smarter than we went into this. Where—how we utilize our best teachers, whether it's K-12, our best professors on the higher education side—again, what you've done and what you did for our, you know, my kids is you're an amazing teacher. You didn't teach 25 kids in one class or, you know, 120, you know, freshmen or sophomores.

Um, you've touched tens of millions of kids. And how do we create systems where our best instructors, and whatever it is, um, have more range, have more access to young people, again, whether it's K-12 or on the higher ed side.

I think, as I said earlier, as a country we have to move to a pre-K to 14 model. Not everyone has to go to a four-year university, but I want to make sure they have the opportunity to do that.

And so we have to make sure every young person coming out of high school gets four-year university, two-year community college, trade, technical, vocational training— that they have a plan beyond that.

I think we will see more low-cost, high-quality models coming out of higher education. Again, the federal government could do a lot more to incentivize that and put some resources behind that.

And then the final thing I would love to see the federal government do is, where we're seeing universities—the goal for me is not to just enroll young people, it's to have them graduate. It's to get that diploma. The worst thing you can have is all that college debt and no degree; that's the worst position.

But if you graduate, you're going to be in pretty good shape. And so I think again the federal level, we can incentivize those universities or those new models where, whether it's, you know, uh, English language learners, whether it's Pell recipients, whether it's first-generation college-goers, or all the above, who's doing the best job not just again of attracting them, of enrolling them, but of helping them graduate.

I'd like to put a lot more resources behind those traditional institutions or new creative institutions that are emerging and frankly less resources behind those places that aren't as serious about helping people get that piece of paper that's so critically important.

No, it's all about transparency—not only are they graduating but what are their job placement, et cetera. So this next question, there's been a lot of conversation on social media about your background.

Uh, this is a very serious question from Facebook, Ruth Branigan asks, "Where is Arnie? Was it his turn to bowl?" I think that is...in...revelation bowl? I think they think behind you are bowling—[Laughter] shoes? Looks like a nice bowling alley with a nice view.

You don't want to see me bowl.

So I, I will tell you the folks who's, uh, are kind enough to give our non-profit office space here—it's actually an interesting story. They, um, they bronze the shoes of the mentors of all the people who work at their company and basically said, "We built this company upon your shoulders."

So they bronzed the actual shoes of the mentors of all of their—their lead, their—their employees here. So that the company gives me space is Vista and, um, yeah, it's a pretty remarkable story and people come visit, people often go show them the shoe of their mentor—the person who had the biggest influence on their life.

I love that idea! Well, you know, in the remaining time we have left, just in one question, there's a lot of people of all ages. We have parents watching, we have teachers watching, we have young people watching. We're going through hard times, you know. What advice do you have for them in navigating their education or beyond?

Yeah, well, say a couple things. First, I just want to say thank you to everybody. Thank you to teachers, thank you to parents, thank you to students. I hate that it's such a hard time now. I hate that there's just a desperate lack of leadership and seriousness—a purpose at the federal level and dishonesty there.

But what I see from real people in real communities every single day is extraordinary. And so just from the bottom of my heart, thank you for everyone who is working so hard in extraordinarily stressful and difficult times on behalf of our kids.

Um, secondly, I always want to say, you know, we need to take care of ourselves, but more importantly, we have to take care of each other. Now, this is a time of extraordinary stress. I actually don't love the term "self-care" because it sort of puts all the onus on the individual just to take care of themselves.

Um, I think this has got to be we, as a community, have to come together, look out for each other, you know, take care of each other, check on people, ask very honestly and listen to, you know, how are you doing? How are you feeling?

I'll speak to myself. I have some great days and I've had some really, really difficult days, and we have to take that part of this, you know, very, very seriously.

Um, third, just to sort of be kind to ourselves, take a little pressure off. You know, don't push, you know, don't push so hard. Don't be so hard on ourselves. We're all trying to do more.

Um, I've probably never felt more inadequate. Um, there's so much I'm trying to do every single day as you are and so many are because the need is so great.

Um, but at the same time, we just have to sort of be, you know, be kind to ourselves. And the final thing I'll say is that, you know, in a really dark and difficult time, I'm actually tremendously hopeful and the sense of our common humanity, the sense of our interconnectedness, um, how much we have to show empathy.

Um, everybody’s seeing that, you know, if my kids are okay but my neighbor's kids aren't okay, um, that's not good enough. If our family is okay but the family down the block or in another neighborhood, they're not okay—that's got to—you know, that's not good enough.

I think we are really realizing in an unbelievably concrete way how much we need each other, how interdependent we are, how much we have in common. And if we can continue to—to never not forget that, continue to sort of have that in our hearts and minds and more importantly in our children's hearts and minds, that actually makes me wildly hopeful about where our country can go.

I'm not just coming out of the pandemic, but for the next couple decades.

Well, thank you for that! As always, uh, very, very inspirational. We're going through hard times but—Secretary Duncan, Arne, thank you so much for joining. This was really valuable. Thanks for all of your leadership!

Well, thanks everyone for for joining. As always, a great conversation with Secretary Duncan. I want to remind everyone for tomorrow's show, we're going to have Laurie Santos, who teaches a very popular course at Yale University called "Psychology and the Good Life."

And so this is a course that actually tries to tackle, I think, something that all of us are trying to do, which is just how do we live our best life? And you know, a lot of what Arnie was just talking about of self-care, uh, which doesn't have to be self-driven, which is, you know, how do you nourish yourself, your mental well-being?

And obviously it's especially important given everything that's going on in the world right now. So join us tomorrow, uh, so—and I guess onward. See you tomorrow!