The $100 billion in emergency aid for public schools and colleges in the economic stimulus bill could transform Arne Duncan into an exceptional figure in the history of federal education policy: a secretary of education loaded with money and the power to spend large chunks of it as he sees fit.
Upon meeting department employees last month, Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, asked them to call him by his first name. "My name is Arne," he said. "It's not Mr. Secretary."
But the money also poses challenges and risks for Mr. Duncan, the 44-year-old former Chicago schools chief who now heads the Department of Education.
Mr. Duncan must develop procedures on the fly for disbursing a budget that has, overnight, more than doubled, and communicate the rules quickly to all 50 states and the nation's 14,000 school districts. And he faces thousands of tricky decisions about how much money to give to whom and for what.
"It'll be wonderful fun for a time for his team -- it'll be like Christmas," said Chester Finn, a former Department of Education official who has watched education secretaries or commissioners come and go here since the mid-1960s. "But the thing about discretionary spending is that it makes more people angry than it makes happy."
| Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas