Arne Duncan, CNN, and Twitter
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was on CNN Newsroom with Rick Sanchez shortly after 3pm today, answering questions from the public. Kudos to Rick Sanchez and CNN for soliciting questions and using technology to gather them, including Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. I keep getting excited about the ways in which these participatory web tools can be used and are being used for public input and collaboration, open government, and more effective advocacy efforts.
So at around 2:30 today I got a tweet (that’s the name for the 160-max character entry on Twitter) saying that the public could suggest questions for Duncan by tweeting “@ricksanchezcnn” followed by a question. In no time I went to Twitter.com, logged in, and saw that many people had already sent in their suggestions. So I started tweeting and added two questions of my own, namely:
- What were your most powerful learning experiences in school or otherwise? What do your answers say about what schools need?
- How and when will DoE listen to the voices of young people, the real experts, in its work to improve schools and learning?
(For those of you counting, when you add @ricksanchezcnn, I had no more than a couple characters left to spare in each of those!)
True to his word, Rick started asking Duncan questions from the public (including one question from a college student) when the Secretary came on the show. Here’s a brief summary:
Q1: Some schools are going to 4 day weeks, what do you think?
Duncan: I actually want to go the other way, to increase school time, not decrease it.
Q2: What about the arts and music being eliminated from schools?
Duncan: This relates to the first question, in that we need more time to do the basics of math, reading, and writing, but we also need art, music, physical education, etc. So we need more time to do all this, because “we need to give kids time to develop their skills and interests.”
Q3: (from a college student) Can we please get rid of NCLB?
Duncan: NCLB has done some things good but it also can do many things better. It highlights the achievement gap and aggregates data, but it has been underfunded and not implemented well. With the new stimulus plan Obama helped push through, over 100 billion dollars of additional funding is coming to education, which is great.
That was it. Pretty short, mostly sound bites. But I really appreciated the public forum that CNN chose for gathering questions, tapping into the changing expectations of the public to be involved in public policy conversations.
And the one quote from Duncan that I wrote in bold up there was a pretty good and empowering one, and I think I got it word for word. Let’s remember that quote and hold Duncan and Obama to account for giving young people “time to develop their skills and interests.”