November 18, 2009 1:31PM # What about K‑12, Secretary Duncan? By [Andrew J. Coulson](https://www.cato.org/people/andrew-coulson) --- SHARE Speaking to the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, education secretary [Arne Duncan said ](http://chronicle.com/article/Duncan-Promises-Colleges/49187/)that “he would gladly cut federal red tape if institutions, in return, showed greater progress on improving student performance.” So the secretary supports less government intrusion in education if schools show improvement. Except he doesn’t. Not at the K‑12 level, anyway. Because Arne Duncan has advocated a slow death for the DC voucher program that his own Department of Education shows is… wait for it… [significantly improving outcomes ](https://www.cato.org/2009/04/03/dc-vouchers-better-results-at-a-quarter-the-cost/)while getting government out of the business of running schools altogether. But maybe that’s the problem. [Schools work better the smaller the role government plays in them](https://www.cato.org/pubs/articles/coulson_comparing_public_private_market_schools_jsc.pdf), but that means we don’t really need a secretary of education at all, do we? ##### Related Tags [Education](https://www.cato.org/education), [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Center for Educational Freedom](https://www.cato.org/center-educational-freedom) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).