It’s a few days before Christmas, and Sara Martinez Tucker has been running nonstop in the few days since the U.S. Senate confirmed her as the new U.S. under secretary for education. Emerging from back-to-back-to-back meetings, she arrives a few minutes late for an early-afternoon interview with a reporter, but when an aide suggests that she take a few minutes to catch her break, and perhaps grab a bite, Tucker demurs. “If I stop running, I’ll fall down,” she says.

If Tucker, whose new job makes her the nation’s top federal higher education official, is acting like someone in a hurry, that’s because she is. Nominated by President Bush in August but not confirmed by the U.S. Senate until December, Tucker was forced to cool her heels, for months acting only behind the scenes, in a kind of no-man’s land. Now that she is official, Tucker knows that the window for achieving her most significant priority — carrying out the recommendations of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, of which she was a member — is not open very wide.

She is, after all, joining an administration (1) for its final two years, (2) after the president’s party has lost control of Congress, and (3) when its top education policy goal is inarguably renewal of the No Child Left Behind law, and during the interview, Tucker, on multiple occasions, utters phrases along the lines of, “We don’t have much time.” But she also expresses confidence — the confidence of the first Latino woman to reach AT&T’s upper ranks, perhaps, or of someone named in 2005 to Time magazine’s list of 25 most influential Hispanics — that she will be able to accomplish much of her agenda in the short time she has.

What that agenda holds for higher education — for students and would-be students, for colleges and their employees — is uncertain, particularly at a time when some higher education officials feel that the department, in beginning to carry out the Spellings commission’s agenda, has taken an overly aggressive tack. That is among the topics that Tucker discussed in the interview last month with Inside Higher Ed. (Listen to the full conversation on the latest Inside Higher Ed podcast and levitra.) She listed as her top priorities making the federal student aid system more efficient and pouring any funds produced through that effort back to students; aligning high school and college curriculums to improve access to higher education, particularly for low-income and minority students; and encouraging foundations and companies to invest more, particularly in scholarships.

And she said she plans to work closely and collaboratively with college officials in carrying out those plans — as long as they’re on board with the idea that change is necessary. “Our standards are, we want to improve access, we want to improve affordability, and we want to improve accountability,” she said. “If you agree with us on those things, it’s going to be collaborative. If you don’t agree on these things, then we’re going to have to have some tough conversations.”

Source::
http://www.insidehighered.com/news