As Arne Duncan, a former member of the Ed School’s visiting committee, helps school districts across the country Race to the Top and tries to give every child a chance to succeed, this idealist, competitor, and basketball pal to the president has the opportunity to do what no previous secretary of education has been able to accomplish.

Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, spent the balance of his childhood traveling back and forth each weekday from his Chicago neighborhood to the afterschool center run by his mother, Sue. It was a short trip — the Duncan home was on 56th Street in Hyde Park, the center on 46th in the Kenwood neighborhood. But as in many American cities where privilege and poverty butt up against each other, it was in essence a passage from one world into another. Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago (and, until recently, to Barack Obama and his family) was a famously integrated, upscale community. Kenwood was, in the language of the time — the 1970s — a ghetto.

The Sue Duncan Center was attended by kids from elementary to high school age, nearly all of them African Americans struggling with the grind of urban poverty — crime, drugs, gangs, absent parents. Arne and his younger brother and sister attended the well-regarded University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in the morning, then spent their afternoons as, in effect, junior members of their mother’s staff. As young kids they earned small change for sharpening pencils and cleaning up. As they got older, they took on more responsibilities: tutoring, supervising, coaching sports and games.

The gulf between their own comfortable circumstances — their father was a professor of psychology at the university — and those of their contemporaries on the South Side bothered the Duncan kids. It became a kind of puzzle, a mental nut they all tried to crack as they grew older. Why did such glaring inequities exist in Chicago, in America? Who or what was to blame? Unsurprisingly, they focused on what they knew — education. Inner-city Chicago schools were notoriously bad during the 1960s and ’70s; Duncan’s brother, Owen, says that, at the time, the afterschool center didn’t help kids with homework because their teachers didn’t give them any.

“I grew up having a huge amount of anger, frankly, at the local public schools — that what we were trying to do from 3 to 8 p.m. at night wasn’t in most cases happening during the school day,” Arne Duncan says in an interview. “So you had kids who may not have been born with all the advantages, but they were smart, they were committed, they wanted to learn — and they weren’t being challenged. No one was expecting them to do anything.”

Let’s be upfront about it: Arne Duncan is a bona fide idealist. He talks not just about putting kids first, raising test scores, and the relationship of education to economic opportunity — the standard rhetoric of his predecessors — but also about education as a tool for social justice, not a phrase heard very often in Washington policy circles or even among his fellow technocrats in the Obama administration. He believes that government has an obligation to right the wrongs of poverty — or, at least, to do everything possible to mitigate the damage it does to individuals. “In so many places we’re not giving every child a chance, we’re not giving children the chance they need to be successful,” he says. “And where we don’t, I really believe we’re part of the problem. We perpetuate poverty. We perpetuate social failure.”