Of course, Duncan wasn’t hired to blow up an old system, but to build on the work of his predecessor. And his current job is, if anything, more of an incremental game than the previous one. The agenda spans proposed changes in preK to college, pounding the bully pulpit to promote charter schools, merit pay, and national standards, and what’s likely to be a contentious fight over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. Besides his $5 billion pot of discretionary money, Duncan has several things working in his favor. Over the past decade sharp partisan divisions over education policy have softened, in part because of the progress made by reformist big city superintendents including Duncan himself. That doesn’t mean a big breakthrough is imminent; the landscape is simply more fractured than before. “There is some bipartisan agreement, center-left, center-right. But both Democrats and Republicans are divided on education,” says Cynthia Brown, vice president for education policy at the liberal Center for American Progress.

The national political foment has been accompanied by a flood of experimentation and new policy thinking, and Duncan wants the department tapped into it. Among other things, he’s brought in Monica Higgins, an associate professor at the Ed School, to organize a series of 90-minute roundtables every three to four weeks in which outside policy experts and practitioners meet with Duncan and his top deputies for an open discussion on a particular topic — teacher performance, turnaround in schools. Duncan has also seeded key positions in the department with Ed School graduates. Martha Kanter, Ed.M.’74, the undersecretary of education, had been chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and is an expert in two-year colleges, a focus of Obama’s goal to increase college attendance and graduation rates. Gabriella Gomez, Ed.M.’01, meanwhile, is running Duncan’s congressional relations. Robert Shireman, Ed.M.’89, founder of the Institute for College Access and Success, has been appointed to oversee college tuition and finance issues. Schwartz continues to advise Duncan informally.

Right now, anything seems possible. That’s not going to last. “Everybody goes through this period, enjoying the honeymoon phase. But then when it gets down to reality of who gets money, who gets approved, who are the real innovators and drivers, there it gets much harder,” says Duncan’s predecessor, Margaret Spellings. One obstacle is the caps that many states maintain on the numbers of charter schools — a policy Obama and Duncan are pushing them to relax. “Imagine a governor of a state that has fairly severe caps on charter expansion and a need to get in an application under Race to the Top. It will take an act of the legislature in New York, for example, to change caps,” says Russ Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former head of the Department’s Institute of Education Sciences. Congress will also be skeptical — as it was recently when Senate and House committees grilled Duncan on his plans for Title I funding.

As in Chicago, Duncan’s plans ultimately depend on his relationship with his boss. “He gets this,” Duncan says. “Before I came to Washington we talked a lot about what we want to do here. And he, like me, feels this huge sense of urgency, this real sense of impatience, and this real sense of possibility. He helps create the space and the latitude to make the changes we need to make.”

Duncan and Obama met in the early 1990s (through basketball, Duncan already knew Michelle Obama’s brother Craig Robinson, now the men’s basketball coach at Oregon State). They crossed paths occasionally after Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 representing Duncan’s home base, Hyde Park and Kenwood on the South Side, and frequently when Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate and Duncan ran the school system. They also began playing basketball regularly — they played on election day in Chicago, and occasionally manage it in Washington. “It’s really, really lucky when you’re not trying to build a relationship now,” Duncan says, “when you’ve got this history of working together, when you tend to see the world very similarly and have a similar set of values.”

Education, of course, must compete with other items on Obama’s ambitious agenda, as well as with erupting crises that will inevitably distract the White House. If the president pushes education reform consistently and wagers political capital on it, Duncan has a chance at success. Duncan’s membership in the close-knit group of Chicago transplants in the Obama administration — including top advisors David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, and social secretary Desiree Rogers (John W. Rogers’ ex-wife) — will help him keep his issues in the mix.

– John McQuaid is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer based in Washington, D.C. This is his first piece for Ed. To access his stories and blog, go to www.johnmcquaid.com.