Arne Duncan (born November 6, 1964) is an American education administrator and currently United States Secretary of Education. Duncan had previously served as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools.

Duncan was raised in Hyde Park, Chicago, where his father Starkey Duncan was a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, and his mother Susan Morton runs the Sue Duncan Children's Center, an after school program serving African-American youth on Chicago's South Side. Duncan spent a great deal of his free time at his mother's center tutoring other students. Some of his childhood friends were John W. Rogers, Jr., CEO of Ariel Capital Management (now Ariel Investments) and founder of the Ariel Community Academy, Illinois State Senator Kwame Raoul, actor Michael Clarke Duncan, singer R. Kelly, IBM Fellow Kerrie Holley and martial artist Michelle Gordon. Duncan's spoken accent at this time led at least one college basketball coach to assume that he was of African-American descent.

Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he aspired to a future career coaching basketball or playing the sport professionally. He then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a bachelors degree in sociology in 1987. His senior thesis, for which he took a year's leave to do research in Kenwood, in inner-city Chicago, was entitled The values, aspirations and opportunities of the urban underclass. Though unpublished, it was later cited by other authors.