Education Secretary Arne Duncan is sitting on $4.35 billion. Can he deliver for children?

If he can successfully bear up under the pressure, Duncan will likely craft what looks to be one of the few bright story lines for the Obama administration in a year that has started out very badly and has the potential to get much worse.

Duncan also addressed one of the toughest criticisms he and Obama have received from a diverse cross section of education advocates, that the executive branch should have done more to prevent the D.C. public schools voucher system from being closed down.

Duncan said he does not believe vouchers are the best solution for children stuck in failing schools.

“What we want to do is make sure that every child has the chance to go to a great school, not just peel off 1 or 2 percent from a school and leave the rest to drown,” Duncan said.

“The goal of turnaround is not to save one or two children,” he said. “The turnaround work is to transform the opportunities for every child, 100 percent of children in those low performing schools. And we want to work with DC and other school districts, urban and rural, who have the courage and commitment to fundamentally change what’s not working and to do it at scale.”

Duncan has been criticized by African-American clergy and community leaders, as well as public figures such as Juan Williams, for not challenging Congress on this issues. Congress is allowing the program – which provided scholarships of up to $7,500 to 1,700 children in D.C.’s low-performing public schools – to expire at the end of 2010.

Daniel Lips, a senior education policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, called Duncan’s comments on the voucher system “indefensible.”

“There is no reason that this program couldn’t be expanded to help many more children in the District,” Lips said.

“He talks about needing to reform broken schools over the process of five or six years. What good is that going to be for a child today who is stuck in a bad school?” Lips said. “We know we can help them today by giving them scholarships to attend better schools.”

Allie McCubrey contributed to this article.