MARTINSBURG -- Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a former big-city schools chief, traveled through rural terrain Tuesday as he asked educators and parents how the Obama administration should overhaul the No Child Left Behind law.

Duncan is from Chicago, but he made West Virginia the first stop on a 15-state "listening tour."

"I think the challenges are very similar," Duncan told The Associated Press in an interview. "I know there are high-performing schools in every state in the country, and what's important to me is to really understand what enables them to beat the odds."

Duncan noted that urban and rural schools alike still struggle to attract talented teachers, a problem lawmakers and former President George W. Bush tried to fix when they created No Child Left Behind in 2001.

"We can fix what doesn't work. We can build on what does work," Duncan told about a dozen teachers and parents at Bunker Hill Elementary, a high-achieving school in the Eastern Panhandle.

Duncan made time to visit with kids, reading the book "Doggie Dreams" to first-graders at Bunker Hill and having lunch with fourth-graders at Eagle Intermediate School in Martinsburg, where he ate a cheesesteak sandwich and onion rings but finished only half his vegetables.

"Who's the president now?" Duncan asked the first-graders, one of whom correctly identified Obama. "Barack Obama, that's important," he said.

He asked if the kids had questions, but the conversation devolved rapidly as his audience clamored to tell Duncan when their birthdays are. "Guess how old I'm going to be on my next birthday?" asked Duncan, 44. Guesses ranged from 51 to 89.

Duncan said little about the law Tuesday, preferring to listen to the concerns of teachers. He kept things low-key and intimate, avoiding larger sessions that could easily have drawn heated rhetoric about what has become an intensely unpopular law.

Special-education teacher Lynn Reichard told him she works all year long to boost the self-esteem of mentally impaired students at Bunker Hill, only to see them fall apart over standardized tests.

"They feel so good about themselves, and then they look at a two-paragraph reading passage, and they know six words," Reichard said. "I have one child here that's a nonreader, and she's going to have to take the test, and she's going to cry.

"There's just got to be another answer for that," Reichard said.

MARTINSBURG -- Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a former big-city schools chief, traveled through rural terrain Tuesday as he asked educators and parents how the Obama administration should overhaul the No Child Left Behind law.

Duncan is from Chicago, but he made West Virginia the first stop on a 15-state "listening tour."

"I think the challenges are very similar," Duncan told The Associated Press in an interview. "I know there are high-performing schools in every state in the country, and what's important to me is to really understand what enables them to beat the odds."

Duncan noted that urban and rural schools alike still struggle to attract talented teachers, a problem lawmakers and former President George W. Bush tried to fix when they created No Child Left Behind in 2001.

"We can fix what doesn't work. We can build on what does work," Duncan told about a dozen teachers and parents at Bunker Hill Elementary, a high-achieving school in the Eastern Panhandle.

Duncan made time to visit with kids, reading the book "Doggie Dreams" to first-graders at Bunker Hill and having lunch with fourth-graders at Eagle Intermediate School in Martinsburg, where he ate a cheesesteak sandwich and onion rings but finished only half his vegetables.

"Who's the president now?" Duncan asked the first-graders, one of whom correctly identified Obama. "Barack Obama, that's important," he said.

He asked if the kids had questions, but the conversation devolved rapidly as his audience clamored to tell Duncan when their birthdays are. "Guess how old I'm going to be on my next birthday?" asked Duncan, 44. Guesses ranged from 51 to 89.

Duncan said little about the law Tuesday, preferring to listen to the concerns of teachers. He kept things low-key and intimate, avoiding larger sessions that could easily have drawn heated rhetoric about what has become an intensely unpopular law.

Special-education teacher Lynn Reichard told him she works all year long to boost the self-esteem of mentally impaired students at Bunker Hill, only to see them fall apart over standardized tests.

"They feel so good about themselves, and then they look at a two-paragraph reading passage, and they know six words," Reichard said. "I have one child here that's a nonreader, and she's going to have to take the test, and she's going to cry.

"There's just got to be another answer for that," Reichard said.

The law does make allowances for different tests for severely impaired kids, but many don't fall into that category.

Duncan said later the teacher was right.

"To have a child taking a test that it is literally impossible for them to pass and having that humiliation, and holding schools accountable for that, that doesn't make sense," Duncan said.

That's an example, he said, of how the federal government should be "looser" about how states meet goals. At the same time, he said the government should be "tighter" about goals, insisting on more rigorous academic standards that are uniform across the states.

"What I mean by loose is not getting away from accountability at all," he told the AP. "What I mean by loose is giving folks more flexibility in how they achieve their goals."

Duncan asked teachers and principals to delve into details, such as the training teachers get once they are in the classroom and how they use sophisticated data systems to track student performance.

Both schools he visited are high-performing and rely heavily on those systems to explain not only what kids don't know, but why they don't know it. But Duncan said he won't hesitate to visit struggling schools over the next few months.

Whatever the administration decides to do, it needs the approval of Congress, which passed the law with broad bipartisan support in 2001 but deadlocked over a rewrite in 2007. Lawmakers plan to try again in the fall.

Duncan gives the law credit for shining a spotlight on kids who need the most help. No Child Left Behind pushes schools to boost the performance of low-achieving students, a group that typically includes minority kids, English-language learners and kids with disabilities.

Yet Duncan has many criticisms of No Child Left Behind, and he has plenty of company. Opponents insist the law's annual reading and math tests have squeezed subjects like music and art out of the classroom and that schools were promised billions of dollars they never received.

Critics also say the law is too punitive: More than a third of schools failed to meet yearly progress goals last year, according to the Education Week newspaper.

That means millions of children are a long way from reaching the law's ambitious goals. The law pushes schools to improve test scores each year, so that every student can read and do math on grade level by 2014.

The trip wasn't all about No Child Left Behind, which covers the elementary, middle and high school grades. Duncan visited Blue Ridge Community College in Martinsburg to answer questions from about 120 people about student aid and other higher-education concerns.