Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says he’s sorry for saying that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that had happened to the education system in New Orleans. This morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, he told host Joe Scarborough that the remarks were a “dumb” thing to say and that he had expressed them in a “poor way.”

Since the remarks were made public last Friday, the blogosphere and Twitterverse have been ablaze with chatter, much of it critical, about the secretary’s choice of words in an interview he did for “Washington Watch with Roland Martin,” which aired on Sunday on the cable channel TV One.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the secretary had phoned New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin on Friday night to explain his comments. And look here for a story from my colleague Mary Ann Zehr about local reaction to what the secretary said.

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Here’s the secretary’s interview from this morning:

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