Four months before he would announce his resignation, Robert Scott characterized his time as the state’s top education official as four and a half years of being in “fight mode.”

In just the past year, the head of the Texas Education Agency has been put at odds with figures as diverse as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Texas Association of Business president Bill Hammond. And his job regularly requires him to balance the demands of state lawmakers, the governor’s office and the educators at the state’s approximately 1,200 traditional school districts and charter ...

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