When questioned about the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Louisiana’s voucher program, Secretary of Education Duncan said he was “not familiar” with it. DOJ is suing to block vouchers in districts that are under desegregation orders. DOJ recognizes that vouchers will exacerbate racial segregation.
This was reported on politico.com’s morning education edition, a valuable resource for breaking news:
“DUNCAN ‘NOT FAMILIAR’ WITH DOJ VOUCHER LAWSUIT – The Education Secretary made the rounds for back-to-school interviews Wednesday and ducked a question about the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit (http://bit.ly/15cDXFA ) over Louisiana’s voucher program. The department is trying to block vouchers for the 2014-15 school year in districts under desegregation orders, arguing that the vouchers set back desegregation efforts. It’s been the focus of a high-profile campaign by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, both Republicans, who accuse the Obama administration of trapping poor, minority students in failing schools. “I’m not familiar with that lawsuit,” Duncan said in response to a question on public radio’s Diane Rehm Show. “That’s between the Department of Justice and the state of Louisiana.” Jindal’s Wednesday op-ed for the Washington Post is here: http://wapo.st/1dHSDFK”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Seems rather appropriate that Dunc Funcan wouldn’t have a clue. Pretty much sums up all about education he doesn’t know.
I guess the DOE isn’t “monitoring” that one.
Duncan also not familiar with: child development, teaching, learning, and all issues related to education.
He was elevated to the top due to his basketball skills, his Chicago connections and his ability to follow orders spewed by Broad and Gates.
Simple as that. If it’s not on his cue card, he knows nothing.
As Duncan said himself…he learned how to read in elementary school, learned how to play basketball in high school, and learned how to think critically in college. HUH? DUH?
Apparently he stopped learning after high school.
He never learned much of anything! That’s why he is just a mouthpiece.
You’re being too generous, Linda.
Seems like there’s a rift in the Obama administration over privatization and its segregating impact. Shows up the Ed Dept as the right -wing ideologues that they are.
Leonie,
It is surprising, to say the least, to learn that the U.S. Secretary of Education was unaware that the U.S. Department of Justice is suing the state of Louisiana to block vouchers that will undermine court-ordered desegregation. It is even more surprising that he is not vigorously fighting vouchers and using the powers of his office to reduce segregation.
Question is, which side of this rift is Obama on? Sadly, I’m pretty sure I know the answer.
Leonie Haimson: many thanks for all you do.
🙂
Dienne: it is you who are being too generous. [for the satire-challenged who haunt this blog—I am just kidding].
🙂
After all, this is the same Standardized Testing Promoter-in-Chief who scolded his detractors at the 2013 AERA conference:
“The critics contend that today’s tests fail to measure students’ abilities to analyze and apply knowledge, that they narrow the curriculum, and that they create too many perverse incentives to cheat or teach to the test. These critics want students and teachers to opt out of all high-stakes testing.
The critics make a number of good points—and they express a lot of the frustration that many teachers feel about today’s standardized tests.
State assessments in mathematics and English often fail to capture the full spectrum of what students know and can do. Students, parents, and educators know there is much more to a sound education than picking the right answer on a multiple choice question.
Many current state assessments tend to focus on easy-to-measure concepts and fill-in-the-bubble answers. Results come back months later, usually after the end of the school year, when their instructional usefulness has expired.
And today’s assessments certainly don’t measures qualities of great teaching that we know make a difference—things like classroom management, teamwork, collaboration, and individualized instruction. They don’t measure the invaluable ability to inspire a love of learning.
Most of the assessment done in schools today is after the fact. Some schools have an almost obsessive culture around testing, and that hurts their most vulnerable learners and narrows the curriculum. It’s heartbreaking to hear a child identify himself as “below basic” or “I’m a one out of four.””
Want to know what is truly breathtaking in this excerpt? That he can’t recognize himself as being the single most responsible person in the USA for what he describes in his last sentence as “heartbreaking.”
Link for the entire speech: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/choosing-right-battles-remarks-and-conversation
But don’t expect the Secretary of Education to free himself from irresponsibility and ignorance anytime soon:
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” [Voltaire]
$tudent $ucce$$ anyone?
🙂
Thanks for posting this Krazy.
Where do we begin to list what ventriloquist dummy Duncan is “unfamiliar” with?
Teaching, learning, democracy, compassion, effective administration … the list goes on forever.
Humanity, decency, justice, integrity….
Wow! I’m familiar with it. Who does his morning briefings and news clips? To borrow one of his favorite phrases: NO Excuses. There aren’t any for this level of professional incompetence.
“I’m not familiar with that lawsuit,”
That’s just embarrassing. It’s worse than when he refused to comment on Parent Trigger out of fear of offending school reform industry leaders, probably.
Duncan has a new word, by the way. He’s dropped “game-changing” and adopted “thoughtful”
I’m curious if it’s a response to people making fun of the glib marketing-speak he uses.
Well that doesn’t work either. One has to have some thoughts to be thoughtful.
Linda,
“Thoughts?” What are those?
Thanks,
Arne
Chicago Tribune reactionary in residence, columnist Dennis Byrne, weighed in in favor of the Louisiana “scholarship” program in his September 2 column. It’s worth reading because it utilizes most of the cliches of the voucher and charter movements — “choice,” “scholarships”, “failing schools” — and adds some great quotes in favor of segregation from a black proponent of all this right wing stuff.
Rather than ask readers to wander around through URLs, he below is Byrne’s complete column. At least this September we’re not getting another movie about the heroic work of charter schools. “Waiting for Supermen” and “Won’t Back Down” are now on the shelves for further study as propaganda.
Here’s Byrne:
Byrne: Dashing dream of better schools in Louisiana
Administration fights voucher program for low-income kids
Dennis Byrne, Chicago Tribune, September 2, 2013
6:11 p.m. CDT, September 2, 2013
This is bizarre: President Barack Obama’s and Eric Holder’s Justice Department is suing Louisiana to force some kids to stay in their failing public schools.
More specifically, the department wants to stop the state from issuing vouchers to parents who would transfer their children to better private schools because it upsets the racial balance of the failing schools.
Yet more specifically, freeing children from the plantation of rotten schools must not happen because it “impedes the desegregation process,” Holder’s department said in a filing. Hundreds, if not thousands, of students in 34 school systems would be kept in mediocre or bad schools unless a federal judge approved the transfers if Holder’s petition is granted.
Under a statewide voucher measure called the Louisiana Scholarship Program some 5,000 low-income students in so-called C, D or F schools last school year received vouchers to attend better-performing, state-approved private schools. Louisiana Department of Education figures show that last year 86 percent of vouchered students came from D or F schools and 91 percent were minority children.
Only blind ideologues like those working for Obama and Holder are unable to see the irony of denying minorities an opportunity because racial head counts must come first.
It is especially ironic when Americans were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s historic March on Washington speech in which he declared, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Not if the Obama administration has anything to say about it. It’s not as if the program were overtly racist, allowing only white students to use the vouchers to escape the troubled schools. Black students can too. But if too many white students flee … well, there’ll be none of that. As the department noted, five white students in Independence Elementary School in Tangipahoa Parish transferred out, “reinforcing the racial identity of the school as a black school.”
Maybe Justice Department social engineers can come up with a plan that would block white transfers, allowing black students first crack at the vouchers to level the playing field.
Kenneth Campbell, president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options that supports vouchers, feels the scheme has lost sight of the larger picture. “I don’t think our ultimate end is just to have racially integrated schools,” he said. “I think our ultimate aim is to have quality schools.”
That’s heresy for those stuck in a four-decades-old and very different world. In a statement, Campbell addressed such obsolete thinking: “We are fully aware of Louisiana’s ugly and racist history of working to both undermine and circumvent early desegregation efforts. There is no question that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the state routinely found ways to help ensure that white children would not have to attend racially integrated schools — including funneling public funds to new, all-white private schools. These acts and many like them were both shameful and appalling and set the stage for important interventions by the United States government.
“Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to equate the current scholarship program that provides the only avenue for low-income children to escape failing schools to past efforts that supported and encouraged ‘white flight’ 40 years ago.”
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal chimed in. “After generations of being denied a choice, parents finally can choose a school for their child, but now the federal government is stepping in to prevent parents from exercising this right. Shame on them. Parents should have the ability to decide where to send their child to school.”
There’s one more irony to the department’s efforts to squelch a lifetime opportunity for minority children: It is the work of a black president and a black attorney general. And it denies to many the “economic justice” that Obama last week said was the “unfinished business” of the civil rights battle.
Maybe Obama and Holder see political advantage in this by appealing to the president’s base of minority voters. Even if it works to the base’s disadvantage.
Dennis Byrne, a Chicago writer, blogs in The Barbershop in chicagonow.com/byrne.
Will the DOJ follow with more lawsuits where this also might be an issue? (I wonder?)
in other states?
Alabama
If Arne wants, I will come to the DOE and explain it to him. I will try and use simple language.
I, for one (as a taxpayer who pays his salary) would like to know just what it is that Arne Duncan does all day. Peruse newspapers or online news sources to find national/state/local education stories? Meet with state superintendents to work through problems, such as those with Common Core? Work on plans for new–and actual–improved educational programs?
I’d wager that the answer would be none of the above.
He shoots crumpled up papers in his basketball net style wastebasket.
Maybe after the basketball he “monitors” Diane’s blog for a while then cheers himself up by hobnobbing with billionaires and Charter bigwigs at some posh venue.
Duncan is NOT a learner.
I listened and was struck once again by what an embarrassment Arne Duncan is as Chief of Education or whatever his role in here in the USA c Obama administration. the way he uses the word “articulate” in the same paragraphs with multimple “you know”s. What a maroon– when in history has being a good (evidently) hoops player propelled someone so far so wrongly?!
I listened and was struck once again by what an embarrassment Arne Duncan is as Chief of Education or whatever his role in here in the USA c Obama administration. the way he uses the word “articulate” in the same paragraphs with multiple “you know”s. What a maroon– when in history has being a good (evidently) hoops player propelled someone so far so wrongly?!