As EduShyster said in her previously noted post, Arne Duncan’s visit to Boston gave him another opportunity to tout charter schools as the answer to what ails American education, and to tell his favorite writer at the Boston Globe how terrible U.S. public education is.
Although Massachusetts is the highest performing state in the nation and performs as if it were one of the highest performing nations in the world on international exams, Duncan took a swipe at Massachusetts and said its students were simply not good enough for global competition.
Only “no excuses” charters win Duncan’s admiration. These are the schools that have high rates of suspension and expulsion, high rates of teacher turnover, and elaborate, often harsh disciplinary rules for children. He took the opportunity to repeat the claim that “charter schools are public schools” even though charter schools in New York City and elsewhere have gone to court to say that they are NOT public schools. Just a few days ago, Eva Moskowitz’s charter chain won a court ruling saying that her charters cannot be audited by the State Comptroller because they are NOT public schools. In California, the state charter school association said that charter founders convicted of misappropriating $200,000 should not be held accountable because their charters were NOT public schools.
Want to know who wrote the book praising no-excuses charters for their “new paternalism“? David Whitman, Arne Duncan’s speechwriter. The best charter in the nation, at the time, he said, was the American Indian Model School in Oakland, where the founder got rid of the American Indian students and replaced them with Asian-American students, where he humiliated students who didn’t follow his rules, where he mocked unions and “multiculturalism,” where he was finally pushed out after an audit found nearly $4 million missing.
Will someone please explain why Arne Duncan has so much contempt for American public education, its teachers, its students, and their parents?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How about we hold a national vote of “No Confidence” on Mr. Duncan?
How horrible that the national head of public schools has such contempt for its teachers, students, parents, and administrators. His policies are actually weakening public schools. Is this because there is money and power in his short-sighted endeavors?
Is the Pope Catholic?
As Michael Fullan says,
A fool with a tool is still a fool.
A fool with a powerful tool is a dangerous fool.
So true!
Indeed.
Said it before and I’ll say it again, Duncan is nothing but a shill for the corporations. Why doesn’t he wear a little blue vest like all the other Wal-Mart employees?
I think he clearly is uncomfortable unless standing behind the veil of corporate thinking. He seems intolerant of human frailty. Perhaps he doesn’t know what to say or do in a situation where humanity is staring him in the face.
This is to be expected of an existentialist person, and not the Kierkegaard variety. If you don’t have compassion for humans, you fill the void with something else. It seems Arne fills it with subscribing to certain notions that a traditional public school cannot fit into.
Just because he’s afraid doesn’t mean he needs to drag the rest of us along with him.
Public school teachers cannot be afraid of people, and typically aren’t. That’s what he doesn’t like, it seems.
He quoted Tom Friedman again in the speech to teachers. Apparently Tom Friedman and David Brooks are running our :college and career ready” policy, because who knows more about The Middle Class than two well-off NYTimes pundits?
The disconnect is just total. This entire “debate” is being conducted among about 150 “thought leaders”, and it affects every public school kid in the country.
I think they should trot out some more CEO’s to harangue parents and students about how they aren’t working hard enough.
Yeah I couldn’t believe yesterday when I read somebody’s post about what prof. development looks like at their school now and it sounded identical to what I’ve seen lately in my own school.
What comes next? Today someone emailed me something about how wonderful Obama is and I just had to delete it because of Arne.
He doesn’t really care how much public schools are doing good because he doesn’t like them at all. No confidence vote for “DONE CAN.”
Really, why does President Obama have such contempt for public education, teachers and their unions, students and parents? After all, he is the enabler of this bully. Is it because he, like most other Democrats in office, take our support for granted? Thanks to blogs like this one, the Dems and their Wall Street buddies may be in for a surprise this November and in 2016.
Vote for Bernie Sanders!
Well, did he ever attend a public school? He went to a private school in Hawaii, then private universities. His wife went to public school, but was discouraged from applying to ivy league universities, by a public school teacher or guidance counselor. She did, in fact, attend an ivy league school.
President Obama’s sister is an educator and Vice President Biden’s wife is/was a teacher at a community college. It’s very sad that their voices are silent. But then the Vice President’s brother is connected to charter schools, so maybe that is quieting the VP’s wife.
Maybe the debate can be re-framed. Not that charters are bad, but that public schools are better. The Chicago Teacher’s Union did a wonderful job of reaching out to the community, and really working with and letting them know what was going on.
…and his brother-in-law is a coach at Oregon State. He is related to educators,but I bet he avoids education discussions at family gatherings.
Yes, Obama did have public schooling in Hawaii & Indonesia before he began private school in Hawaii in 1971 where he hung out with the elites & became a rebellious teenager doing cocaine & pot and going to classes high.
Having had the experiences in an elite private school and his daughters the same, I am baffled how he doesn’t want to give those experiences to low-income schools. He was a community activist in Chicago and yet with the highest seat in Washington allows public education to be blamed for things he was fighting for in the neighborhhoods of Chicago (poverty). He seems a little delusional.
He keeps running with the wrong crowd.
Interestingly, on the comments in Amazon for this book, it is mentioned that is now available for free download through the Fordham Institute. A little cross-party action is no problem when you’re just striving for “excellent” schools, I guess. Please note the sarcasm.
“it is mentioned that is now available for free download through the Fordham Institute”
Hah! Typical.
DC is a club, and we’re not in it.
I can’t read an education piece without hearing from “David Petrilli of the Fordham Institute” and the alternative, the counterpoint, is usually some local official who’s just trying to run a school and keep her head above water. Not a fair fight. She doesn’t speak “lobbyist”.
Allow me to translate:
“My general sense is, in national studies, that Boston’s charter schools do as well or better than virtually any other place,” Duncan said. “So where you have high performance, where you have demand that’s greater than supply, when you have parents looking for options, you need … to provide that.”
He came to Boston to endorse lifting the charter cap. Remember when he campaigned for Michelle Rhee, and then they lost the election?
The House passed charter subsidy legislation last week.
They can’t pass anything that benefits working class parents, and they can’t get unemployment benefits out the door, and 36 states have cut K-12 funding under ed reform political leadership, but they can subsidize charter schools! They moved on that top priority.
That’s some political clout they have, ed reformers. Must be nice.
The next time we’ll see this sort of bipartisan love fest is when they’re cutting the corporate tax rate.
When do you think public school parents will notice that none of these people are working on behalf of the schools their kids are actually in?
When does the DOE release what Duncan discussed at the charter school he visited? He visited a public school and that’s up on the website. He’s a public official. If he’s discussing plans for publicly-funded schools inside a charter school I think we should know what was discussed.
Is the MATCH tutoring program really a national model for the Obama Administration? Duncan knows it relies on employees who make 17k a year, right? That’s a low wage job. They can call it volunteer work if they want, but it’s a low wage job. Are they going to be scaling up this innovative “hire low wage workers/volunteers to do tutoring and then increase class sizes” model all over the country?
We already have that in manufacturing. They’re called “temps”.
I don’t think we need any more low wage temps displacing middle class workers in Ohio. We’re full up on that JIT business model here.
Diane I don’t know if this will get to you, but I hope it does. My name is Arletta Stewart. I am a high school teacher in southwest Oklahoma. Oklahoma is currently going through the same political/educational fight as the rest of the country. Our state superintendent was a dentist who started a charter school; our governor is head of the governors’ board that approved the CCSS. They are both up for reelection this year. We have some outstanding bloggers in Oklahoma; one so feared/hated by the state superintendent that his school was ordered off the random list for the field testing sessions all the schools will have to do after the regular testing sessions are over. Oklahoma is a red state, so unions maybe strong locally in places, but not state wide. But it has gotten bad enough that teachers and administrations across the state are meeting at the capital on March 31st. We are officially asking for more funding for educational resources and salaries. A lot of us think we should official protest VAM, excessive testing, and CCSS, but we were told not to over complicated the message (or something like that). I think our legislation last week did vote to delay CCSS for 2 years, but I haven’t had time to verify it. I also have a small attempt at a blog. It is madramblingsofahistoryteacher.wordpress.com I have commented on your blog a few times. One more thing, Arne Duncan gave an interview to the Blaze yesterday. He said states didn’t have to follow CCSS. Did you see it?
Arletta Stewart, I know that Oklahoma is in the same deep troubled as other states, with a dentist as state superintendent, who loves charters above public schools. I did not see the article where Arne Duncan said that states do not have to follow CCSS. Send a link if you can find it. Everyone is treating it as a federal mandate, even though it would be illegal to do so (the US Department of Education is bound by law not to control, supervise or direct curriculum or instruction). The DOE has probably already broken the law by funding tests of the CCSS.
USDOE is on very shaky legal ground with the funding of PARCC and SBAC assessments. It is one fine line they have crossed over. Still waiting for the legal challenge. Can for see this going all the way to the Supreme Court as a constitutional issue.
Diane,
Sorry, I didn’t answer sooner, but it was my husband’s birthday yesterday. I am new at this blogging thing so I am not sure how to get you the address to the article, but some how I got it on my twitter page. It’s Arletta Stewart @ArlettaS64. I think that’s all you need to get to it. I don’t have that many “tweets” so it shouldn’t be hard to find. Also I follow you so I shouldn’t be hard to find.
If you have time I would be honored if you would look at my blog, Mad Ramblings of a History Teacher; at least the one about my drama over house bill 3398. There is a link to the blog off twitter. I have a slightly off kilter sense of humor that comes through in my writing, but it works really well with the teens I teach.
Diane, I thought I sent an answer earlier today, but I can’t see where it was sent. So if I did, please forgive the duplicate. I am also sorry i didn’t answer sooner, yesterday was my husband’s birthday.
I hate technology just about as much as I love history so I don’t always know exactly what I am doing. I have the address for the Blaze interview with Duncan on my Twitter account, but I am not sure how to get it to you. My account is Arletta Stewart @arlettas64 I follow you so I shouldn’t be hard to find and I don’t have a lot of tweets so it should be easy to find.
I know you are busy, but I would consider it an honor if you could look at my blog, Mad Ramblings of a History Teacher. It has a link from the twitter account. My Drama with House Bill 3398 blog was done with my classes. I have an off kilter sense of humor, but it works well with the teens I teach.
“No excuses” charters are the junkiest schools around. I have worked in one and the turnover of staff and students is unreal. There are years when there are no qualified staff members in certain classes or you see a revolving door of teachers and subs in classrooms. No one in Mass. who wants a quality ed. for their child would send their child to this type of school. Also, there were no real choices for electives, etc. There were barely any extra-curricular clubs, etc. The CEO and wife would take off on trips to tropical places for long periods during the year. They employed family members. They all had jobs for life while they dumped on their staff and students. Duncan lives in a bizarre world. How dare this man promote this type of education to the people of Mass. They really do need to shut down the dept of ed.
That sounds like one of the Utah charters I “toured”. Pretty much everyone working there was related to one another. Founder had hired his wife as the “co-administrator”, front office staff was all daughters or relatives, teachers were all daughters or relatives or people from his ward. Plus the founder had “sold” the land that the charter school sat on to the state, and his brother-in-law’s construction company had built the school. It was unreal, but apparently pretty typical. And yes, LOTS of “vacations” for the “administrators.
Yes, now see if you see any one in the media report this to the public. Not a word. You’d think the ed. sec. would make this an number one priority-Oh no, that might upset the hedge funders and the donors.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen this, Diane, but after I read this post I wanted to see if I could find Duncan’s net worth in 2007 compared to today and discovered the Beyond the Bricks Website instead.
Beyond the Bricks reports, “The Gates Foundation funneled $63.2 million into the Chicago schools during Duncan’s tenure and now Duncan is taking the “Chicago model” nationwide with the help of top aides recruited from the Gates and Broad Foundations.”
http://www.beyondthebricksproject.com/blog/billboard-choice/al-sharpton/faces-school-reform
The post lists other robber barons and wolves of Sesame Street with details that might be interesting if you haven’t seen this yet.
Here’s a Tweet: Anyone may copy and paste then ReTweet often. The short link leads to Beyond the Bricks Project.com and the link was converted at Bitly (https://bitly.com/shorten/) to free up room for more info in the Tweet. Most full links are too long and rob Tweets of room for more info impact. Tweets only allow 140 characters including the html address.
Public Education’s Most Un-Wanted List
Discover who’s behind the takeover of democratic public schools in U.S.
http://bit.ly/1iS55SS
“Charter schools are public schools,” he said. “They are accountable to us. They are our children, our tax dollars. Where they are successful, let’s do more of it. Where they aren’t successful, let’s close them down.”
Not that it matters, but this factually incorrect. Charter schools in my state are accountable to no one except their private operators.
Why doesn’t the secretary of education know anything about how the schools he promotes and subsidizes operate in the vast majority of states? The average Ohio citizen on the street would rebut this lie. Columbus public schools lost a levy campaign because people didn’t want more public ed dollars going to private companies. The public schools are reeling. They can’t get public funding because charter school lobbyists pushed for more local funding, and voters rejected it. Charter school lobbyists screwed every public school kid in that city.
Oh, I think he knows. It’s propaganda he’s spewing, in order for everything to be taken over by his benefactors. They’ll reward him with some fancy job after (or before!) he leaves office.
You make a key point. Everything Arne Duncan is doing has to be seen as a “Live Audition” for his next job.
He wants to demonstrate, in full view of his next potential employers, that he can be “trusted” as a True Believer in The Privatization of Public Schools.
“And what big Privatization Company wouldn’t want me”, he might be thinking.
But this “brilliant” Harvard alum may have miscalculated. Duncan isn’t exactly popular with the general public these days and what little support he has comes almost exclusively from a small wealthy elite. And there’s not enough of them to form a majority—except for maybe in an exclusive executive washroom.
And no matter how many dollars they possess, they have relatively little support in the population as a whole. Conservatives hate him—and unlike their antipathy towards other Obama cabinet members, in this instance, their reasons are actually substantive.
Progressives are also beginning to get it as well. As progressives understand more about what’s really happening, they’re no longer fooled by the “argument” that “he can’t be that bad if Obama appointed him.”
The amorphous middle eventually chooses one of the two major party candidates but there is no constituency clamoring for “More Privatization”—anywhere! (Maybe Arne hasn’t paid attention to the Gallup Polls that are issued every year since the mid 80s, strongly indicating, every single year since that time that they love their neighborhood schools and strongly support their children’s teachers.)
So how many companies will be offering a big payday to Arne Duncan when he emerges from his self-imposed isolation and solipsistic delusions?
Even if I was a big privatizer—think David Coleman or Rupert Murdoch, for instance—and I took full advantage of the luscious goodies Arne Duncan tossed my way for eight years in “Quid Pro Quo: Part One”, I’d still be aware that he ISN’T very popular with most folks and there would be no margin in having him come to work here and injure the “brand” I’ve taken years to build and refine.
Oh sure, Arne will find “something”, somewhere. But his dreams of making himself fabulously wealthy by manipulating public policy to favor a small, monied club is reprehensible; and it should be absolutely illegal.
Public office is NOT something to use and play with in order to maximize the odds of you pleasing someone enough that they’ll “pay you back” when you’re out of office, looking for your next job.
But, even if they privately love him, and let him know, in whispered tones, just how grateful they are for all the water he’s carried on their behalf, they might just have to say, “Sorry Arne, I just can’t risk it. Remember, I still want to remain rich myself and my board will kill me if I took those kinds of risks.”
“But hey, Arne, I’ve talked to a couple of universities and in exchange for a lot of my cash one of them agreed to let me fund the “Milton and Rose Friedman Chair” within their Education Department—and guess what? They need a new department chair! Hey! Not a bad job for an academic type like yourself; they assured me you’ll still have gobs of travel time and they’ll pick up the travel costs…but, eh, only coach for now, at least…”
The privatizer in chief is also pushing product for ed tech companies. Just be warned. There may be merit to ed tech, but the sales job should be a huge red flag to parents.
They just took 750 million from tech companies. Nothing is “free”. We’re going to pay for this “donation” in the same way we’ve paid for all the other “charitable donations”.
Like the street pusher who offers something that looks great, sounds sexy and reportedly gives you the greatest feeling you’ve ever had…Duncan’s Common Core is a nasty trap, designed to addict you, ruin your existing relationships, and make you completely dependent on this new thing you’ll do ANYTHING to keep receiving.
And, like that same sleazy, deceptive street pusher, you can be sure that “the first one is ALWAYS ‘free’; the very, very, very high interest rate payback comes later.
Will someone please explain why Arne Duncan has so much contempt for American public education, its teachers, its students, and their parents? BECAUSE HIS BOSS DOES!
Someone should tell him charters close all the time in Ohio. They open, they close, they’re completely unregulated.
They then dump the kids into the much-maligned and weakened public school system, and head on down the road.
It fabulous. First graders get a front row seat to the awesome power of markets, and the kids who are already in those schools get one, too. Thank God the public schools are still there to act as a “safety net” to the “choice” schools Mr. Duncan prefers and promotes or I don’t know what those kids would do.
http://www.dispatch.com//content/stories/local/2014/01/12/charter-failure.html
I believe Duncan is out of touch and until he consults with teachers he’ll continue making decisions that are detrimental to our educational system.
I challenge him to teach a class of 30, students that live in poverty, speak another language, live in substandard housing and many times don’t have adequate food.
Marian, Duncan is not out of touch. He has been Ed Secretary for five years. He knows exactly what he is doing. He is the cheerleaders for charters and privatization. He wants every teacher’s value to be measured by test scores. He wants Common Core to make the measuring easier. None of this is serendipity.
Ah, yes! The washed up professional basketball player (no formal education experience) who went crying home to his mother and Chicago elite friends (Penny Pritzker) for a job, and was handed the CEO position of Chicago Public Schools. Yes, he knows what his reformer friends are trying to do and he follows right along like a puppet on strings!
I wish someone would fact-check these statistics before the newspaper prints them. In Massachusetts, 37% (he rounded up) of high school graduates WHO ATTEND PUBLIC MASSACHUSETTS COLLEGES need remedial classes.
That’s only 40% of our college-attending graduates; the majority of those who graduate from Massachusetts public high schools and attend college ATTEND PRIVATE COLLEGES.
37% of 40% is not the same as 40%.
When you find out he will be paid millions for working at a conservative think tank and as a well paid board member of several charter school organizations, then you will have your answer. Who better to speak for these groups in the future? He has nothing to lose by taking these positions and everything to gain financially speaking.
Unless Arne continues to make himself so very unpopular with the general public that NONE of these Privatizer Pushers WANTS to be identified with Duncan in the future.
Then he’d better hope that one will take pity on him enough that they hand him some sort of “job” that pays a mere middle class survival wage—which in those circles is around $275K a year—with the understanding that he withdraws completely from public life and never shows his face again until the Common Core and Corporate Takeover of American Schools has achieved its goals.
Criticizing KIPP Critics
http://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/criticizing-kipp-critics/
It’s really not that tough to figure out, Diane: All of Arne Duncan’s odious actions as Education Secretary have to be seen as his “Audition” for his next job.
Arne Duncan wants to impress his next potential employer. He knows that a position making millions—quite literally millions—per year is possible. If relative “lightweights” like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and other privatizers can make millions—and they have—by slandering our public school students, teachers, parents and principals, just think of how much a former Secretary of Education can “earn” in the “Marketplace”!
It’s enough to make you salivate; if, that is, you value personal enrichment more than doing the right thing for millions of American children, their educators and their families.
Arne wants The Good Life. If he understands the word, “SELLOUT” he probably smirks and dismisses it as “loser talk”—like a smarmy, sleazy character out of “Goodfellas” or “The Sopranos.” In that mindset that Arne shares with Rhee, Klein and Klein’s boss, Rupert Murdoch, caring, compassion and human decency is for “saps” and “do gooders”.
And Arne isn’t one of them. He’s made that much very clear.
If Arne Duncan had been the protagonist of the classic film, “It’s A Wonderful Life” instead of humble, honest, hard-working, loyal, decent, soul, Mr. George Bailey, it would have been a very different movie.
In the scene when Mr. Potter—the symbol of unabashed greed and sociopathic contempt for anyone “below him”—attempts to con George Bailey by telling him that “you’ve beaten me” and that he effectively “surrenders” his efforts to stop his successful efforts to build new houses to lower income residents of the town, he tries to seduce him into working for him, promising him all sorts of riches if he just hands over that “old broken down building and loan” and asking if George would like to “live in the finest house in town, buy his wife fancy furs, drive a big beautiful car, take business trips to New York and Europe several times a year, while making 10 times his current salary”, George asks if he can think it over, and then sees the truth of Potter’s attempts at seduction, telling him his answer is “NO!” and that he won’t sell out the dozens of families of his home town.
George gave up a lot of worldly goods to do the right thing and be a decent and humane person. I’ve always loved his character and his courage and integrity, standing up for his values in the den of seduction, and walking out with his head held high.
Arne Duncan, on the other hand, would have leaped in the air, clapped his hands together, asked how soon could he start and then, ever grateful, would have asked Potter where he preferred for Duncan to bow to him, and how many times a day is bowing expected in his new job.
Arne Duncan. The chief public school officer, in charge of destroying the public schools. But, being the windup toy of a bunch of plutocrats pays very, very handsomely.
Unless they all decide he’s now too “controversial” and decide to double-cross him now that they’ve used him and squeezed him dry.
Hey, it’s what they do to “little people” every day; and in their circles, Duncan is just a notch above that classification.
“Nothing personal. It’s just business, Arne. Call my secretary sometime in the fall and we’ll see if anything’s going on then that we could tell you about. Hey, your wife still has her job; doesn’t she?”
Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Subpart 2, section 9527(c)(1):
(1) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of Federal law, no State shall be required to have academic content or student academic achievement standards approved or certified by the Federal Government, in order to receive assistance under this Act.
Read this if you want to know why Duncan hates public schools:
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news-impact/2009/09/will-obamas-choice-change-education-in-america/
In the 4th paragraph, he shares that he grew up with a lot of anger directed at the public schools in Chicago.