Michael Klonsky on Arne Duncan: Time for Accountability?

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1. roxanne says:

   July 29, 2015 at 10:33 pm

   I think that Arne and the writers of the Common Core will be grilled by Congress in the future. How it came to be is so bizarre and fishy. I think participants has mostly good intentions. The only problem is they let the fox into the hen house in their attempt to right wrongs. How exactly the fox got in the hen house is what Congress will be looking at.

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   • NJ Teacher says:

     July 30, 2015 at 7:22 am

     I would question the intentions of the reformers. If their methods were successful, why would it be necessary to close down the same school again? The goals are union busting, firing veteran teachers and privitizing education through the employment of endless testing.

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   • Spanish&French Freelancer says:

     July 30, 2015 at 7:41 am

     I’d watch every minute on cspan. But what makes you think it would ever happen?

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2. joe prichard says:

   July 29, 2015 at 10:59 pm

   I am not sure any president of any party has ever named a cabinet level education secretary as bad as Arne Duncan. He, along with Bill Gates, has created the most negative blotch of the Obama presidency.

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3. CCProf says:

   July 30, 2015 at 8:00 am

   I would question Arne Duncan’s initial premise that the schools, teachers, etc. are not accountable. Were they not accountable 30 years ago? 40 years ago?

   The schools I went to and the teachers I had were accountable to parents, the community, the local school board, state law, federal regulation, etc. That’s accountability. We already had it. We didn’t need to waste billions of hours of instructional time on fill-in-the-bubble tests to have accountability. It was already there.

   This is not to say that the schools I went to were perfect, but at least the teachers spent most of their time doing real teaching instead of proctoring exams, mindless test prep, and so on.

   Arne Duncan is just one foot soldier in the reform army. He will be out of office soon, but the idea that we can’t have accountability without lots and lots of standardized testing will still be around. That is the idea that needs to be criticized more.

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4. Chiara says:

   July 30, 2015 at 8:27 am

   “He’s not beholden to any one ideology, and he’s worked tirelessly to improve teacher quality,” Mr. Obama said.

   Baloney. He’s utterly and completely beholden to the ed reform “movement” and has been since day one. Just because there are Democrats and Republicans in the ed reform movement doesn’t mean it isn’t driven by “an ideology”

   Here’s the definition:

   “a system of ideas and ideals, especially one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy”

   Duncan applied a specific, narrow, market based ideology to US public schools and it doesn’t matter a bit whether the President who appointed him has a D or an R next to his name.

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   • Duane Swacker says:

     July 30, 2015 at 5:16 pm

     “. . . doesn’t mean it isn’t driven by ‘an ideology’”.

     Oh, it’s definitely not driven by “an ideology”.

     It’s driven by “an idiology”.

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5. Chiara says:

   July 30, 2015 at 8:43 am

   The Obama/Duncan political appointees are one thing, but aren’t there a lot of career people in the US Department of Education? Do they really see their role, their JOB, as promoting privatization? That seems extraordinary to me- like they’ve strayed very, very far from the original idea or the point of employing them in the first place.

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   • SomeDAM Poet says:

     July 30, 2015 at 10:32 am

     Career people are easily silenced by their politically appointed bosses.

     If you know you can be fired at the drop of a hat, you are very reluctant to rock the boat.

     Some do it, but not many.

     Why risk a long career and future government pension when you know that your appointed boss may be gone tomorrow and things might change for the better?

     I can’t say that I blame these people. They are trying to do the best they can in what can be a very hostile environment.

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     • KYTeacher says:

       July 30, 2015 at 11:01 am

       I’ve work with some people who deal with the USDoE, so this is hearsay. According to them, there appears to have been a lot of turnover and multiple ‘reorganizations’ within the last few years.

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