Michael Grunwald, who usually writes about politics, not education, has posted a mostly admiring profile of Arne Duncan.
Bottom line: He really cares!
What he leaves out: Arne’s persistent support for privatization of public education.
He does touch on the opposition to high-stakes testing, but skirts the hot-button issue of teacher evaluation by test scores.
But he does feel bad about the instability that has occurred in Chicago since he left.
And Undersecretary of Education Ted Mitchell cries when he talks about Arne. Michael Grunwald probably doesn’t know that Ted gave up a $750,000 a year job as CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund, the leading privatization organization in education, to join Arne.
As Grunwald says, you can’t understand Arne if you don’t understand basketball. I know a lot about education, but I don’t understand basketball. So that’s my problem.
And
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What goes on at the Broad academy ‘daiye spa’? Duncan and Deasy are great guys until Mugatu starts playing the privatization trigger song.
Basketball is all about forming separate teams and picking sides. I guess that explains why Arne Dunkin has joined the side of the new segregation.
I’m not even going to touch corporate basketball, where the success of your club depends on how much money you have to buy players.
It is also about excluding others who “can’t measure up”.
My particularly cruel high school gym teacher/coach (if I can call him that), loved to humiliate, ridicule, and bully the less athletically inclined but academically motivated students. His favorite game in track was to send out us slow, fallen-arch nerds first around the track, then send out the faster, twitch-muscle gifted kids to catch and pass us in front of everyone else. One day, some of the latter group of students refused to play his sadistic game. So he instead turned on them with twice the vengeance. Duncan reminds me of those days.
I’ll bet your mom was one of those suburban ones who was surprised to learn that her kid was not as great an athlete as she thought
Duncan was the biggest promoter of the “skills gap”. That theory goes like this- there are lots and lots of high wage jobs that “go unfilled” because the US workforce is inadequate.
CEO’s and governors love it, because it’s a way to shift responsibility FROM them TO working people. Duncan grabbed it with both hands and pretended it was not a theory but “truth”, because it advances his agenda. He shares this devotion to the “skills gap” with Scott Walker, which is all you really have to know about the “skills gap” excuse for politicians and CEO’s.
MathVale: what you describe is simply a variation of the standardized testing hazing ritual—
Test to punish. Which involves using others to make immoral choices. And when some of those others object and refuse to cooperate, they are punished.
Improve health and fitness? No, like everything else involving the heavyweights and enforcers and enablers of self-proclaimed “education reform,” it’s all about the “expectations” of the adults. Expectations, of course, meaning satisfying their pathetically desperate need to build their self-esteem by making themselves look bigger by making others look and feel smaller.
Any wonder why I call them edubullies?
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Yes, mom wanted a linebacker and got a lumbering nerd. The sports analogies always seem to assume everyone understands the winner take all, destroy the opponent culture as the American Way.
Who is Arne Duncan?
Maybe the song by Paul Simon can help shed some light, especially about the basketball aspect.
“Arne Duncan” (parody of Lincoln Duncan by Paul Simon)
Teachers in the next room
Bound to win a prize
They’ve been testing children all day long
Well, I’m trying to get some sleep
But these schoolroom walls are cheap
Arne Duncan is my name
And here’s my song, here’s my song.
My father was professor-man
My mama was professor-man’s friend
But I’m at home in the boardroom
And the charter
So when I reached my prime
I left my home and Chicago Times
Headed down the highway for
The White House, for the White House
Holes in my confidence
Holes in my B-ball dreams
I was left without a penny or a contract
Oooo-wee I was about destituted
As a man could be
And I wished I wore a (championship) ring
So I could hock it, I’d like to hock it.
Seen the President in a parking lot
Preaching to a crowd
Selling Hope and Change and reading teleprompter
Well, I told him I was lost
And he told me all about the double-cross
And I seen that man as the rug
To helicopter
Just later on the very same week
When I went to his House with a B-ball
And my long years of counting cents ended
Well, he hired me for the “B”
Saying “Hows-a -bouts you head up the DOE?”
And just like a dog I was befriended, I was befriended.
Oh, oh, what a job
Oh what a garden of hobnob
Even now that sweet memory lingers
I was playing in the gym
Shooting one-on-one with him
Just thanking the Lord for my fingers
For my fingers,
For my fingers
Diane, glad to see some credit given to the greatest civil rights leader since the 1960’s, Arne Duncan. The only question is: where to put his statue!
Thanks, Virginia. Love the humor. Maybe you could put Arne’s statue on the State Capitol grounds in Virhginia, since he lived there during his historic tenure in the Obama administration. You could inscribe it: “He launched the Common Core; his children avoided it by living in Virginia. He persuaded Congress to strip his office if most of itst powers. He must be honored for inadvertently strengthening federalism.”
I’d put Arne’s statue in the shade, where the sun don’t shine.
Does the sun shine in virginia?
It does, but since we can’t measure value-added sunshine, it doesn’t exist.
I’m sure Arne is a good guy to his buddies, he’s just not a good Secretary of Education. He should have stuck to basketball and left education to the experts instead of ignorantly dabbling in a field for all the wrong reasons and ruining the lives of millions of people.
Agree, but clearly he should know how incompetent he is and step down. For the children.
I just thought it was a horrible piece. This idea that we’re supposed to evaluate politicians NOT by their public statements or their policies but instead by what people who know them feel about them is just nonsense.
I don’t know him. I don’t have to know him. I have to judge him solely on his work and what he says publicly.
He has acted as a member of the ed reform “movement” and NOT as a representative of the broader public. I think he hires exclusively “movement” people and pursues “movement” policy and I think he got away with it because 1. everyone in DC agrees with him, 2. Congress, as usual, weren’t doing their job, and 3. there was a huge implosion of the financial sector and he was able to operate under the radar, because people were busy losing their jobs, life savings and getting kicked out of their homes.
The only thing I like about that piece is the title, which is accurate- Duncan came in with a lock-step “movement” agenda and he has ignored, belittled or insulted anyone who disagrees with it. The Common Core is a perfect example. There was absolutely no good reason to cut the public OUT of decisions on OUR public schools, but ed reform rolled right over us and did it anyway. That the Best and Brightest were shocked when people objected to them “reforming” US public schools with little or no input is just further proof of the general attitude, which is arrogance.
The two questions that I would like answered, by Duncan, are, “When the American people elected a Democrat to the Presidency, did they want their public schools to be privatized? ”
And, ” Should the public have expected, a shadow government from Silicon Valley and the financial sector?”
Good point: if there was an article about an incompetent teacher that students loved, Arne Duncan would be calling for their resignation.
Diane,
Here is a link to all charters schools that have closed down!
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/09/12936/cmd-publishes-full-list-2500-closed-charter-schools
So stupid. It doesn’t matter how deeply caring or earnest he is if he is so wrong in so many ways and fundamentally not the right intellectual or ideological match for the job.
Ted Mitchell should spend less time crying and more time figuring out how to get all the young people who got suckered into taking rip-off loans for worthless for-profit colleges out of the hole they’re in. That happened because no one in DC acted. They couldn’t be bothered. Duncan blames Congress but Duncan rammed the whole rest of his agenda thru without Congress. Why couldn’t he regulate for-profit colleges? Why did he have to be shamed into acting by the Occupy Wall Street people and Elizabeth Warren when the for-profit debt scam started to implode? Why did the consumer financial protection agency and state AG’s act much more aggressively than Arne Duncan? It is because the ed reform “movement” took precedence and some of the biggest supporters of that agenda in Congress also promote rip-off colleges?
Arne may have passion. Hitler had passion too, but his passion does not negate the Holocaust. The only thing bigger than Arne’s “passion” is his arrogance. If he had any sense, he would honestly evaluate what he has done, and try to rectify the errors of his ways.
So We end in tragedy…Instead of real compassion and reform, self congratulations,
and our most needy kids in Dylan’s words…”only a pawn in their game.”
And Arne’s game is about Arne, not about the kids who need help the most.
I don’t think you can understand Arne if you do understand Brown versus Board of education.
I’d also like to know what the ed reform “movement” plan to do with the Common Core now that they got the testing and scores they want. The Common Core was sold as standards to improve public education. That implies some kind of commitment and support past collecting test scores and issuing patronizing op eds on how they are the Truth Tellers and the rest of us are “suburban moms” or whatever.
Are they planning on bailing on public schools now that they put this giant national program in and moving forward with the “choice” agenda? Because it sure looks like it.
When do we get the benefit of the Common Core in existing public schools? Kids and parents obediently showed up and submitted the data. Where’s the support for the “deeper learning” and “nuanced approach” we were promised? Looks to me like all the “movement” does is open charter schools and issue vouchers. Where’s the long-term commitment to this program they all sold, or is it just another ed reform testing scheme?
Saint Gates dabbles with a hammer. He’s a firebrand, self-appointed and promoting, and unfortunately, rejects self-immolation.
Choice is a forgotten notion of “reform” when they charterize an entire urban school district without any democratic involvement.
I’m not exactly Christian, but I think Jesus said it best: “You shall know them by their fruits”. Talk about a tree that needs to be hewn down and thrown in the fire.
I understand the frustration with finding “high school graduates” who are functionally illiterate. They are not wrong. It’s the solutions that do nothing to correct the problem. What does a high school teacher do when confronted by students who are really several years behind where they should be? The problem is so much bigger than the quality of teachers, and it cannot be laid at the door of public schools to fix it. Public schools have an important role in what has to be a societal response.
Ed reform said they would “improve public schools”. It’s been 15 years. They need to show WHY they are sticking with this lock-step agenda at some point- blaming teachers unions only takes them so far, as we learned with Chris Christie and Scott Walker.
I don’t want to talk about labor unions anymore. I want to talk about how ed reformers- the 150 people well-connected people who Duncan listens to- have improved public schools over the 15 years they have absolutely dominated DC and the 10 years they have dominated statehouses.
Also, since there seem to be thousands of adults employed in the growing “ed reform sector” is anyone ever going to look into any connection between Duncan’s claims about high school graduation rates and “credit recovery”? It’ll come out eventually. The inconvenient facts on ed reform “miracles’ always do, as we learned with President Bush.
I know Ohio and Illinois are using for-profit providers for “credit recovery”. Is this yet another growing sector in the ed reform portfolio, and are the graduation rate increases legit?
“As districts seek to boost their graduation rates, they’re increasingly turning to online credit recovery, which aims to help students pass classes previously failed”
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2015/09/online_credit_recovery_grows_despite_criticism.html
To understand Arne, you have to understand basketball. Well, I’m a Hoosier. That means I understood basketball before I could walk.
Diane, in case you and others on this blog have not spent much time in Indiana, I would say that to understand Arne Duncan’s basketball-ness, you need to understand the term “cheap shot”. That’s what it sounds like: an unsportsmanlike blow at a defenseless player. Sort of like Arne and teachers. Or Arne and parents. Or Arne and every school district he has assaulted.
The most Arne-like example is the infamous Kermit Washington incident that nearly killed NBA player Rudy Tomjanovich, and prematurely ended his career. John Feinstein wrote about it in “The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight That Changed Basketball Forever.” After the incident, the NBA added a third referee to all games to watch for the actions that might otherwise lead up to a knock-out punch.
In interviews years later, Washington said he wished he could turn back the clock http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1602545-25-worst-cheap-shots-in-nba-history/page/2. It’s hard to imagine Arne having such a soul searching reflection. Now we are supposed to believe that he provokes tears from the likes of Ted Mitchell (Eli Broad’s longtime pal?) I don’t believe a word of it. This is nothing more than PR spin as Arne seeks to secure a legacy that everyone paying attention knows should have him banished from the game for life.
Karen Wolfe: nicely done.
😎
The Obama Administration’s decision to join the coordinated purely political attack on public schools that went on from 2009 to 2011 right up until immediately prior to the 2012 elections was one of the most cynical, calculated hit jobs I have ever seen.
But they pushed their “movement” agenda thru, so they should all take a bow for a job well done and head off to the lucrative private sector. Public schools are pretty resilient. They’ll still be here after Duncan is safely ensconced at the ed reform start-up.
How about an ed reform wax museum? That could be cool.
Chiara, that makes me almost hopeful.
TC, that’s a GREAT idea.
Good suggestion,
The Reformer Wax Museum, where the reformers could go to wax nostalgic
But they’d best keep that out of the sunlight, too.
Wouldn’t want Michelle Rhee’s statue (and the flying monkeys) to melt..
Couldn’t the interviewer get tears out of Arne’s former chief of staff, who is now an education executive at for-profit, Parthenon?
I love how the definition of “bravery” in DC is “standing up to labor unions”.
You’ll notice it isn’t “standing up to banks” or “prosecuting white collar criminals”.
They’re extraordinarily brave when battling middle class working people, because as everyone knows, middle class working people pull all the strings in the nation’s capitol.
It’s delusional, and it’s nuts that the Pope seems to be the only person in that city who has a clue.
Chiara,
What I find humorous is how many politicians have “discovered” religion (and climate change, and the poor and the working class an refugees and all the rest of the issues and people they usually ignore or downplay) right before the Pope arrived.
Hillary Clinton did a complete 180 and came out against the Keystone pipeline as the Pope (who has made climate change a central moral issue) was getting of the plane in the US. Pure coincidence, of course.
Chiara, you’re on a roll.
Well, I meant the first comment about the Pope.
As for HRC, I don’t have any problem with politicians finding religion. In fact, maybe we should have lobbied Pope Francis to whisper a little something in President Obama’s ear about education this week.
My problem is not with politicians finding religion the second the Pope arrives.
It is with their losing it the second he leaves.
Chiara,
You nail it, with great consistency.
Only in America is education “reform” comprised of billionaires (Gates, Broad, the Waltons) hiring millionaires (Brown, Klein, Rhee) to ruin the lives of unionized middle class workers.
Presumably, Ted Mitchell’s tears were of the crocodilian variety.
From the article, “and he was on a jihad to root out the profit motive” Who, Duncan?
I thought Duncan and Ted Mitchell were totally for the free market in education? Like what, venture funds aren’t profit oriented?
I guess they picked a bad day to stop sniffing glue.
Did the interviewer delete the paragraphs about revolving door, hypocrite and neoliberal anti-labor ideology?
He also must have missed how many Duncan hires go on to full time, private sector careers bashing public schools, like this one:
https://twitter.com/edu_post
Is there a single Duncan hire who went on to anything other than “movement” ed reform lobbying/employment? No wonder they all think he’s so great. They’re all in the same exclusive club.
“Go on..to jobs”…. far removed from the actual day-to-day teaching of the children, for whom they purport to care so much. Illustrative career ladder -from Harvard Kennedy School to a brief stint as a contractual teacher, to State Chair for the contractor, to a reformy philanthropy that makes money by collecting fees from donors of school supplies. And to top it off they, with delusional zeal, describe themselves as risk-takers.
Arne really cares!!!
We know where the road paved with good intentions leads.
Der Dunderkind Vunderdunker
Duncan Doenuts
Cry Duncle
Arnestead Maudlin
The Man from DUNCLE
Arnold McDuncan of McTest, from the Charterdom of McLearn
The Prince of Dimness
Dunca shame
Dunq L8r
Blarney Arne
Arndrew Dunce Play
The Dunderthunker of Feducation
Strong Arne tactics: chide with incent to bribe
A Confederacy of Duncans
The Basketball Dunceries
Oops Dreams
Baller Ed
Civil rights for the private few:
Dunce-cap, Sect of Deformation
The Duncelor of Defundication
Dunconstitutional Breakfast con carne at Carny Con thru 2015
Suburban mom,
meet sub-intellectual bomb.
Don’t fix poverty, exploit it!
–We’re social Darwinists, and
we BELIEVE!!! Watch as we
claim to crusade for social
justice while denigrating and
exploiting the underclass!! Yes
we can. We already did!!!
Wow!!!
Remember who appointed the dunce. It’s about $$$$$ and the oligarchy.
The interviewer said all sides were against Duncan. Wrong. The most important side, the oligarchs, protect Duncan in the bastion they built and defend.
Something tells me that just by looking at the accompanying photo in the article I should wait until my dinner digests before reading it. Think I’ll take a nap before reading it.
It reads like a wistful nap.
The nap didn’t help.
I think only a Rip Van Winkle nap would help.
Let the air out of a basketball, then punch yourself I’m the face three times. No need to read; same effect.
Akademos–I liked your simple but says-it-all “Oops Dreams.”
Stupendous summary of the Duncan years. (& Hoop Dreams should have won for Best Documentary!)
Would have been wonderful for U.S. public schools if Arne had been more successful on the courts.
Also, would have been great for Chicago Public Schools if Rahm would have stuck to ballet (where, actually, he was an extremely gifted dancer &, I believe, was offered a spot in one of the United States’ premier ballet companies).
Despite that having been said…ALEC–around for 40 + years & still buying legislators far & wide.
Arne Duncan only has his job because President Obama wants him there. Why don’t we begin aiming our ire at him or would that be too uncomfortable?
Obama is certainly a huge disappointment in this field and it must be one giant blindspot somehow. This seems to be Duncan’s game, though. And of course any attack on Duncan is implicitly an attack also on Obama’s choice and conviction. This is such an encompassing field ultimately, touching practically everything from poverty to technology. Both Obama and Duncan will be embarrassed in history books that correctly view their policies and what has and will soon become of it all.
Chris–remember the Obama letter-writing campaign that started on this blog? Who actually answered those letters (& with form letters?
Aides & assistants, that’s who. Obama promised he’d wear his ‘walking shoes;” was he anywhere to be found in Madison, WI?
Just recently, the Dyett 12–organized in large part by KOCO (Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization; Obama’s house is in Kenwood)–appealed to POTUS. Any response? Nope.
I would wager a guess that most readers of this blog–if not even Diane, herself–have come to the conclusion that all of this misery has fallen–& will continue to fall–on Obama’s deaf ears.
I, for one, am not “uncomfortable” in saying, “Get a hearing aid, Mr. President. Or–go to the Wizard of Oz & ask for a heart.”
Your children go to Sidwell Friends, which is devoid of this nonsense.
“Other people’s children” (part of the nation you took an oath to protect & to ensure liberty & justice for all) are suffering.
I like your health care, but our children’s minds & spirits are a terrible thing to waste, & in all your years in office, you’ve done naught to eradicate these inequities–in fact, you have made them worse.
Shame on you, & shame on us voters.
Looking to the future–Bernie, 2016–because yes, WE can!
And WE WILL.
Akademos.
Duncan won’t be embarrassed, any more than Holder was, for failing to prosecute the bankers or, Bush’s federal department heads were, for contributing to the financial Armageddon of 2008.
Depends on who the historians will be, and what publishing will become.
“They also share a vision of education as an engine of opportunity, especially for the kind of at-risk kids on Chicago’s South Side that Duncan tutored at his mother’s after-school program, and Obama fought for as a community organizer.”
“ ‘Arne had such a missionary zeal for this stuff. And the president has a real sense of urgency about education.’ ”
I think these two quotes are pretty telling. Arne thinks he’s an educator because he helped out at his mother’s daycare center, so he must know all about at-risk kids and what’s good for them. As the friend of the Prez, he couldn’t be wrong, ¿right?
Of course, neither Dunkin nor Obama ever attended public schools, yet they are on a mission to fix ’em up. How could this end well?
Mr. Kurtz – he dead. The horror! the horror!
(Wiki version for those who have not read Joseph Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness”:
Kurtz is an ivory trader, sent by a shadowy Belgian company into the heart of an unnamed place in Africa. With the help of his superior technology, Kurtz has turned himself into a charismatic demigod of all the tribes surrounding his station, and gathered vast quantities of ivory in this way. As a result, his name is known throughout the region.However, over the course of his stay in Africa, Kurtz becomes corrupted. He takes his pamphlet and scribbles in, at the very end, the words “Exterminate all the brutes!” He induces the natives to worship him, setting up rituals and venerations worthy of a tyrant. By the time Marlow, the protagonist, sees Kurtz, he is ill with jungle fever and almost dead. Marlow seizes Kurtz and endeavors to take him back down the river in his steamboat. Kurtz dies on the boat with the last words, “The horror! The horror!”)
I am sure the devil cares about the people he is trying to lead too. So it is not an issue of whether the man cares or not. The problem is he cares about his progressive agenda and his progressive friends. He cares about pushing forward an irrational, insane ideology about how to educate children. We believe and care about education. Duncan believes and cares about social justice and indoctrination not education. Is what he cares about that concerns us not whether he care or doesn’t care.
If Duncan cares about social justice, he has a funny way of showing it.
The trend in privatization has served the richest 0.2. It’s record in helping the 99%, has been abysmal.
Anyone ever hear of the Dunland School CORPORATION in Chesterton Indiana? http://www.duneland.k12.in.us/Page/154
Administrative guidelines should also be established to ensure that students enrolling in the Corporation for the first time, at whatever level, submit the proper documentation and that records are promptly transferred.”
Did I blink and miss something? When did school districts become corporations?
“Parents as Teachers” early ed program is funded by United Way.
Duncan’s title at Chicago Public Schools, was CEO.
If Arne had half a brain he’d have seen where this is heading. I wonder if Elon Musk’s funded, Future of Life Organization’s “Research Priorities Document” is simply too complicated for him.
“increased automation may push income distribution
further towards a power law [13], and the resulting disparity may fall disproportionately along lines
of race, class, and gender;”
And this is why I am opposed to the Cradle to Career, Promise Neighborhood data culling of the public school populations. It is segregating by design. Charter schools are creating a spoked wheel community where neighbors are all heading with their kids in different directions so community visioning can no longer happen.
Click to access research_priorities.pdf
Arne Duncan’s background made him the perfect lackey for privatizing oligarchs. He played ball, ran a non-profit, and leapt to CEO of Chicago Public Schools.