Mike Klonsky wonders whether Arne Duncan’s patronizing comments about parents and critics of high-stakes testing helped Donald Trump win the election.
When 20% of the parents in New York opted out of the state testing, he sneered at them and said they were white suburban parents who found out that their child wasn’t so bright after all. This was rank condescension.
When Duncan used Race to the Top billions to bribe states into adopting Common Core, he continued to insist that Common Core was a project of the states. He became the nation’s leading cheerleader for Common Core, and he ridiculed the critics. The critics were vociferous, especially in the Midwest.
Throughout his time in office, Duncan celebrated the successes of charter schools, wherever he could find them, and barely noticed public schools. Last month, before Massachusetts voted on Question 2, Duncan turned up in Boston to argue that expansion of charters was unquestionably a good thing. Despite his ringing endorsement, Question 2 was soundly defeated in almost every district in the state.
I don’t know whether Duncan helped Trump win by making public school parents angry, but he most certainly paved the way for the full-throated privatization that Trump is now pressing. Who would have thought that Arne Duncan and Donald Trump would be on the same team, cheering for more school choice, more charters, more privatization? Trump took it to the next level and threw in vouchers. Once you endorse school choice and launch an assault on the very principle of public education, it is hard to walk it back.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
With apologies and I don’t mean to incite vitriol or flame throwing. But…………I blame the more than 60 million Americans who decided to vote for Trump. They heard the same words that Trump uttered and the speeches that he vomited up which I heard. That was enough for me, that was all the information that I needed to determine that this man should be no where near the White House. I didn’t need all the incriminating videos and audio recordings which showed Trump to be a crude and vile misogynist. Some new words coming our way: Trumpism, Trumponomics, Trumpsvilles, PTTS (Pre Traumatic Trump Syndrome or Post Traumatic Trump Syndrome) and the ever popular Trumpology.
Hey, 60 million Trump voters, don’t complain when Trump and gang decimate Obamacare, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Not to mention setting us up for another depression.
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Hear, hear.
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Another depression or a meteor might be a godsend .Saving the working class from the economic consequences of Trump.. Feb 2017 would be optimal .
Joe, I don’t know, I am torn between two realities. Most Trump voters I know do to one degree or another fit into that basket. On the other hand what was the message that the Democrats were sending..
I think Sanders expressed it very well yesterday
“Which side are you on?” Sanders said. “Can you go out and raise substantial sums of money from the wealthy and Wall Street and those powerful special interests then convince the American people you are on the side of workers and the middle class. Or you do you finally have to say we are going to take on the oligarchy?”
Not many in that basket understand the word Oligarchy no less Noe-liberal . They do understand that their standard of living has dropped and fear worse for their children.
They in some visceral way got, that the political establishment of both parties had abandoned them long ago.
Perhaps Duncan should not have called called out those suburban mom’s or Perez not laughed up the unemployment numbers with Bill Maher or Obama pushed the TPP… … The only real question to be answered is how far up the educational chain has this decline in living standards gone.
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I say this with trepidation. I don’t want to set off a seismic response. Since Russian intelligence agencies are expert hackers, maybe they hacked the voting machines in swing states. Maybe the polls were right. No one was more surprised to win than Trump himself.
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I don’t think they had to hack voting machines. The Clinton campaign largely ignored Michigan and Wisconsin, thinking they had them in the bag. With Republican governors in both states, you would think that would be a clue that they needed to spend some time in those states.
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How about Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania?
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The lesson I learned in working against Duke in Louisiana was that he always under polled by 5-6%. The tightening in my gut began when Clinton’s polls were showing 3-4% leads. Trump under polled 5-6 or more percent (see Utah) in the states that mattered. Fascists always under poll.
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My understanding is that voting data is gathered in such a fragmented way at the precinct level that it’s essentially un-“hackable.”
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But where the voting is gathered on touch screens, why can’t it be hacked. When I served on a presidential commission on the electoral process, the potential for hacking was discussed. But no one thought a foreign power might do it.
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It may come down to how and where voting totals are aggregated. The more decentralized that process is, the less feasible hacking would be from a return-on-investment perspective. But I suppose great things are possible these days.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-elections-russia-hack-how-to-hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144
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I would have settled for a thorough investigation of ties between the Trump campaign and the Russians. With results released before the inauguration. But even Johnson seemed to have dropped the ball on that one with Nixon
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But let’s walk that through… Even if Russian hackers were able to do that [doubtful] & were able to do it in the states where that counted most [more doubtful?], & were able to accomplish an electoral college victory [most doubtful?]… we still end up w/a country where about 50% [or 49 or 48 or 47%] of voters voted against the bipartisan neoliberal policies of the last few admins. Regardless of possible yet doubtful tweaking of voting results by a foreign power, I think the vote illustrates a more-than-sizeable chunk of citizens clamoring for attention to be paid to the middle-, lower-middle, & working-class citizens left behind in a swift descent toward poverty by global trade. Perhaps augmented by middle-to-uper-middles who see their kids victims to the same trend.
Trump & his Rep House/ Senate most probably will not be able to satisfy those folks. But perhaps at minimum Dems will be re-invigorated to dump neoliberalism & seek a public-good compact.
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bethree,
Trump will pull together the old hacks of the religious right and the GOP and they will do exactly nothing for disgruntled workers. They will fatten the bank accounts of the 1%. It was all a great charade.
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my take is similar and different, although I took a dive and had the editor add “accidently” so I wouldn’t alienate black friends.JohnHow Obama’s policies accidentally helped Trump – NonDoc | | | | | |
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| | | | How Obama’s policies accidentally helped Trump – NonDoc By John Thompson President Barack Obama’s policies, especially those focused on education, serve as a metaphor for the elites… | |
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I found your article, which is more comprehensive. Well done.
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In his speech at the 2008 DNC convention, Bill Clinton asked the country to choose between two competing value systems and politics: We’re in this together or you’re on your own. Republicans have always stood for the latter and Democrats lost their credibility on the former.
Privatization of schools embraces you’re on your own. The bipartisan support for charter schools is just one more tragic step away from the unifying values of social responsibility. So, is the embrace of anti-unionism on the part of some Democrats. So is the walking away from an inclusive struggle for integration. All of it conspires to leave too many folks thinking that no one is on their side, so their only choice is to be out for themselves or their group.
http://www.arthurcamins.com
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Linking Duncan to the Trump election seems a stretch, but I suspect we’ll soon see him in a highly paid job with for-profit charter, or a foundation that advocates privatization.
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Joel,
He cleared the path for Trump’s education agenda, spending 7 years belittling public schools and praising charters.
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Right on, Diane! Duncan not only echoed the far-right by dumping on pubsch sys [& pushing policy to show them ‘failing’– & pumping fed $ into privatized replacements], he trumpeted his condescending viewpoint– in an effort to squelch intelligent Dem pro-public-school countering opinion– which came across to the masses as just more Dem elitism, which translated to Rep votes.
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Joel: He works for Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow, & I believe it’s called the Emerson Foundation (anyone feel free to correct me). &, yes, she’s a privatization person, among other things.
&–I’m sure he’s making LOTS of $$$ (after all, his children go to–where else?–University of Chicago Lab School).
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I’ve said this on this blog’s comments forum before, but I’ll say it again (and as often as I perceive it to be true): I can’t imagine two people who deserve each other more.
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I wouldn’t say him directly but the ed reform movement, in my opinion, has a huge problem – they’re snobs.
The Obama Administration was so tightly connected to this movement that they always sounded like snobs, too.
The whole Best and Brightest thing? Ugh. Is that really what they believe in DC? The only people who are talented and hard-working are the people who attend Ivy League schools?
I would listen to them when they would come to Cleveland or Toledo and they were basically telling working people wage stagnation was their fault- they weren’t working hard enough or “skillling up” enough. They blamed working people for the fact that their wages were falling.
It’s just unbearable coming from someone like Duncan who has literally never held a job that wasn’t a political appointment. When did Arne Duncan have to “retrain”?
After Duncan they’d send someone like Penny Pritzer who is LITERALLY a billionaire. She’s just not credible lecturing machinists. She has nothing in common with these people- she lives in a different world than they do. It may as well be another planet.
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YES. We so often attach the mess made through standardizing test-score invasions to racism or culturalism when, to a large degree, it has been simple snobbery — a detached and unspoken elitism — which has been pushed by the DOE and union leaders alike. Even inside my own largely low-income district’s union, I would hear statements like, “We’ve got to fix ____ school; I wouldn’t send my kids there.”
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I knew people would object to Common Core because there was no public debate or discussion before it landed in every public school.
The ed reform response to that was to dismiss resistance it as lazy and coddled parents and children or evil labor unions.
The arrogance is a REAL problem.
I don’t even object to the Common Core – I basically back it- and I thought the response was incredibly patronizing and dismissive. You can’t just barge into their schools and upend everything with no debate and then tell them all they’re fools for being upset. They have a right to be upset. You just barged into their school,created chaos, and then said “good luck with that mess we made!” Anyone would be upset.
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Yup. Fed DOE just marched into every state ed sys & said here it is, like it or lump it– may I say: ignoring the fact that a huge majority of us in the outback (i.e., not in inner cities whose ed sys long ago removed democratic school boards in favor of mayoral or state gov’r fiefdoms) were still rassling out curriculum & teacher-pay/ employment issues at the municipal level. States bought in at the govtl level, seeing the ‘accountability’ package (CCSS plus assessments used as cudgels against pubsch schools/ teachers) as a way to whack down state ed budgets (ignoring/ kissing off the costs to future admins).
FWIW I do not like or buy into Common Core: Math is an extension of older [weak] curricula & ELA is an affront to decades of research on best reading/ writing/ lit pedagogy…
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“Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz met with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday at Trump Tower, a person with knowledge of the meeting told POLITICO New York.”
Wow. That’s some clout. You can bet no public school superintendent will get that kind of access, but them who cares what those “mediocre” commoners think anyway?
Moskowitz probably has their facilities slated for closure.
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It’s not just public school parents whom Obama/Duncan/King outraged with their stubborn support of charter schools: Hillary received only 51% of the white college-educated women’s vote because a great many college-educated women are public school teachers who saw Hillary as “just more of the same” in regard to the relentless push to privatize public schools via charter schools. Obama was co-opted by the pro-charter Democrats for Education Reform billionaires even before he became President the first time. So, Obama can take a significant part of the blame for the Democratic Party debacle. His legacy.
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I have said from the first that Duncan was a poor choice for the post. He is an ideologue.
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I rarely see this noted, but with Duncan, RTTT, and VAM, Obama alienated most teachers across the country.this is the largest profession in the country and very female dominated. Clinton did little to disavow this mess. Teachers have large influence across families and communities. Certainly this factor has to be part of the reason for her loss. Any future progressive candidate could step up, embrace our profession, end the test and punish mess, and create powerful momentum.
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I so agree. Of course, we have no stats on how teachers across the nation voted. But we know that teachers are a large chunk of middle-class voters. And we know that teachers’ unions have been spectacularly unsuccessful over the last 20 yrs of assault on pub ed at supporting their members, choosing instead to cosy up to privatizing neolib admins, silent even in outrages like LA’s post-Katrina layoff of 7000 teachers, massive closings of pubschs in Chicago & Phila, Scott Walker’s removal of negotiating privileges for his state’s teachers. It would be small wonder if a significant number did not decamp to Trump in hope of a shake-up.
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If anyone wants to know more about what Arne is doing, read the puff-piece in the November 2016 Chicago Magazine (sorry–don’t have the link–simply Google it) titled
“Can Arne Duncan Save Chicago?” (Hint: the last paragraph describes him as sitting in his office & crying…about the children!)
As if this election hasn’t been sickening enough, this article will do it for you.
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