Peter Greene does his very best close reading of Arne Duncan’s bizarre article in The Washington Post in which he insists that his policies have NOT failed, contrary to the evidence and public opinion.
He begins:
Lately, a wave of apostasy has swept through Reformsylvania, and reformsters have stepped up to say that ed reform kind of, well, failed. Yesterday, just in time for April Fools Day, former secretary of education Arne Duncan (and current thinky tank fixture) took to the pages of the Washington Postto try his hand at some non-reality-based history and argue that ed reform has been a resounding success.
How has he managed this feat? Well, there are several tricks.
 |
| This damn guy |
First, move the goalposts. All the way back to 1971. Fourth grade math and reading scores on the NAEP are up since then!! Why focus on fourth grade scores? Maybe because 17-year-old scores haven’t really moved much at all. And of course, reform hasn’t been in place since 1971– and most of that growth happened before modern ed reform ever took hold– you know, prior to those days when Secretary Duncan was explaining that American schools actually sucked? And all of this assumes that a single standardized math a reading score is a good proxy for the quality of the entire educational system.
Duncan has an explanation for those flat 12th grade scores– because the graduation rate is up, more weak students are taking the NAEP, and so keeping the scores flat is a win. Yay? Anyway, graduation rates are up, so that’s more proof of ed reform success, except that, of course, whether those diplomas actually mean anything other than districts have learned how to game the system with credit recovery and other baloney– well, never mind. There’s probably some real gain there, and that’s not a bad thing. The numbers are up, so woohoo…
[His] notion that test-based accountability “revealed” achievement gaps is baloney. Educators knew where the gaps were. We’ve4 always known where the gaps were. We’ve screamed about the gaps. I don’t believe any teacher in this country picked up test results and said, “I’ll be damned! I had no idea these non-white, non-wealthy students were having trouble keeping up!” At best, test-based accountability was a tool to convince policy makers who would listen to data spreadsheets before they would listen to teachers. And even then, policy makers didn’t look at the data and say, “Well, we’d better help these schools out.” Instead, all the way up to Duncan’s office, they responded with, “Well, let’s target this school for closure or conversion or a growth opportunity for some charter operators.”
This, it turns out, is another thing Arne “Katrina’s Destruction of NOLA Public Ed Is a Great Thing” Duncan counts as success- three million students in charter school. He cites Boston as a win (again, debateable) but ignores the widespread fraud, corruption and failure that charters have been prone to nationally…
Duncan has tried a variety of history rewrites for his administration (only politicians hated Common Core! charter school magic unleashed! ESSA was not a reaction against his work! CCSS should have been rolled out faster!) But all of his reflections stumble over the same problem– Duncan simply refuses to acknowledge the damage that his policies have done to public education. Here he is acting puzzled again–
[Duncan wrote:] Some have taken the original idea of school choice — as laboratories of innovation that would help all schools improve — and used it to defund education, weaken unions and allow public dollars to fund private schools without accountability.
No, Arne! Not “some.” Not some faceless mysterious group of folks. You. You and the people that you empowered and encouraged and cheered on and backed with your policies. You did that.
Well, as we have come to expect, Peter is right on target.
Charter schools are the gateway to vouchers. It is now widely understood that Arne Duncan and his friends paved the way for Betsy DeVos and her all-out war on public schools. That is now widely recognized, even if Duncan doesn’t admit it.
Reform is failing, failing, failing. The public is wise to the reformers’ real goal, which is to privatize public schools and disparage teachers instead of confronting the real issues of poverty and segregation.
And nothing that Arne writes here changes that fact.
It is hard to know where to look for the take-over of public schools. This recent post should be a real red flag and warning about the continued flow of money into school board elections by people who want to indoctrinate our students with the one right (hard right) way to think.
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2018/04/02/money-politics-creep-nonpartisan-school-board-election/?utm_source=cerkl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter-04022018&cerkl_id=1631067&cerkl_ue=w1lgssYRVwl8i%2FeQbiv%2FZmiPaHKDzoxEmIN9XO1ojxA%3D
I hope this gets reprinted by The Huffington Post!
I hope so too. There is no way to separate Duncan from the debacle called “reform.” He was in charge so “plausible deniability” is no defense. Duncan is living in a fantasy if he refuses to accept responsibility for multiple failed policies.
Duncan was wrong, and the soccer moms were right. Many of our public schools and students are doing fine, but our increasing poverty continues to be a problem. Privatization with increased segregation is no solution.
If he were living in a fantasy, he would not feel the need to spin the history.
The fact that he does means he recognizes his own role and feels the need to cover his bare a*terisk.
He is essentially admitting his own culpability.
Many of our public schools are doing great work. I just read about Michael Brown, a student in Houston, that was accepted at twenty different colleges including four ivy league schools. While he is an outstanding student, he would not be prepared without the support of his school. He is not a student from Kipp. He is a senior at Lamar High School, a public high school in the city. https://patch.com/texas/galleria-riveroaks/lamar-high-student-accepted-20-top-colleges-4-ivy-league
“”Maybe it’s just a remarkable coincidence that White (Louisiana) has suddenly developed technical concerns about the validity of NAEP at about the same time that he was briefed on his state’s results. How much do you want to bet that there is a decline in LA?
Exhibit B is Arne Duncan taking to the pages of the Washington Post to defend the idea that ed reform has contributed to significant improvement. He focuses on trends over the last few decades. That would be a smart move to focus on long-term gains if recent trends — you know, in the wake of Duncan’s tenure as U.S. Secretary of Education — have been taking a nose-dive. NAEP results slipped for the first time when 2015 results were released. How much do you want to bet that national results have declined again?” Jay P Greene, University of Arkansas
Obama’s toxic education policy as implemented by Arne Dun-can’t was the gateway drug that lead us straight to DeVos.
“The Gates way drug”
Arne was the Gatesway drug
That led us to DeVos
Never was a Gatesway bug
But really was de Boss
The cluelessness of Arne Duncan is typical of the “talent” that the corporate education reform crowd hires to sell, implement, and enforce their nostrums and snake oil.
From another angle: remember the first GHOSTBUSTERS movie? Let me fiddle around a bit with one of the initial verses:
[start]
If there’s something going right in your neighborhood school
Who you gonna call to undo? True rheephorm believers!
If there’s some genuine teaching and learning going on
Who you gonna call to undo? True rheephorm believers!
[end]
So if you’re going to get someone to sincerely and wholeheartedly give all in order to deliver as much ROI* as possible—do you hire from among the oblivious of the world like Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee and John Deasy? Or do you cut your own throat by looking for, say, the likes of Diane Ravitch?
🤪
C’mon, choicesters, this ain’t rocket science and we haven’t got all day…
So you can’t accuse those hard-headed 3DM[DataDrivenDecisionMaking] folks who run the ed bidness for inconsistency, at least in their hiring practices when it comes to apologists and salespeople and enablers and enforcers…
They’re willing to pay a pretty penny to get the best shills money and flattery can buy.
😎
P.S. ROI* = ReturnOnInvestment.
Who you gonna call?
Gatesbusters!
So, here’ the thing – many of you rightfully so point out that many of the reforms that Duncan has mentioned are failing. And yes, I think that his moving the goal posts and lots of other things that he alludes to are true (I think including graduation rates as proof of growth is scary given some of the recent issues in DC). However, I can say that there are some concrete things that have changed of late. I took a job in DC in 2004. When I took the job, I was very leery given the history of DC Public Schools for so many stories of incompetence – teachers not getting paid on time, books not being in classrooms, etc. I strongly considered not taking a job at a brand new STEM school because it was in DCPS. However, since then lots of changes have happened – around getting teachers materials on time, around scheduling, around attempts are improving professional development and making it more personalized and teacher focused as opposed to one size fits all. Have all the ideas worked? Certainly not? Have the “reformers” solved the issues of education today? Not by a long shot. But at the same time, if you think of the idea of someone who reforms, to me it means that they don’t accept the status quo, correct? Yes, I think Duncan is way off to claim that “reform has worked” But I also think it’s way off to say reform hasn’t worked completely. I think that there are some cases of change that were good…but there is a lot more that needs to be done.
the real gateway to vouchers is public education’s over-reliance on property taxes which has the effect of insulating thousands of students from the ravages of tax cuts or tax caps at the state and/or federal level.
When state legislatures impose deep cuts to public education or the federal government reduces funding, the school boards in affluent communities can increase their property taxes to ensure that the children in their community are insulated from the impact of cuts. Boards in less affluent communities do not have this option, and so their schools suffer. The result: the divide between rich and poor widens but the property tax burden increases in affluent towns as the funding is shifted downward.
In states where state legislatures impose property tax limitations WITH the possibility of local voter overrides— the voters in affluent districts consistently pass supplemental budgets. Thus, they protect their students and communities from the impact of budget cuts experienced in less affluent communities who do not have the tax base necessary to match the funding possible in wealthier districts. And in states where state legislatures impose property tax limitations WITHOUT the possibility of local voter overrides, school boards came up with fee-for-service models that replaced tax revenues with de facto “user fees”: children are assessed for busing, extra-curricular, and, in some cases, text books. In either case where tax caps were imposed, the schools in affluent districts did not experience the impact of limitations while the schools in less affluent districts suffered.
This ability of relatively affluent districts to raise funds to offset lost revenues through increases to property taxes or the institution of fees creates a situation where the parents and children in those districts never felt the impact of STATE tax cuts OR property tax caps. As a result, voters in those districts were indifferent to or, in some cases, fully supportive of test-driven reform because— to paraphrase Mr. Greene— their “white, relatively wealthy students WERE keeping up”. And since they were keeping up they never had to worry about doing poorly on state tests, they never had to worry about their schools being identified as “failing” and closing, and never had to replace their broad curricula with “focused” test preparation classwork.
This system of taxation is the gateway to vouchers because as long as property taxes and “user fees” are the primary source of funding, the voters in affluent districts will remain immune to the impact of STATE tax cuts and may even support them because they are already paying high local property taxes to keep their schools afloat. So when these state-tax-resistant voters in affluent districts hear that the State legislators have a means of helping “other children” in “failing schools” by giving their parents “choices”, a “solution” that requires NO increase in State taxes, they are open to supporting the idea…. And as readers of this blog realize, the privatizers are only too happy to feed them data to support the fantasy that “choice” is the silver bullet that can solve the problems of inequitable funding.
W. Edward Deming said “A bad system will beat a good person every time”… we have a bad system for school funding in place and it is, alas, beating many good people…
Since Arne is revising history, I think it is important to set the record straight with ” just the facts, ma’am”
“America ruins on Duncan”
“America ruins on Duncan”
The motto of Deform
Where every school is dunkin’
And dough nut$ are the norm
“The Duncan-Kruger Effect”
The Duncan-Kruger Effect
Is rife with school deform
Where thinking has been checked
And chutzpah is the norm
“Dead Ends”
Arne’s driver took a turn
Down a dead-end street
Arne’s driver just can’t learn
That dead-end is defeat
“The Era of Arne Err”
This decade, let’s be clear,
Is “Era of Arne Err”
No education here
Just testing, VAMs and fear
“Worst ideas all the way down”
Duncan’s worst idea
Is resting on another
And what is very clear
Is that one had a mother
“21st Century Medicine”
He dragged them kicking and screaming
The kids and all their teachers
Cuz Arne‘s into bleeding
With testing and with leeches
“The Arneanderthals”
The school “reform” was hatched
In agency of ads
And policy was snatched
From prehistoric fads
“Duncan’s Speechwriter”
Putting words in Arne’s mouth
That’s my job, and man I’m proud
Speech about “surburban mom”
Man, that really was ‘da bomb’
“Duncan Cover”
Duncan Cover
Not a drill
It’s all over
Fetch your will
Arne’s coming
Through the err
Tests are bombing
Everywhere
VAM is flying
Teachers scream
No denying
Duncan’s scheme
“ NCLB (No Camel Left Behind)”
The Bushy camel head
Was poking in the tent
And look at where that led
To Arne’s government
And now we have the butt
Of camel in the tent
We’re really in a rut
With stinky camel scent