Peter Greene commented on the opinion piece written by Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings about education reform, in which they lament the lack of courage and vision by those that succeeded them.
How sad, they write, that the bipartisan coalition that formed after the [phony] Nation at Risk report of 1983 is not fighting for more of the same.
How strange that they think of themselves as rebels when they were in charge and had the help of the nation’s billionaires.
How pathetic that they lament the lack of top-down muscle to shove more of the same down the throats of everyone else.
How curious that they don’t understand that the teachers marching in the streets are not supported their failed vision of more tests, higher punishments, and more privatization. What the protesters want more of investment in public schools, which neither Arne nor Margaret said much about when in office.
How out of touch these two are!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Out of touch?”
In touch with dollars
Not with scholars
In touch with leechers
Not with teachers
In touch with test
And not with best
In touch with quacks
And not with facts
In touch with Rheel
And not with real
“In touch with quacks
And not with facts” NCLB, R2T, ESSA: such a lucrative hotbed for quacks.
I don’t know anything about Spelling but Duncan has always been very rigid.
He spent 8 years as sec of ed and never budged an inch from the positions he came in with.
It’s not good. It stands to reason that one or two of his agenda items were flops. This idea that “we all agree” on his agenda was a huge part of his problem.
This article he wrote is just more of the same- “we all agree I’m right but everyone else lacks THE WILL to put in my agenda properly!”
Good Lord. Are they teaching this kind of arrogance at those expensive private schools he attended? If so they need to reform themselves.
They don’t need to teach arrogance at schools like Harvard because it is already present to a large degree.
Most of the students they accept are already arrogant. When you are told for your entire life that you are smarter than everyone else, you naturally start to believe it, whether it is true or not.
SO TRUE!
Chiara, Here is a pretty good profile of the reign of Margaret Spellings, no in North Carolina and among the highest paid presidents of a public university.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Spellings
Margaret Spellings seems to have a problem with anyone who is LGBT.
The legislature must love her.
Do you suppose Ms Spellings even knows how to spell LGBT?
Yes. No one has my courage, my will, my vision. That’s the subtext.
“Humble Arne”
No one has my mettle
To fight suburban mom
Cuz most would simply settle
And lack my great aplomb
Also, Duncan and Spelling write in the piece that “we” (they) realize that public schools are the majority provider of education in the US.
There is not a shred of evidence that anyone in the Bush, Obama or Trump administrations gave any thought at all to existing public schools. They did nothing for them. If they “all realize” that public schools are part of their jobs you could never tell it by looking at their work.
They show up during testing season. Other than that they’re completely irrelevant to public schools.
Chiara,
The Duncan Spellimgs need public schools. Who else could they regulate?
Good one, Diane. I suggest they regulate themselves, but they won’t. They think they are perfect and both have been told this their entire lives.
Not to pick nits, but your Spellings is incorrect.
You really wonder why ed reformers don’t look at US health care and why that doesn’t give them pause in their zeal to eradicate the public system.
We have private sector health care. We often pay for it with government-subsidized plans of one kind or another. It’s an expensive disaster and we have really poor public health outcomes with wild levels of inequity.
Isn’t it much more likely their privatized vision ends up looking like that than looking like a cell phone company or a food truck?
K-12 education is much more like health care than it is “like” anything else, but they never consider this.
The food truck analogy is great! I wish I were a political cartoonist.
A typical bureaucrat-speak, not a single idea or specific statement in the whole article, this takes skill.
It strikes me that those whose careers were spent in anything they perceived as a revolution are unrepentant. Trotsky groused in Mexico about his failed revolution. Why should we be surprised when these people do the same when they look at the failed attempt they made to right a sinking ship? Only the data they used to prove that it was sinking now looks like they made it up, as though anybody should have listened to it in the first place. They were only able to tip he boat a bit. What a disappointment.
Yvonne has it so right. Again, I refer you to Chicago Magazine, Oct. (or Nov.) 2016–big picture of Arne, puff piece, “Can Arne Duncan Save Chicago?” A must-read (if it doesn’t make you regurgitate). He’ll save Chicago from his office on the toniest of streets–Michigan Ave. Or from his home (worth at least a million, as I recall–listed in a Tribune column about lux homes). Or by working for Steve Jobs’ widow (a known champion of public schools!) for the Emerson Initiative, “visiting” & “helping” incarcerated youth (the CPS school-to-prison pipeline). Oh, wait, he used to be the head of CPS, right?
& now Paul Vallas is running for mayor. WHY do we get stuck w/these lemons? (As in, “dance of the lemons,” which just refers to teachers, y’all).
Oh, & here’s another gem–a recent University of IL study names Chicago as “the most corrupt city in the country” & ILL-Annoy the “third most corrupt state.”
From what we’ve witnessed lately, politicians prefer spending money to protect children from gun owners exercising their rights to acquire weapons designed for warfare to spending money on health care for those same children. They prefer giving tax cuts and tax incentives to corporations to giving living wages to teachers or decent housing to those who cannot afford a roof over their heads. They prefer low taxes to an effective government.
But Ms. Spellings and Mr. Duncan don’t want to acknowledge that we have the money we need to improve our schools and we are spending that money on the wrong things. They would rather insist that “our vision is warped, our will is weak, and our efforts are lacking.”
Hm-m-m… wait a minute… maybe they ARE right…. if we are spending money on guns and wars instead of children our vision IS warped… if we are failing to capture taxes from corporations our will IS weak… if we are not asking taxpayers to support “government schools” our efforts ARE lacking.
Between the number of unflattering photographs of him floating around, and his public pronunciamentos, there is something about Arne Duncan that just screams “low-watt bulb” to me….
“Low Watt Bulbs”
Duncan is an LED
A “Lie Emitting Dummy”
His dumminess is plain to see
And lies are kind of scummy
Hahahahaha! Damn, SomeDam! Do you teach English? You should!
I don’t teach anything now, but I was once a science teacher.
Orchestrated racism out of touch oh my.
They knew what they were doing and the fall of America stsrted with them.