Peter Greene learned that Arne Duncan has accepted a position as chair of the board of an edu-biz called FullBloom. He continues to be a partner at billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective.
He quotes the owner of the biz:
Here’s what CEO Jeffrey Cohen has to say about the momentous acquisition:
“Having a thought leader like Arne help guide our decisions through this time of unprecedented educational disruption is vital as we work to ensure both the safety and engagement of our students,” said CEO Jeffrey Cohen. “We are delighted to welcome Arne to the board. This appointment makes us better as an organization because we know he will hold us to the highest standards when it comes to producing results for the children and clients we serve.”
Arne is the right guy to lead a company during a period of “unprecedented educational disruption.” That was his specialty when he was Secretary of Education: Disruption.
Greene goes on to explain what FullBloom is and what it does. Your head will spin with mergers and acquisitions. All this money is made near and around education by entrepreneurs but it bypasses teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It seems many DINOs are also members of the AFAB party …
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Don’t mistake Arne Duncan for a “thought leader.” He is a willing tool–a follower– who ascended to a position of power–on behalf of those who seek to advance the privatization of public education and undermine the influence of unions.
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So TRUE.
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He’s not a thought leader….he’s an A__ Kisser. He just gets to fail up for his sucking up.
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In the original mythology, it never occurred to me that a Trojan Horse could be reused. (I’m not sure if this is a fitting analogy or a random thought.)
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OMG … what a joke.
The whole notion of “THOUGHT LEADERS” is ridiculous. Does this mean the rest of us don’t think?
This is just another CLUB of insiders.
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a club every year turning more openly into a cult
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Thought leaders produce thinklets. Thinklets is a word i encountered about a decade ago. Thinklets are food for Twitter, Instagram, and other social media. Peter has offered another brilliant tracing through the alphabet soup of the education biz, positions held, dumped, and “scaled up.” Arne still has a huge presence on TV as if an expert on education. He is not, but he held a VIP federal title. His failures are not mentioned. Peter does.
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The fact that “…children and their clients” are not one and the same suggests that this will be yet another failed education initiative.
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It’s a perfect description of ed reform that they spend 20 years blindly cheerleading “distance learning” and selling school districts billions of dollars in edu-product but they never did anything about the fact that +/- 50% of low income children in the US don’t have reliable access to the internet.
They should convene some “thought leaders” and figure out how that happened.
They never built the infrastructure to deliver the products they were all selling.
What I will remember most about the pandemic is the lower income kids in this town huddled under the entryway canopy at the library trying to access “school”.
Billions and billions and billions spent on ed reform and no one made any effort at all to fix this. They’re still not doing it. Instead they’re creating a national social studies test which of course they will mandate public schools administer. I just hope “testing season” doesn’t fall during a pandemic spike- half the kids won’t be able to access their new social studies test.
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This is ambitious and I have no idea how one would go about doing it, but is it possible to create a new group of policy orgs that are outside the ed reform echo chamber? People with experience in public schools who value public schools and public school students?
I just don’t think our schools will get stronger if we continue to take advice from people who are invested in the replacement of public schools with privatized systems of educational services.
Ed reformers don’t hire people who are opposed to charters and vouchers to work on charters and vouchers. Why do we hire people who don’t support our schools to set policy for our schools?
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NPE is the group you are looking for, Chiara. I frequently get emails from young people who want to join the fight to save public schools, but I can’t refer them to jobs because we don’t have organizations overflowing with millions from Gates, Hastings, Walton, DeVos, Koch, et al.
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With Australian professional basketball league experience, Arne Duncan has always been the right man for a coaching job in the NCAA. You don’t get hired to run schools because you played basketball. Something about Duncan has always been very wrong.
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I thought Jeffrey Cohen’s comments were facetious. At first. The words “Arne Duncan” and “thought leader” are so incongruous.
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Thought leader Duncan praised Hurticane Katrina for wiping out the public schools in New Orleans, creating the opportunity to eliminate the union, fire all the teachers, and privatize all the schools. Lest we forget.
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Arne and his fellow opportunists are all about the financialization of the common good. I looked at the reading program from the Institute for Scaling Evidence-Based Education, and it was a bunch of decontextualized phonics that you can actually find on Youtube. Evidence is a strange word for the deformers. The only evidence we have from so-called reform is that they fail repeatedly, and they keep getting more money from their billionaire friends in high places.
Greene’s tone is perfect in this post. He uses just the right amount of sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek commentary to keep it interesting.
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The proper job for someone like Smarmy Arne is selling used cars for a junkyard.
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Arne Duncan is a NO thought leader. He has no “thoughts.” He doesn’t think.
Ooop…except for himself & his family (maybe). & $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
He is this close to my choice of pronoun being an it…like 45 (again, creds to Bethree for it45).
&–BTW–always keep an eye out (or both!) for the return of Paul Vallas. Hw was on “progressive” talk radio the other day, pontificating (because he knows everything, doesn’t he?) about the BLM movement,, the unrest in Chicago (because, after all, Lori won–big time–& he had one of the lowest %ages in Chicago’s mayoral race), which is, according to PV (actually stands for peeve), is all Mayor Lightfoot’s fault because, after all, as mayor, he would’ve made Chicago into the Garden of Eden.
Those two make me violently ill.
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Clarification: “Those” two, being, of course, Arne & Peeve–certainly NOT Mayor Lightfoot!!!
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Arne Duncan, Paul Vallas, Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Forrest Claypool and Gerry Chico were members of the now defunct Mayor Richard M. Daley Democratic Machine. If you belonged to that machine, you did well. 😐
Duncan was a CPS graduate, which is rare for a Chicago Public Schools’ Superintendent (or CEO). 😐🔔
The same is also true for current CEO Janice Jackson. 😁🔔
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