Let me start by saying Arne Duncan was a disaster as Secretary of Education. He went around the country bashing public schools and teachers, while lavishing praise on charter schools and Teach for America. His “Race to the Top” was a disaster. Congress gave him $5 billion to “reform” American schools, and he wasted it on unproven fixes, like evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, touting the Common Core, and underwriting tests for the Common Core. He predicted vast academic improvement but there was none. He blamed teachers and parents for the failure of his “reforms,” most or all of which were inspired by Bill Gates.
I met him early on in his tenure as Secretary of Education and concluded he was a nice guy but probably the dumbest person I had ever met in public office. He had Peter Cunningham to craft his remarks and speeches.
Guess what? He might run for mayor of Chicago. Why not? Rahm Emanuel was smart and evil. He closed 50 schools in a single day. Could Arne be worse?
Fred Klonsky thinks so. He will keep a close eye on Arne.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
exactly
I have names for these two bozos … “DUNCE” and “Rahm-BOO.” Obama’s educational policies were abysmal.
Don’t ASK that! Never, EVER ask if things could be worse. Things can ALWAYS be worse!
lonnnnnng sigh
Is your middle name Eeyore? 🙂
Honestly, I feel more like Rabbit XD
I’m TV/film illiterate. Who is Rabbit XD?
Rabbit is another one of Christopher Robin’s friends, like Pooh and Eeyore. He’s frazzled and high-strung!
That’s a sideways smiley face. Rabbit is just Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh.
I’m still lost. “Rabbit :).” Huh? I think my age is showing.
speduktr,
Rabbit was a duller charter than many of the others, but has a prominent appearance in perhaps the most famous Pooh story, “In which Pooh goes visiting and gets into a tight place”.
Thanks to his “stoutness” and generous consumption of honey, Pooh is stuck halfway in and halfway out of Rabbit’s hole.
(spoiler: Pooh has to get thin again to get out, and Rabbit hangs clothes from his bottom half but all is well at the end).
Hopefully he will be soundly defeated. Keep this educational malefactor as far away from any public office as possible, he’s already done enough damage. He’s no better than Betsy DeVos, they are on the same team when it comes to education, they both want to destroy the public school system.
Three words can shut down Arne in a heartbeat……”White Suburban Moms”. Just imagine the smear commercials from the opponents! Can Biden please give him an Ambassadorship to someplace like Viet Nam where he can’t do much harm to anyone?
I once thought it would be entertaining to invite readers to submit their favorite Arne Duncan quote.
There are so many to choose from.
I think my all-time favorite is when he visited a second-grade class in New York City and told the children that he wanted to look into their eyes and see if they were college-bound. I recall thinking that the best he might divine is whether they hoped to be astronauts, athletes, doctors, nurses, firefighters.
Colleges and universities are, by definition, guided by principles like the greater good.
Arne was maybe looking to see if the students planned to go to a think tank with students like Stanford or Harvard. Duncan, of course, similar to Gates, prefers corporate- or wealthy owned think tanks.
“Poverty is not destiny”. Bull. When poverty causes childhood stress, malnutrition, lack of sleep and many other conditions, learning is slowed. In the current system, when learning is slowed , children are retained and eventually pushed out of school.
Arne etc when they say that about poverty, are looking at the very small percent who are protected from those conditions and therefore learning at a more normal rates
Good catch, Lisa. Someone needs to give you a loudspeaker with that one.
Arnie Is Owned By Family Friendly Funders
Arne Duncan is a Senior Advisor at The Rise Fund.
DreamBox Learning, the adaptive K-8 math education platform, has secured a $130 million investment from the venture capital firm The Rise Fund.
In exchange for the investment, The Rise Fund will take a majority stake in DreamBox, and Arne Duncan will also join DreamBox’s board of directors. Duncan is senior education advisor to The Rise Fund.
The Rise Fund is “a global impact fund led by private equity firm TPG in collaboration with a group of renowned stakeholders. TPG or Texas Pacific Group, is one of the biggest private equity investment firms in the world.
Founded in 1992, they have about $50 billion kicking around. They have acquired or invested in J. Crew to PetCo. In 2002 they teamed up with Bain and Goldman Sachs to perform the leveraged buyout of Burger King. Later they snagged all or some of Neiman Marcus, Univision, Sabre, Alltel, Midwest Air Group and more.
https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2017/04/arne-duncans-newest-gig.html
His arrogance outstrips his talent. If the people of Chicago are smart, they will reject this out of touch know nothing, neoliberal clown. Nobody should vote for anyone backed by private equity.
I always agree with everything you write, but I have to pick a couple bones here. First, Duncan has no talent — outside of playing frickin basketball against amateurs. Second, the people of Chicago have a history of being the opposite of smart when it comes to electing mayors. Emmanuel. Daley. Ugh.
The other Daley (track 12):
https://www.ouvirmusica.com.br/steve-goodman/369655/
Quite a song.
perhaps even more to the point: how much money does Duncan himself take in per “job”
He also works for the Emerson Collective (Laurene Powell Jobs), & doesn’t that name sound like it’s a jewelry exchange or some such? He has an office in a building on tony Michigan Ave. (Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile”) & he owns a house near the Obamas’ Chicago mansion (still own it, but they’re never there)which cost over $1 million, so that should tell you how much 💰💰
he’s making; this was featured in The Chicago Tribune’s Sunday real estate article, “Elite Street.” His kids go to the University of Chicago Lab School, of course. But he’s a good guy: he works with “disenfranchised youth,” some–or most–of whom are imprisoned (the public to prison pipeline, or, should I say, the CLOSING of the public’s causing the imprisonment: 50 community schools lost (pal Rahm) so no communities for these kids, & for more & more, the gangs became their communities. 🤑🤑🤑 never ends.
Chicago seems to have their own ideas about who should run Chicago.They kicked Rahm Emanuel to the curb without a second thought and they’ve undone most of Duncan’s reforms over the years.
I just wouldn’t underestimate them as far as making up their own minds.
much union organization to thank in Chicago
Yes, & now there’s challenge in CTU leadership: CTU President Sharkey is retiring & going back to teaching, but V.P. Stacy Davis Gates is running (&, no, NO relation to Bill!). However, C.O.R.E. (which ran the late, great CTU President Karen Lewis (o.b.m.) is being challenged, &, of course, from people who want to tear down & weaken the CTU: there’s 💰💰💰💰 being put into this already: there’s a group w/a women from the northern suburbs (she was asked to leave a city job when it was found out she didn’t live in the city) who only wants to help (?), & opposition ads are already being run.
&, y’know, CPS is one of the only districts in the mask mandate complaint which is still maintaining masking (& other Covid protocol) guidelines BECAUSE the CTU was smart enough to BARGAIN it INTO THEIR CONTRACT.
a great way to show leadership for this type of situation: bargain it INTO contracts
You don’t really get a sense of just how anti-public school Obama’s education team were until you compare them to Bidens- after all, Bush and Trump were Republicans so that’s not an apt comparison.
The Biden team just don’t make a practice of bashing public schools 24/7. They don’t do overt marketing and promotion of charters or ed tech. They haven’t set themselves in opposition to public schools. You don’t get the sense that they’re wholly captured by the “ed reform movement” and in lockstep compliance with it. It’s a huge difference.
Arne Duncan wrote a book after he left office that is premised on the idea that all public schools “lie” to students and parents. Just outright, wholly adversarial opposition to public schools. If he has to call them all “liars”, he will because that advances the agenda. No dissent was permitted at all. If some public school parents in NY didn’t like the Common Core tests, well they were obviously just lying to themselves about how smart their children are. He wouldn’t even consider that there could be legitimate criticism of his work. Anyone who opposes him is acting in “self interest” or deluded.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/116255-duncan-says-schools-have-been-lying-to-children-parents
“He had just told a gathering of state superintendents of education that “white suburban moms” were rebelling against the Common Core academic standards — new guidelines for math and language arts instruction — because their kids had done poorly on the tough new tests.
“All of a sudden, their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought … and that’s pretty scary,” Duncan said at the event Friday.”
Any questioning or hesitancy about the Common Core tests was immediately dismissed as invalid. Anyone who opposes any of Arne Duncan’s ed reform initiatives is operating wholly in bad faith, by definition.
Not that it mattered. The minute the new tests went itn the whole ed reform echo chamber abandoned the Common Core, other than to bash public schools for the lower scores with the more difficult testing regime. They could have saved a billion dollars and just changed the cut score on the existing tests. I didn’t even oppose the Common Core but having watched ed reform over the last 20 years I knew they’d dump it on public schools and walk away- they do it with every “reform”. It fell out of fashion.
I recall that Arne also referred to critics of the Common Core as people wearing tin foil hats. IE, nuts.
“was a nice guy but probably the
dumbest person I had ever met…”
Does this mean you’ve never met
a person who “thinks” changing
the systems’ mascot will change
the system?
Had a good, knowing laugh at “dumbest person I had ever met.”
One thing I’ve learned over many years is that it can always get worse.
Duncan’s Race to the Topic was a moronic approach to school funding: who would base school aid on a competitive grant process —instead of NEED! And it was essentially black mail: do what we say or don’t get federal money – even though the law is clear that states determine education not the federal government.
Lisa E, you are so right! The NAACP criticized Race to the Top for holding a competition instead of funding states based on need. There was an event scheduled at the White House, and the NAACP was told that their leaders would not get a meeting with President Obama unless they called off their press conference where they planned to attack RTTT. Valerie Strauss wrote about it. They did not hold the press conference.
Cue the pics of Arne in 3rd-grade classrooms trying to read their books.
Now, now, Diane. We don’t say, “dumb.” We say, “cognitively challenged.”
“The Squandered Brilliance of Our Disposable Youth,” is a chapter about the harm caused by charter schools. It’s in the 2021 Jim Freeman book, “Rich Thanks to Racism…how the ultra wealthy profit from racial injustice.” Bill Gates is prominently identified in the chapter that has the wording, “cruel and deeply harmful policies in education.” Freeman is one of the leading civil rights lawyers in the country. The book was published by Cornell Press and, as in all books, education, our illustrious blog host appears in a footnote. Freeman is at the Social Movement Support Lab at the University of Denver.
I googled Academica, the Florida-based for-profit charter chain. I went to its Wikipedia page, and there were two interesting entries. One was a description of its ties (family and financial) to members of the Florida legislature. The other posed the question: Do charter schools get better academic results than public schools? The answer was “no,” and the source was the Network for Public Education.
Brava!
Hee hee!
Not possible without Diane!
Btw- I read a twitter feed where former N.Y. education officials weighed in on topics. A person whose name I didn’t recognize, without any context for it, tweeted a complaint, paraphrasing, Diane Ravitch defends public schools by invoking consciences.
It reminded me of something Mitch McConnell said, he preferred colleagues who didn’t give him sermons and just moved into bargaining.
Thank you for engaging based on right and wrong.
Well, the guy who shut down 50 public schools in one day is now ambassador to Japan, so strange things do happen.
Indeed.
Strange things? Like a failed businessman and cheating huckster who found a 2nd career playing a fake successful businessman in a fake tv show, and then becoming president of the US, with people actually defending him as he attempted to end democracy altogether?
That’s the kind of “strange” I could never have imagined, let alone have expected a person who wasn’t a fascist to defend.
I would take Caroline Kennedy or anti-public school folks like Rahm Emanuel or Lamar Alexander or Arne Duncan as a figurehead ambassador any day.
I wish Arne Duncan would go off and play ambassador in a country where people know his opinions are worthless.
^^Our country would be much better off if Trump had spent the last 5 years as Ambassador to Japan where he would be an enormous embarrassment which would shame and humiliate our country but in no way endanger our democracy or our public schools.
I wish he’d go off to another country &…play basketball!
We don’t need another Clownbassador from Chicago route.
It is not just Arne who is thinking about the run. Paul Vallas is also in the seriously thinking about it tank.
Retreads who failed big time.
Paul Vallas never goes away, either. He has been running op eds (about how bad public schools are & why there’s so much violence in Chicago but he can fix it). He was on the 10 o’clock news, shouting into a bullhorn about how our kids shouldn’t have to be wearing masks in schools. &–most ironically–he’s been on our Chicago Progressive Radio’s (Progressive Paul?!) We’d. afternoon talk show (always introduced as “our good friend, Paul Vallas”) who’s always spouting off about everything. He’s truly a jack(a$$) of all trades & master of none.
Vallas failed in Philadelphia, privatized in New Orleans, and was pushed out of Bridgeport. What most would call a downward trajectory.
I guess they won’t let him coach the Chicago Bulls, so this is his second choice.
L❤️VE this comment, Ted!
& my comment above was meant to land under NYCpsp’s comment about Arne playing ambassador.
Well, my comment about Arne, not Paul, although they’re on the same wavelength.
Many great points here and by Diane. Warning. Secretary Duncan has much higher ambitions than Mayor of Chicago. I won’t be surprised if/when he runs for Senate, and (nearly) every Senator sees a President in the mirror. Very, very frightening to see him running for anything.
I’m now seeing a former Chicago crooked mayor turning into Clownbassador since he moved to Japan — one of the key US allies in the Pacific region. He doesn’t disappoint me yet as he starts talking a lot of nonsense. Luckily, there is some good English progressive media who knows really well who Rahm dog is and communicates that to Japanese audience. The least thing I want is a Class A edu deformer zombie who may use mayoral position as a springboard to rehabilitate his career.
To be fair, has being Mayor of Chicago ever rehabilitated anyone’s career? Isn’t it basically a career-killer? I might not have agreed with Lori Lightfoot on all her positions, but she was basically a decent politician, and look at her now.
Honestly, if I didn’t know that even 4 years of Arne Duncan would do great damage to Chicago and its public schools, I would not mind him being Mayor of Chicago because it is the sure way to end his career! I just looked at the list of Chicago Mayors, and unless you plan to remain Mayor for 22 years like Daley, it seems like a career killer, not a career rehabilitation.
I know Rahm is the figurehead Ambassador to Japan, a country that has a strong tradition and doesn’t care what Rahm thinks about education or anything else. And I assume Rahm will be as influential as Caroline Kennedy was after her term as Ambassador to Japan. What’s Caroline Kennedy doing now? Does anyone care?
If only we could figure out how to make Arne Duncan a powerless Mayor for a couple years and then he could go off and have the same post-Mayoral influence as all the other Chicago Mayors — that is, no one would ever care what he said again.
Race to the Top was the plan that Bill Gates and his Foundation concocted to get states to adopt Common Core and VAM.
Arne Duncan was Bill Gates’ man at the US Department of Education to implement the plan.
A FOIA for all the correspondence between Gates/ Gates Foundation and Duncan/ DOE would illuminate the details.
Agree.
The U.S. needs laws written to prevent oligarchy.
If prosecution of Trump for existing law violations is any indicator, never mind.
Though it took several years to develop the standards, the basic plan for Common Core was announced on June 1, 2009 and Race to the Top, (which required states to adopt a set of standards) was announced a couple months later ( July 24, 2009.)
Many states agreed to adopt Common Core sight unseen to fulfill the RTTT competition requirements.
It’s no accident that Bill Gates appeared before the National Conference of State Legislators to talk about a “national state standards initiative “(sic — essentially Common Core) on July 21, 2009, just 3 days before the announcement of Race To The Top.
The timing tells you all you need to know.
They wanted to effectively coerce the states (which badly needed the money after the economic collapse of 2008) to adopt a set of standards but they didn’t want to give the states a lot of time to “shop around” because they wanted them to adopt the Gates standards (Common Core). So they made it convenient for states to put in “Common Core ” as a placeholder on the RTTT application, even though the standards themselves did not get exist.
Thanks for the history and for connecting the dots.
Ken Griffin, billionaire oligarch from Chicago, would be glad to fund what will be Arne Duncecap’s failed run for mayor, and notwithstanding the fact that America got saddled with trump, I seriously doubt that Chicago has such a short memory as to replicate that atrocity with Arne. Seems like him announcing his desire to run is consistent with the entitled cluelessness of other lapdogs to oligarchs who need to keep their name in the media in order to continue getting paid for implementing the bad ideas of their edu-hobbyist funders.
From: https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-arne-duncan-the-fallible-narrator/
“The 53-year-old Duncan has been, in my view, the most influential of the 11 Secretaries of Education since the founding of the U.S. Department of Education in 1980.
That’s not necessarily a compliment. Mr. Chips was influential. So was Walter White of Breaking Bad.”
Certainly Arne was the most influential US Secretary of Education in that he unleashed incalculable harm on public schools (by promoting charters), and on teachers (by promoting VAM and TFA), as well as his endorsing impossible goals and prattling nonsense about public schools.
Being influential need not mean anything in our society.
Some of the most influential people today are little more than con artists whose only “talent” is being able to convince a lot of ignorant people to listen to them, which really is not that difficult if you are willing to lie to people.
Reportedly, Muneer Satter (Wall Street) who usually funded Republicans, gave campaign funds to Rahm. That’s not surprising and it’s not surprising that the Satter Foundation supported charter schools.
I thought that Obama was a steadying hand that helped get us through the Great Recession, but his education policy was a disaster. Emmanuel and Duncan also put doubt on Obama’s selection of his advisors. The reality is that the Democratic establishment is full of Ivey Leaguers who attended independent schools. Their complicity with our thirty years of bias toward competitive remedy has brought the American public schools to her knees yet the national media continues to promote the ruse. After Bloomberg promoted dishonest academic results in NYC, the media continues to trumpet his harebrained contributions to charters that fail. When will we stop putting our well being in the hands of these misguided miscreants?