I kind of miss Arne Duncan. I miss reading the goofy things he said when he was Secretary of Education. Miguel Cardona doesn’t say anything so I can’t see what he is thinking. I seem to recall running contests for Arne’s funniest line. Some people liked his claim that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans (because it wiped out the NOLA public schools and enabled “reformers” to turn NOLA into an all-charter district.) My favorite happened when he visited a second grade classroom in NYC and said that he wanted to be able to look into their eyes and know that they were college-bound. Others preferred his statement that parents didn’t like standardized testing because they didn’t want to know how far behind their kids are. There were so many great choices.
Just recently, Arne added a new one, when he was interviewed by Rick Hess of the conservative American Enterprise Institute:
Hess: I’m curious if there’s a time or issue during your tenure as secretary where you wish you could’ve had a do-over?
Duncan: I think the teacher-evaluation issue was one that I had hoped we could make more progress on, but teachers just felt beaten up over it. We had the union leaders on board, but they couldn’t convince their members that this would help them and strengthen their profession.
Gosh! Teachers could not be convinced to support value-added evaluation. Could it have been because this tactic failed to achieve its goals but demoralized teachers? Because the American Association of Statisticians said that the approach was inherently flawed because home effects are far more powerful than teacher effects? Because research funded by the Gates Foundation discovered no academic gains when VAM was implemented but teacher demoralization and teacher exodus increased? Because VAM was successful nowhere?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Duncan and his ilk never let evidence get in the way of the grip of ideology on their prescriptions for education.
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I have so much respect for Barack Obama, but how did he go so wrong with this choice?
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Friendship, I suppose. Or their shared belief that teaching is like basketball. Scoring points matters most.
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Because they had the same outlook on education reform.
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Sadly, yes. Obama and Duncan held the same ideas about “fixing” schools by closing them.
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Obama didn’t have any interest in education reform, in my opinion. He was deeply incurious about the ins and outs. I don’t really blame him, because lots of Democrats and progressives, including folks like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders (who supported “good public charters”) had very little interest in K-12 education. Neither does Biden.
Very few prominent Dems bothered to inform themselves, even if they supported teachers’ unions, which is why they were lousy defenders of public education.
One reason that the 2016 election saddened me so much is that “she who must not be named” was the first Dem presidential candidate who showed me that they got it. I still voted for Bernie in the primary, because I was willing to give up having someone who was well-informed about public education for other issues. But in the general election, I was very excited to think that we might finally have someone who knew what they are talking about. I didn’t mind if she who must not be named agreed 100% with me about public education — I cared that she understood the issue and developed policies from reality, not from lies (she is still the sole national Democrat who has put her finger on the big lie of charters – that they don’t “save” children from failing public schools, but instead force children they can’t cheaply and easily teach back to public schools.)
Jamaal Bowman and Bill DeBlasio were also knowledgeable and paid a political price, but DeBlasio did many good things that go unrecognized by people who aren’t parents in public schools (and as much as I respect Leonie Haimson, she made good criticisms but ALSO seemed almost intentionally blind to the good changes that were happening under DeBlasio, some of which were reversed under Adams.)
If the issues involving public education aren’t discussed and addressed from a position of honesty, then the fixes do little good and much harm.
Arne Duncan was terrible. And incurious and ignorant, and there is no excuse for that ignorance when your JOB is Sec’y of Education and you believe you are already too knowledgeable to bother with listening to people who aren’t going to help your career because they are rich and powerful.
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Obama bailed out the banks but not the homeowners. He could have easily structured this so that the payments went through the homeowners to the banks and the homeowners thus held onto their homes. He didn’t.
He filled his cabinet with people from Wall Street.
He adopted a Republican health care plan–Romneycare–instead of fighting the good fight for universal coverage.
He continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exactly as Bush, Jr., had been conducting them, but with ramped-up use of drones.
He expanded surveillance of U.S. citizens.
He appointed as his Secretary of Commerce a rich donor who had gifted him a vacation home.
Via his quantitative easing program, he oversaw the largest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the very wealthy in all of history.
He was not a progressive, but he played one on TV.
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He ordered the killing of two American citizens without any judicial proceedings whatsoever other than the two were supposedly “bad” Americans.
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You are right about the lack of judicial proceedings, and the immorality of ex-judicial targeted killings, but it seems misleading to say “other than the two were supposedly “bad” Americans.”
“Supposedly bad” Americans?
Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen who had been working out of Yemin for years, and was an important purveyor of English-language terrorist recruitment propaganda. His youtube videos advocating for killing Americans on religious grounds were pretty “bad”.
I still agree with your main point, but it’s not as if there was any question about what Anwar Al-Awlaki was advocating for.
I don’t know how I’d feel if there was a white supremacist group based in Russia that had recruited a charismatic American citizen to post hundreds of youtube videos that were propaganda directed to white American males to launch terrorist attacks on Black Americans, and there were white males being radicalized by this propaganda to commit terrorist actions against Black Americans as their patriotic duty. I’d probably understand that an American president might feel pressure to stop that American who was advocating for violent attacks from the safety of another country where the white supremacist group launching worldwide attacks on non-whites was based.
I agree with your main point that it is wrong, but at least it’s fair to point out that there is no question that he was preaching for violent actions on religious grounds, part of a terrorist group, and protected by them in another country and advocating for the murder of Americans. This wasn’t just some random person who was “supposedly bad”. He wasn’t some random hate-filled supremacist that no one listened to.
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The systemic problem with the mortgage crisis wasn’t just that people couldn’t pay their sh!tty mortgages—it was that the synthetic products based on those sh!tty mortgages collapsed, triggering a bunch of acceleration clauses that had a chain reaction that threatened the banking system. Some of the world’s largest financial institutions went bust practically overnight and the contagion risk was real. Moral hazard is real but it’s a good thing, not a bad thing, that the federal government was there to intervene, IMHO.
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The insurance on the default (the credit default swap) could have been untriggered by having all those mortgages retroactively made whole by the government via payments through the homeowners so that they stayed in their houses instead of the banks foreclosing on them AND being bailed out by the feds.
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I don’t think it was that simple. Also this stuff was moving at a thousand miles an hour and couldn’t have waited for what (sadly) would have been a highly litigated plan to cancel mortgages.
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Interesting to hear that union leaders were on board with this. I had the impression they were forced to go along, just like administrators. Teachers (and ultimately, students) sold out by people who should have protected them.
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Ah, yes, so many people were hoodwinked who should have known better. Eg, Bill Gates, who poured many millions into VAM. It always failed.
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The union leaders were too busy kissing Duncan’s arse to listen to the teachers.
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Exactly so. It was a shameful and shocking episode.
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They were too busy cashing the checks from Billy Boy Gates
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I remember Arne Duncan, too.
Who’s the Bigger Data Fool?
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Haaaa. And both did enormous damage.
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Arne Duncan has NO CLUE about teaching and learning.
One of Obama’s biggest mistake is appointing Duncan.
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I served as an alternate to the NEA as president of the Association of Teacher Educators (2011-2012) during negotiated rule making with Arne Duncan’s Department of Education. As you describe, value added teacher evaluation was a hot item for the agenda. Teacher educators were left to respond to teachers who sang the praises of its utility while we argued against its validity. It was three days of assault on teacher education. I never had much respect for Arne Duncan as a Secretary of Education and I had even less after three days of disingenuous discussion. It left me wondering whether anyone really cares about quality educator preparation.
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Jim,
Arne was an enthusiastic believer in TFA. They don’t believe in teacher education.
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I was just naive enough to believe that we would have an actual conversation rather than a diatribe about teacher education. I found out that I had to defend my values against an intentional assault, a setup, rather than something purposeful. TFA was definitely Arne’s thing.
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“. . . while we argued against its validity.”
Or Wilson would point out the many invalidities involved in the standards and testing malpractice regime.
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Absolutely true. Standardized testing is just big business.
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Gosh, Arne! Do you also wonder why the human sacrifices of the Aztecs made them enemies? Why Stalin’s starvation of Ukrainians is still recalled?
Duncan’s answer suggests that he still believes it was a good idea. Ego involved , Arne?
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Duncan is an impractical dilettante. He talks about education, but he really does not understand it, not public education anyway. Reading the interview, I find him to be lacking in taking any responsibility for imposing test and punish syndrome on public schools as well as the capricious teacher evaluation process known as VAM that are all connected with firing teachers and shuttering schools. He bears no responsibility for the standardized curriculum that has replaced a more thoughtful, teacher led education that existed prior to deform in public schools. He acts like a casual observer on the undermining of public schools instead of one the chief architects of it. Now that enrollment has dropped, he concludes that parents must be disillusioned by the schools. He is an ignorant fool! Twenty-five years of unrelenting BS privatization has led to vouchers and all the fake, politicized culture war nonsense that he describes as a distraction. Duncan, Emanuel and Obama played big role in setting the stage for the right wing extremists to pick up the clubs that neoliberal Democrats used to beat up the public schools, teachers and students with and take it a step further.
Duncan is still in search of his illusive rigor. May he wander in the wilderness in search of it! Maybe he’ll find a conscience there.
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“We had the union leaders on board“
To the eternal shame of the leaders of those unions.
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I’m sorry, but anyone who was not bright enough to figure out that Common Core was a POS when it was foisted upon our country by Gates should not have been in a position of power and authority in U.S. education.
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I was amazed that my sister (an older teacher) was all on board for CC. She was sold on the notion that a kid could easily move from state to state and still stay on a curriculum track with no learning loss and that edtech was the wave of the future. Boy did she learn the hard way!….and she had to retire to avoid being VAM’d. Her first clue was when her state/district took on PARCC, SBAC and MAP and all she did was test prep and proctor for pre-testing and testing. When her students with IEP’s couldn’t pass the tests….her evaluations started trending down……HMMMM. Such a shame that she fell for the garbage because she was an outstanding and well loved teacher.
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We lost a lot of good teachers from VAM and deform, but Arne’s not losing any sleep over it.
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When I think of “the wisdom of Arne Duncan,” I imagine one of those blank notebooks.
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ha ha! So true!
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Duncan is a moron. He’s not even a slow learner. He’s no learner at all. He has no clue how counterproductive everything he did was, how much damage he did. The word “idiot” comes from the Greek idios, meaning “one’s own” or “pertaining to the self.” An idiot is one who cannot see and understand anything beyond his own nose.
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But Duncan was just Gates’s dog–Gates, another exemplary idiot.
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He’s as clueless as JD Vance.
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Arne was enamored with Gates and all of his “altruistic” endeavors (HAHAHAHA!). But back then, everyone was loving on Gates and the Zucker-borg. Arne was a sucker and a toadie…..and he made a lot of money by being a suck up. Nobody takes Arne seriously anymore….he’s like a cartoon character.
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I was part of a VAM study group in Charlotte as district leaders tried to impose the program on principals. When I told leadership that my evaluation was not a motivating factor for my work, they replied that research backed my perspective. Then they tried to find a way to use VAM on principals anyway. The entire Obama administration was tone deaf when it came to public schools. Primarily because they came from private schools where they would not dare attempt such hare brained schemes. No clue about the mission or culture of public schools.
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Duncan seems not to understand the fact that public education is an essential pillar of democracy, and it is a public responsibility. It was never intended to be part of a market based system.
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Did Duncan attend public school at any level? Did he ever teach? I remember him with displeasure, but don’t recall anything about his personal background.
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Retired: I remain shocked at how many people in democratic government, including Obama, have no clue about its intimate relationship PUBLIC education.
Without it, the institution of “education” becomes the new playground for every ideologue on the planet.
First, however, they want to capitalize on it, slipping in privatization and salespeople for every money-making scheme anyone can think of in between government and the people; then the idealogues, racists, political and religious propagandists get hold of it claiming under the “market-based system” that public education is not competitively fair, and power-grabbing curriculum, . . . then the neighborhood idea crumbles away under everyone’s feet while some parents “home school” and take their kids to Disneyland on their voucher money.
On the other hand, there’s Walz. CBK
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It’s amazing how many intelligent Democrats fell for market based baloney. Now they see how reckless their complicity was in the form of universal vouchers that have the potential to dismantle public education in some states.
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I found nothing funny about Duncan…still don’t. He’s one of The Despicables…and Obama is to blame for what Duncan did because Obama was in thrall to the DFER oligarchs who funded his campaigns for the Senate and the White House. Obama sold out public schools and public school teachers to finance his career.
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The truth! Facts matter.
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So many people were hoodwinked who should have known better. Defining the appointed dictators doesn’t undermine their power to dictate policies. Sticks and stones may break the bones, but name calling will never undermine the powers of the appointed dictators of policies…
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NoBrick: Yes, the appointed dictators can just shut up and let the wave pass, until people get back to their distractions . . . like work, . . . sort of like the Gun Lobby. “We’re so sorry your child was shot to death, let us pray.”
Then Mother Time and the status quo take back over. CBK
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It’s amazing that after all these years later, Arne Duncan still garners a lot of anger on this blog! Not one good thing has ever been said about this dope! It must be a slow time for anyone to give any air time to Arne.
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I miss Arne Duncan
like a tiny pointed pebble
lodged in my wet hiking boots
and I have no place to sit down
to remove it.
H.Hurley
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Exactly!!!! HAAA!!!!!
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Best poem I’ve heard in a while. Sounds like Bashō. Thank you.
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Agreed! HAAA!!!! It was wonderful.
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H.A. Hurley: Similarly, Arne is like the shattered glass of grief that a tender writer wrote about upon losing his beloved mother in an online psychology magazine last week. You think you’re done cleaning it up and then you find you have stepped on a little invisible shard, start bleeding again, and have a devil of a time getting it out. CBK
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I miss Arne Duncan
like a sharp pointy pebble
lodged in my wet hiking boots
and have no place to sit down to remove it.
HHurley
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Haha!
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Exactly right, quikwrit.
l’ll write more later because l’m out the door, but there is, unfortunately, more to the Dumbkin story…it goes on & on.
Would you believe some of these fools in Chicago were urging him to run for mayor? (He would have fallen in the same way Vallas did against Mayor Johnson, because the CTU was heavily GOTV, knocking on doors, making calls, doing what you’re supposed to do to have a winner.)
As l said, more later…
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Just the fact that Blarney Duncan would sit in an interview with Rick Hess* pretty much sums it up. . . and not in a good way.
During the lunch break I spoke with Hess at a Show-Me Institute conference in KC a few years back. A nice enough dude but he knows who butters his bread.
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AEI education program is funded in part by Betsy DeVos.
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Diane, Devos, huh. Well, that’s all I need to know. CBK
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Bennet, Duncan, DeVos
The rule seems to be, let us find the person who will be most destructive to teaching and learning in the U.S. and make him or her Secretary of Education.
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Bob: . . . sort of like Trump and the presidency . . . find the worst possible scenario for leadership and put him on the ticket. CBK
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Lisa M.: “Nobody takes Arnie seriously anymore…” Unfortunately, LOTS of people take him “seriously” in Chicago: l just wrote that some people wanted him to run for mayor; l’m thinking the only reason he didn’t was because his good buddy, Paul Vallas (another fine one-NOT) was running. He “started” an organization named “Cred,” which works w/incarcerated youth (& WHO put them there, A.D?!), &, infrequently, there are pictures of him visiting prisons or pictures of him w/his arm around a young man or articles about the good Cred is doing (you know, scholarships & the like) led by A.D. A few years ago he was on the cover of the widely read Chicago Magazine, & the title, l think, read, “Can Arne Duncan Save Chicago?”–whatever, it was a nauseating puff piece. My guess is that he’s involved in this work to assuage his guilty conscience (so he gets to sleep at night); surely, it was his lousy policymaking as head of CPS causing all of this in the first place. I blame Dumbkin & Rahm (for closing 50+ schools) for most–if not all–of these incarcerations & the massive gun violence/gangbanging here (& the CTU warned that the result would be increased disenfranchisement leading to chaos & death but, as usual, were ignored; remember Rahm telling the late, great Karen Lewis to “f**k” herself?). The incessant, meaningless testing (A.D. policy) taking REAL education away, misspending precious $$$$ (Pearson had the no-bid test monopoly from IL) that could have been spent on social workers, psychologists, librarians, more (& REAL, not TFA!) teachers; IOW: REAL education. & Obama, in all his wisdumb, appointed Dumbkin, so N.C.L.B. on steroids goes nationwide! (As one of my teacher friends used to say, “Smooth move, Ex-Lax!”)
A.D. works for the Emerson Collective (yeah-Laurene Powell Jobs), has an office on tony Michigan Ave., downtown Chicago, & a $$$$ home (it was described in a Chgo.Trib. article “Elite Street”) near the Obamas’ mini-mansion (one of their multiple homes, it’s empty, mostly–hmm..wonder how many refugee families could live there?). So Cred is well underwritten, but the tragedy is that the reason it exists (& that A.D. has such a cushy job) is because the lives of youth–& their families–were needlessly, viciously & stupidly destroyed. & it continues to this day.
& by Arne & his ilk.
So, yes, Diane, keep posting about Arne, & every stupid “idea” he spews as long as you keep blogging. Unfortunately, people DO take him seriously (whenever there is some highly charged situation, A.D./Cred is almost always there, & is reported on; A.D. infrequently writes editorials, often w/people who are actually highly respected violence interrupters/community leaders) &, as such, he continues to be almost as much a threat as, well, it45.
& thanks, Diane, for this post.
.
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I think this comment by Arne demonstrates that Arne has learned nothing since the collapse of race to the Top. $5 billion wasted, but it did a lot of damage.
I have seen Arne on national TV, where he is presented as an expert. The reality is that his 7 years in DC were a disaster.
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Obama, Duncan and Rahm Emanuel – Chicago Boys, just like the Milton Friedman OG Chicago Boys. They know nothing, but never let that deter them from making their appointed rounds.
I miss Arne like I miss the frequent migraine headaches I used to have – not at all
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Because Obama’s evil Department of Edu-Duncan-Dictatorship essentially blackmailed America during the Great Recession, my students and I are still suffering the effects to this day. States and districts desperate to survive were nearly forced to adopt the troubled idea of using test scores to cull the teaching profession Because my great teachers union fought back against Duncan (and Deasy), at least the test scores were prevented from becoming part of my evaluation. UTLA under President Alex Caputo-Pearl was magnificent. I can’t say as much for NEA or AFT.
My evaluation, however, still became an online thing involving data. As a result, this year, I will spend about six hours filling out online red tape that doesn’t improve my performance one iota, my site administrator will spend about the same amount of time just on me, looking at the mini essays I have to write about data, and my students will have their education disrupted for an hour while I teach a disjointed lesson that had to be planned months in advance for the observation instead of learning with the flow of my curriculum at the pace that works best for them. In the good old days, none of us were under constant surveillance. We were able to adapt to student needs and educate.
Arne Duncan is a fool and a huckster. And by the way, Rick Hess is no magnate of intellect or integrity either.
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How sad! What a way to kill the joy of teaching and learning. Administrators used to say data must inform instruction. Now they use it to stifle instruction.
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What happens if my students get really high test scores? Do they get a trophy or something? A smiley face sticker? Anything?
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It means you cheated.
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Comment of the day.
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One more thing. This subject reminds me of the admiration I will always have for CTU President Karen Lewis.
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Amen, leftcoast, amen. (BTW, l always ♥️ your comments.)
Karen Lewis: of Blessed Memory. You are sorely missed.
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Yes.
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Bob Shepherd: Evaluation Session Stream of Consciousness Rant | Diane Ravitch’s blog
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In Tennessee, principals and evaluators were pressured to make their evaluations line up with test scores. When I pointed this out to my principals in an evaluation conference once, they were quite exercised.
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He was an arrogant man who apparently still can’t admit that his plan was, as my kids say, an epic fail.
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LL: He still IS an arrogant man!
Oh, no, wait…he is truly humbled by all those incarcerated juveniles & is desperately trying to help them while, also, stopping all the youth violence in Chicago.
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Duncan’s experience in education came from tutoring kids at his mother’s South Side after-school program. Arne, meanwhile, like Obama, attended private schools – The U of Chicago’s Lab School for Duncan and the Punahou School for O. So neither had any first hand experience in public K-12 education.
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