For his entire seven years as Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan repeated the mantra that American public schools were the worst ever. They were falling behind the global competition, they needed radical change, they needed privatization, they needed radical transformation. He thought that the remedies were testing, more testing, high-stakes testing, charter schools, and technology. Now he works for Laurene Powell Jobs at the Emerson Collective, where he is supposedly re-imagining the American high school, or something like that.
Having listened to his daily rants about failure for so long, it is startling to see his opinion piece in the Washington Post declaring that American schools are definitely on the right track because they have followed the advice of “reformers” like himself. He claims credit for every gain in test scores and graduation rate since 1971! Even though he was only 7 years old in 1971.
The funny thing is that I used many of the same data in my book “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, to refute the claims of Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Eli Broad, Bill Gates, and the rest of the corporate reform wrecking crew, who insisted that America’s public schools were failing and obsolete. Their favorite word was failing.
Now, Arne doesn’t admit that he was wrong, but instead he claims credit for everything good.
No mention of the D.C. graduation rate scandal or the spread of credit recovery, which enables students to take an online course for a week and get credit for a semester that they failed. No mention of cheating scandals. No mention of the 2015 flatlining of NAEP scores.
But, you see what is really happening is that all the reforms he championed have made no difference at all. They are failing. There is not a single district controlled by reformers that is a shining example of success. The shine is off New Orleans, where most of the charters are rated C, D, or F. The District of Columbia has been firmly in the grip of “reformers” and we now know that most of its claims are illusory. Rick Hess, one of the chief reformers, chastised his fellow “reformers” that they had refused to recognize the D.C. realities and spun a tale of success out of their own fantasies.
Teachers and parents hate the high-stakes testing, and school officials are bullying them into taking the mandated tests.
But go back to 1971, and it is clear that we have made great progress. It is just clear that Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, and Eli Broad had nothing to do with it.
Let’s credit the successes of our teachers and principals, our democratically controlled public schools.
The real struggle is not to double down on failed strategies but to protect our public schools from the rapacious grasp of privateers and profiteers.
