Obama's Misguided Education Secretary

Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Secretary of Education has never worked in a public school! He has never been a teacher or a principal in any school. It appears the only private sector job he has ever had was to play basketball in Australia and for nine years worked as an investment broker in Chicago. He relates in “old jock” style like a “pick up” game in baskertball. I guess “life is like a box of chocolates” doesn’t work for him.

His approach to changing education is far more economic than educational. He is a free market privateer and part time “union buster”. He wants to turn all low performing schools into charter schools. Charter schools are little more than unregulated private schools run with your tax dollars. Charter schools are ripe for abuse and academically do no better on average than their neighborhood public schools. Voucher and charter schools are very popular with political right wing. Newt Gingrich loves Duncan’s educational policies. John Kline, Republican from Minnesota says of the Duncan agenda, “In many ways it’s a Republican agenda”.

Duncan has a very unique background. His father was a professor at the University of Chicago. He grew up near the university in an intellectually segregated university housing district. He attended the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School. His home had no television. His father read the classics to the family every evening while the children sat around, did their homework and listened. He had an athletic mother who was very involved in her children’s lives.

As wonderful as his childhood sounds it was about 180 degrees from mine and about 99.9% of America’s public school children, especially the minority children in low performing schools. That wonderful childhood, his elite private school and Harvard education may make him totally ignorant of the needs of America’s 45 million public school children.

Mr. Duncan is a man of little distinction and a man of many powerful connections. Working as an investment counselor he was picked by the Superintendent of Chicago’s Public Schools to be a high ranking administrator. His qualifications for this job were ZERO. Two years later he was appointed Superintendent of the third largest school district in the United States by Mayor Richard Daley. All of Duncan’s dramatic school closings and enthusiasm for opening charters had resulted in no gains”, so says Diane Ravitch, Professor ay New York University.

Steven Rivkin an economist at Amherst University worries, “Duncan may be pushing too hard for policies that haven’t been proved effective”. Mr. Dunkin’s Education agenda seems to be to close schools that serve our poverty level children and turn them into charter schools. These schools that serve our poorest children have traditionally had the lowest test scores and the highest drop out rates. There is not one scintilla of evidence that turning these schools into charters is anymore effective than the traditional school that charters replace. It is obvious to me that Diane Ravitch was right, he is a “union basher”. He wants to kill the unions, most free marketers are strongly anti union and I am afraid Mr. Duncan is no different. I suspect his anti union position comes from the fact that unions are opposed to his educational “reforms”. In his rush to implement “reforms” that have no evidence of working, some union leaders have had the guts to stand up and question what he is doing! From his right wing view point unions are standing in the way of “progress’ and “reform” and should be eliminated or dramatically weakened.

After all who should you trust? A teachers union whose policies are developed by union teachers with thousand of years of teaching experience or a guy who never attended or worked in a public school and thinks everything can be related to a “pick up” basketball game.

Duncan is incredibly unqualified to hold the position of Secretary of Education. He should go back to investing with other people’s money, playing lots of basketball and leave educational reform to those that know what they are talking about, classroom teachers.

If you want to know what’s wrong with public education ask a teacher. They will tell you what’s wrong and how to fix it. The problem is that no one ever asks. Obama has appointed a clueless inexperienced well meaning politico like Duncan to fix our schools when he doesn’t have a clue and a track record to prove it.