(3) More on the Curious Case of Arne Duncan

Arne Duncan

Salon writer Diane Ravitch:

"It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan’s policies have inflicted on public education. He exceeded the authority of his office to promote a failed agenda, one that had no evidence behind it. The next president and the next Secretary of Education will have an enormous job to do to restore our nation’s public education system from the damage done by Race to the Top. We need leadership that believes in the joy of learning and in equality of educational opportunity. We have not had either for 15 years."

Reference: Diane Ravitch’s devastating Arne Duncan critique: The education secretary earned his F.

You see, friends, education matters a lot to me. I agree with a lot of advocates that it's the royal road out of dire circumstances: poverty, crime, and violence. But if delivered incompetently or corruptly, then that very same "education" becomes a farce at best and a disaster at worst.

The following are three of the "accomplishments" in Duncan's Secretary of Education resume, which Ravitch lists:

(1) He used his control of billions of dollars to promote a dual school system of privately managed charter schools operating alongside public schools;

(2) He has done nothing to call attention to the fraud and corruption in the charter sector or to curb charters run by non-educators for profit or to insist on charter school accountability or to require charters to enroll the neediest children;

(3) He pushed to require states to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students, which has caused massive demoralization among teachers, raised the stakes attached to testing, and produced no positive results.

Very unfortunate, indeed.