Tag: Arne Duncan

Parents Fact Check Ed. Secretary. MSM AWOL

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Caroline Grannan, erstwhile editor at the San Jose Mercury News, just posted a fact check of a recent speech by Ed. Secretary Arne Duncan. The fact checking was actually done by Chicago watchdog group Parents United for Responsible Education, and Grannan laments her former media colleagues’ “unwillingness to question claims like Duncan’s.” You and me both, Ms. Grannan.

According to PURE, Duncan claimed that a startling turnaround at one Chicago public school was achieved after its original students returned following a major restructuring. Citing Chicago Public Schools’ own data, PURE claims only 12 of the original students actually returned (more details in an earlier letter cited here).

That’s an interesting model for school improvement… ditch the low performing kids.

Not sure that could be brought to scale.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Do I Agree with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan?

By
Adam B. Schaeffer

Well, sort of. From today’s USA Today:

Duncan recently acknowledged D.C.’s woes, calling its public schools “a national disgrace.” But he added: “We have to be much more ambitious for ourselves and have higher expectations — we have to help every child in D.C. The answer is not vouchers for a few. It’s massive change, massive reform for all, absolutely as quickly as possible.”

Yes! They are a disgrace, and we do need quick, massive change from the current government-run system!

So Secretary of Education Arne Duncan supports broad-based education tax credits or a massive expansion of the DC voucher program, right? What radical change! He is the heroic reformer everyone says he is!

Oh … wait … by “massive reform for all, absolutely as quickly as possible,” he means another pipe-dream 5-year plan to brow-beat a huge, unwieldy, and ossified government school bureaucracy into thriving mediocrity while killing a voucher program that actually brings immediate improvements to the more than 1,700 students who won the lottery for educational opportunity in the District.

Way to set your ambitions so high, Arne!

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

The Best Defense against National Standards? Hearing about National Standards

By
Neal McCluskey

I’ll admit it: When I go to an event intended to tout an idea I think is wrong, I get a little nervous. What if I hear an argument that’s so convincing it forces me to totally reevaluate my position? All my work will have been for naught! Well, I had just such worries as I headed toward the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s “International Evidence about National Standards” conference yesterday.

I needn’t have worried. What I heard made me even more certain that imposing national academic standards – whether through state compacts, or worse, “incentivized” with federal dollars – is doomed to failure, just as I have been saying for years.

First, there’s likely political failure. Yes, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other high-profile education folks have recently been talking about the need for common standards – or at least the folly of having 50 different state standards – and many people think national standards would be great. But though people may love the idea of national standards, when it comes to actually creating and implementing them, love quickly turns to anger.

The second panel of the day, featuring Dane Linn of the National Governors Association and Gene Wilhoit of the Council of Chief State School Officers – whose organizations are working together to create national standards – made this abundantly clear. While people at the conference might have agreed that national standards are peachy in theory, they couldn’t agree at all on who should write them. Indeed, they couldn’t even agree on their general shape: While Linn and Wilhoit stressed the need for higher and narrower standards, the Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli, who moderated the panel, said that his group, the conference convener, could very well find itself opposing narrow standards that include too little.

If you can’t get people who really believe that we need national standards to agree on even their basic shape, why would anyone think that they could get a majority of Americans to agree on a single standard?

Of course, this was a conference supposedly about the international evidence concerning national standards. Even though the domestic political outlook for national standards appears poor, surely the evidence from abroad would conclusively demonstrate the need for national standards.

Hardly. If anything, the international evidence panel was the least persuasive part of the conference.

The hub of the panel was Michigan State University professor William Schmidt, who argued energetically against the illogical, weak standards of most American states – certainly a valid point. But he offered no compelling reasoning or evidence whatsoever to suggest that national standards would be any better than state standards. Indeed, moderator Ben Wildavsky knocked out Schmidt’s entire argument with just two punches, asking if there is empirical evidence that national standards produce better outcomes, and why Canada – which doesn’t have national standards – does very well on international comparisons. Schmidt’s answers: Almost every country participating in international exams has national standards, so it’s impossible to credit those standards with either good or bad outcomes, and Canadian provinces are kind of like countries.

If that’s the best evidence one can muster for national standards – essentially, no evidence – then there is absolutely zero good reason to support national standards.

Unfortunately, that really does seem to be all the evidence. At least, it’s all that was brought out yesterday. Which is why, though the conference didn’t force me to change my views, it did make me reach some very disheartening conclusions. Primarily, that many people support national standards simply because they are easier to conceptualize than multiple standards, and because they think that they – not people they dislike – will get to write the new, inescapable, standards for all.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Arne Comes Through…in a Bad Way

By
Neal McCluskey

Yesterday, I had an op-ed go up on Townhall.com summarizing what I think of President Obama’s first 100 days when it comes to education. Long story short: Lots of nice-sounding rhetoric, but the opposite of real reform.

Today, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan – who has embodied the administration’s all-talk, awful-action approach to education – did me a real solid by penning an op-ed for CNN.com beautifully illustrating exactly what I wrote.  Whether it’s his effusive praise of his boss for shoveling tons of federal dough into already obese schools, or his empty, jargon-soaked rhetoric about change – “These discretionary funds are a carrot for educators who will break the mold, scale up successful programs and transform whole school systems” – Duncan really drives home my point.

And so, thanks for coming through for me, Arne! Now, about those DC voucher kids…

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Rare Duncan-Free Friday

By
Neal McCluskey

As readers of this blog, and other fine blogs, have no doubt noticed over the last few weeks, Fridays have been kind of popular with the Obama administration for quietly doing questionable education stuff. Well somehow we’ve gotten through this Friday (as far as we know) without Obama and company trying to slip anything past us, leaving us with nothing new to add to recent posts like this one, and this one, and this one.

Look at this as a blessing, and a chance to catch up on all the recent federal edu-action by checking out today’s Cato Daily Podcast featuring yours truly. I give a quick summary of what the Obama administration has promised and done to date, and a prediction of what it will — and won’t — do when edu-push finally comes to edu-shove. It’s a perfect bit of listening for a surprisingly uneventful Friday afternoon.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Duncan: “I’m a big fan of choice and competition”

By
Neal McCluskey

How does U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan live with what must be some of the most painful cognitive dissonance in the history of mankind? I mean how, fresh off of doing all he could to make even more untimely the untimely death of the D.C. voucher program – and opposing private school choice generally – could Duncan say this in a new Time interview:

I’m a big fan of choice and competition, and in our country, historically, wealthy families have had a lot of options as to where to send their children. And families that didn’t come from a lot of money had one option — and usually that option wasn’t a good one. The more options available, the more we give parents a chance to figure out what the best learning environment is for their child.

How could Duncan say all this great stuff about competition and maximizing choice right after what he’s done to private school choice – which maximizes options for the very poor who have typically had none – in the nation’s capital? It is simply impossible to reconcile the words and actions.

Unless, that is, the words don’t really mean what the words, to a normal person, really mean. And to Duncan – like lots of political creatures – they don’t. He offered those gushing words of love for choice and competition in response to a question about charter schools, and in continuing to answer the question went right into this:

To me it’s not about letting a thousand flowers bloom. You need to have a really high bar about whom you let open the charter school. [You need] a really rigorous front-end competitive process. If not, you just get mediocrity. Once you let them in, you need to have two things. You need to give those charter operators great autonomy — to really free them from the education bureaucracy. You have to couple that with very strong accountability.

And finally, it is clear how Duncan twistedly reconciles both killing school choice and competition, and loving school choice and competition: It is all about who is doing the choosing. If schools and potential schools have to compete for the approval of government – of the same smarter-than-thou, bureaucratic apparatchiks who have given us atrocious public schools for decades – then that’s competition Duncan can embrace. But compete based on the approval and demands of the people the schools are actually supposed to serve, the people most interested in schools performing to high standards? In other words, compete for the approval and business of parents, especially without the choices first being fully vetted and approved by parents’ government betters? Well, that just shouldn’t be any choice at all!

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

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