Arne Duncan’s Chicago Schools

The Washington Post reports on what new data reveal about the Chicago public schools run for the past seven years by Arne Duncan, now President Obama’s secretary of education:

This month, the mathematics report card was delivered: Chicago trailed several cities in performance and progress made over six years.


Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth‐​graders in the much‐​maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.

As I’ve said before, what always struck me about Obama’s appointment of Duncan to run the nation’s schools — and he is actually moving to do just that, more so than any previous federal administration — is that Arne Duncan ran the Chicago schools for seven years, and in that time he didn’t manage to produce a single school that the Obamas chose to send their own children to. Valerie Schwartz of the Post reminds us that Duncan is not the first Cabinet secretary to be appointed on the basis of great results in a previous job, that then turned out to be not so great.


Of course, you could have read much of the data about Duncan’s results right here at Cato @ Liberty back in July.