December 29, 2009 2:30PM 

# Arne Duncan’s Chicago Schools 

By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) 

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The *Washington Post* [reports](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/28/AR2009122802368.html?nav=hcmodule) 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](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/08/AR2009120801570.html) 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](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/education-secretary-duncan/why-duncans-record-in-chicago.html) 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](https://www.cato.org/2009/07/07/duncans-donut-the-ed-secs-impact-on-chicago-student-achievement-was-near-zero/) at Cato @ Liberty back in July.

##### Related Tags 

[Education](https://www.cato.org/education), [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Center for Educational Freedom](https://www.cato.org/center-educational-freedom) 

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