Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Credit: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post has written a sympathetic article about Arne Duncan and the waning of his powers as Secretary of Education. He is a nice guy. He is a close friend of the president. He cares about individual children that he met along the way. The pending reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act will prohibit him and future Secretaries from interfering in state decisions about standards, curriculum and assessment. His family has already moved back to Chicago. But he will stay on the job to the very end.
When Obama was elected, many educators and parents thought that Obama would bring a new vision of the federal role in education, one that freed schools from the test-and-punish mindset of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. But Arne Duncan and Barack Obama had a vision no different from George W. Bush and doubled down on the importance of testing, while encouraging privatization and undermining the teaching profession with a […]
Ravitch does not go far enough. How might we start to actually separate Academia from Plutocracy? It is delusional to think that the next U.S. President and his or her Education Secretary will be immune to the exam-factory disease. The subtle and artistic process of developing the life of the mind requires space, time, and tender care. We need to extend the umbrella of academic freedom, which protects the independent life of the mind at the university level, to protect the independent life of the mind at the Pre-K to 12 level. Is public education truly “public” when it is micromanaged by teaching-and-learning illiterate bureaucrats?