#AskArne? We’d rather see for ourselves.
Yesterday, the US Department of Education posted a video with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that supposedly answers questions about the role of corporate funds and interests in education. Though we’d like to take what Secretary Duncan says at face value, our experiences over the course of his years in office demonstrate that we can’t.Instead of offering a change from the top-down, test-and-punish policies of the Bush Administration, Secretary Duncan and his team have continued and extended them. So while he may ‘listen to everyone’ as he says in his video, his policy choices suggest that he only acts on what he hears from certain people.
When he insults teachers one day, then meets with Pearson executives the next, who should we believe holds more influence with him, the teachers or the testing company?
When he dismisses concerned community activists as “armchair pundits” who “manufacture drama”, and writes off parents because he believes they’re just “White suburban moms who’ve discovered their kids aren’t as brilliant as they thought,” why would we believe that he is seriously considering our concerns? Especially when many of those concerns are about the very corporate interest groups who are so well-represented among the Department’s leadership?
We have seen time and again that there is a huge gap between the Department’s rhetoric and our reality. We’ve heard the talking points before, and they ring increasingly hollow as the years pass.
That’s why we look forward to examining the communications we’ve asked for in our FOIA request. We know better than to take Secretary Duncan’s words at face value. We’d rather see what’s been going on for
