WHY LIBERALS HATE ARNE DUNCAN
A few weeks ago I was asked to be interviewed by a friend who was going to write an article about Arne Duncan in a major online news site.
I never had the chance to be interviewed because, as she told me, “It was pulled.” I am sure there are several possibilities as to why but when you see the proposed title, “WHY LIBERALS HATE ARNE DUNCAN”, you may draw your own conclusions.
Not knowing that the article was to be pulled, I decided the best way to answer this was to poll liberals I knew who would be willing to share their thoughts. What appears below is a list of reasons we all shared.
The biggest issue was this:
Bush’s non-policy was less destructive to education in the United States than Duncan’s Race To The Top which used the promise of federal money to force states to adopt a high-stakes “Common Core” aligned testing regime based on ill-defined academic goals that includes the repeated testing of both students and teachers and the transformation of many schools into test prep academies.
Arne’s background:
Arne directed the Ariel Education Initiative, an arm of Ariel Investments “designed to bring educational opportunity to students in disadvantaged communities. Today, AEI’s primary focus is Ariel Community Academy and its investment curriculum. This curriculum is sponsored by Ariel Investments and Nuveen Investments, Inc.”—From the Ariel Investments Web page
He Headed the Chicago public schools magnet school program and served as the deputy chief of staff of the system. Then ran Chicago’s Public Schools based on his experiences and influences. (See above) Ultimately that is the issue.
As Secretary of Education:
Duncan’s Race to the Top requires schools to compete for funds, when in fact we should make a priority of fully funding all of our schools and providing the resources needed for all of our public schools to thrive, not compete.
The $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition (that I have heard state legislators call a bribe) made adoption of “common standards” an incentive to win federal funding that would go along with that waiver. The problem was and is that The RTTT carrot is poisoned with common standards, more and newer tests and is actually, as Diane Ravitch has repeatedly said, NCLB 2.0.
All adopting states had to:
1.Adopt international benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college andWHY LIBERALS HATE ARNE DUNCAN | DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing: