Arne Duncan in Pittsburgh, Selling Low Common Core Test Scores
On September 18, 2015, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stopped in Pittsburgh at private university, Carnegie Mellon, to promote Common Core and its tests.
During that visit, Duncan said that the signature low scores on Common Core tests did not mean that students were “less smart than they were six months ago or a year ago.”
However, two years ago, in November 2013, Duncan said some mothers were indeed realizing that their kids weren’t so smart:
It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback [toward Common Core] is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were….
Nevertheless, both in November 2013 and in September 2015, Duncan assures the public that the problem is with states’ former, “lower” standards.
Yet Duncan offers no empirical evidence to support this statement to his Carnegie Mellon audience, as reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
The secretary said children and parents “were lied to and told they were on the track to be successful” when they weren’t. He called that “one of the most insidious things that happened in education.”
And yet, Duncan’s own legacy as Chicago Public Schools CEO left test score results that show that Chicago students under him might have already been “lied to” by a Duncan who by 2009 had moved on to the White House–and to actively promotingCommon Core and its tests. As the December 2009 Washington Post reports:
Soon after Arne Duncan left his job as schools chief here to become one ofArne Duncan in Pittsburgh, Selling Low Common Core Test Scores | deutsch29:
