The Faith-Based Education Policies of @ArneDuncan
Arne Duncan is Barack Obama's worst appointment. Worse than Tim Geithner, worse than Penny Pritzker, worse than Eric Shinseki -- even worse than Rahm Emanuel (OK, maybe that's open to debate...).
The havoc Duncan has wreaked upon America's schools will likely take decades to undo:
- Duncan has created a test-obsessed education culture that has narrowed the curriculum and sucked the joy of learning out of our schools.
- Duncan has fostered an unbridled expansion of charter schools; while some may be well-run and showing marginal gains in test scores, many others have been involved in profit-seeking and corruption so egregious that they put defense contractors to shame.
- Duncan has allowed organizations like Teach For America and the Relay "Graduate" School of Education to provide substandard teacher preparation, even as he promotes the use of noisy, biased student growth measures to rate actual colleges of education.
- Duncan rewarded states that inequitably and inadequately fund their school districts, incredibly holding them up as exemplars.
- Duncan has decimated the morale of America's teaching corps, de-professionalizing teaching and contributing to an atmosphere where teachers are blamed for problems they did not create.
- Duncan has overseen the implosion of teaching as a career; universities around the country are reporting that fewer students are enrolling as education majors, even as several states report shortages of qualified teaching candidates.
- Duncan has allowed the unprecedented mining of student data, blithely ignoring parental concerns.
- Duncan's ham-fisted approach to implementing the Common Core has all but guaranteed that we will never see meaningful national standards reform in our lifetimes.
- Duncan inappropriately punished states for implementing teacher evaluation policies that experts have found to be wholly invalid.
- Duncan has watched while the systematic defunding of our nation's schools continues.
- Duncan has presided over the continuing resegregation of America's schools, offering little more than weak platitudes in response.
And, perhaps worst of all, Duncan has denigrated the real concerns of parents, teachers,