NYC Public School Parents: My memories of Arne Duncan; why he will not be missed

NYC Public School Parents: My memories of Arne Duncan; why he will not be missed:

My memories of Arne Duncan; why he will not be missed

On Friday, Arne Duncan announced he will leave his post as Secretary of the US Department of Education in December.  Here are some of my memories of his damaging involvement in the divisive politics surrounding NYC schools:

In May of 2009, he personally interceded with the Citizens Union to persuade them to endorse mayoral control without any checks and balances -- so that Bloomberg could continue to fire his appointees on the Panel for Educational Policy at will -- the opposite of what anyone concerned with good government or democracy should espouse.  The organization had previously voted to endorse fixed terms for mayoral appointees, so that the Mayor couldn't summarily dismiss board members who disagreed with him, as Bloomberg had notoriously done when they differed with his decision to hold back third graders on the basis of test scores. Duncan followed up with a letter to the Citizens Union, in which he argued that putting any limits on mayoral control could “turn back the clock and halt progress” and have “profoundly negative consequences for New York City’s students.”

As a result, the organization changed its position on this issue, and mayoral control was renewed without any amendment on the authority of one man to determine the fate of 1.1 million students without any checks and balances..  After the NY Post ran a series of articles full of illusory claims aiming to show the great improvement under mayoral control, and the governance system was maintained by the legislature, Arne Duncan praised the NY Post series as "thoughtful" and thanked the paper for its "leadership", even though these articles simply regurgitated the spurious statistics provided by the city's press office. 

GothamSchools (now Chalkbeat) ran a story examining this phenomenon, entitled the Fruitful Alliance of Arne Duncan and Rupert Murdoch, which pointed out that "New York City newspapers have a proud tradition of waging campaigns both on and off the editorial page, and then congratulating themselves when they hit their marks. But having a cabinet member for a sitting president join the cheering is more unusual." His unalloyed praise for the Mayor was subsequently plastered all over Bloomberg's copious campaign literature, which every voter received at least ten times. 

Another favorite  activity of Arne Duncan was his boosterism of charter schools.  In May 2010, I was standing outside a Brooklyn school NYC Public School Parents: My memories of Arne Duncan; why he will not be missed: