The Secretary of Education Deform moves on
Mark Friedman reports on the destructive legacy of Education Secretary Arne Duncan--and the equally awful resume of the man Barack Obama named to replace him.
WHEN ARNE Duncan announced that he would be stepping down as U.S. Secretary of Education this December, two words crossed the minds of thousands of supporters of public schools across the country: "good" and "riddance."
For the past seven years, Duncan has made the Obama White House the national headquarters for the movement promoting what critics refer to as "corporate school reform": a neoliberal agenda of austerity, privatization and union busting via charter schools, merit pay and tying teacher evaluations and school closures to standardized testing.
Unfortunately for the many parents, teachers and community organizations that would have liked to celebrate Arne's exit, Barack Obama quickly announced that Duncan would be replaced by John King, a former charter school director who is most famous for provoking the largest test boycott U.S. history during his time as New York state education commissioner--with his ham-fisted imposition of the Common Core curriculum and high-stakes standardized tests that go with it.
When Duncan was first appointed Secretary of Education in 2008, the national media referred to him as a "compromise choice" who could bring together teachers' unions with anti-union corporate reformers. But public education advocates in Chicago were already familiar with Duncan's record as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
"Duncan is being portrayed in the national media as a school administrator who had a 'good' relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union," wrote Jesse Sharkey, then a Chicago school teacher and now vice president of the CTU, in Socialist Worker. Sharkey continued:
The truth is quite different. Duncan pursued anti-labor policies by pushing nonunion charter and contract schools. He also imposed test-oriented, competitive schemes that force schools to close if they can't raise test scores above a certain level.Yet he failed to implement the kinds of changes that really would improve student performance--such as smaller class sizes and expanded facilities to end overcrowding. Instead, special education teachers were laid off and budgets squeezed.
As Education Secretary, Duncan took his Chicago plan to the national stage with Race to the Top, a $4.35 billion dollar federal initiative consisting of federal grants designed to make states compete with each other to push privatization efforts, wrapped up in the rhetoric of "innovation and reform."
Under Duncan's watch, the Department of Education became a "hub of a network of policy advocates," as Sherman Dorn and Amanda U. Potterton put it in a recent Huffington Post article:
These reformers have largely consisted of private actors, including leaders of education nonprofits, charter school founders and other nontraditional school leaders whose essential resources for reform come from the private wealth of major foundations, an approach that Berkeley education professor Janelle Scott has termed "venture philanthropy."
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UNDER DUNCAN'S leadership, the Obama administration has led a bipartisan push to The Secretary of Education Deform moves on | SocialistWorker.org:
