CURMUDGUCATION: Duncan Scolds Education Schools

CURMUDGUCATION: Duncan Scolds Education Schools:

Duncan Scolds Education Schools

When former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan isn't busy joining another board of some education-flavored enterprise (his latest is Revolution Foods, an over-hyped cafeteria supply company), he still finds time to offer uninformed opinions about education itself.

Pay me to have an opinion about school lunch? Retirement is awesome.

Take for instance his open letter today at Brookings, in which Duncan castigates the nation's collegiate teacher preparation programs.

He opens with his trademark blame-disguised-as-praise:

Schools of education are providing one of the most important services in America today, training our future teachers who will prepare our children to succeed in work and in life. No other responsibility is more directly linked to our future.

Really? Economic policy, business growth, policies addressing poverty, maintenance of infrastructure, global diplomacy-- nothing at all more directly influences the future of our nation than how well colleges prepare future teachers?  Okay then. Let's address the Most Critical Issue Facing Our Nation with a look at the hard facts.

Nah. On second thought, says Arne, let's just pull out a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group devoted to proving that college ed programs stink, and proving it by using the laziest research methods ever. In fact, Duncan goes back to a NCTQ report from November of 2014, the delightful "Easy A" report. I've already discussed this as the most rigor-free half-baked research to ever be taken seriously. Research so lazy that it "evaluated" non-existent programs. Research so lazy that it literally consisted of reading commencement programs and course catalogs.

Duncan also cites the Deans for Impact, a group that includes Mayme Hostetter, a "dean" of theRelay Graduate [sic] School [sic] of Education [sic], the group created by charter operators as a way CURMUDGUCATION: Duncan Scolds Education Schools:

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