Arne Duncan Makes Me Want To Punch Myself In The Brain
Arne Duncan still has a gift. I'm not talking about his ability to continually get bookings as an education, though that certainly counts as a gift in the sense that he has done nothing to earn it. No, I'm talking about his preternatural ability to raise my blood pressure.
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| He still hasn't gone away. |
Arne Duncan, managing partner at Emerson Collective and former U.S. secretary of education, pointed out that students from wealthy families who score low on college readiness exams still have a better chance of graduating college than high-scoring students from lower-income families.
Well, duh. You might imagine that the very next sentence would be something like, "That's one more piece of proof that my policy of basing all district, school, and teacher accountability on scores from standardized tests based on allegedly college and career ready standards was a bunch of bunk, completely misguided, and a huge mistake that I now deeply regret." Ha, just kidding. Nobody familiar with Duncan would imagine that because another of Duncan's gift was a complete disconnect between the words that came out of his mouth and the policies that came out of his office. Duncan could-- and did-- wax rhapsodic about the importance of caring teachers building relationships with students in making a difference, and then go right back to demanding that those teachers be judged on their standardized test scores. He could talk about the importance of CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Arne Duncan Makes Me Want To Punch Myself In The Brain
It’s taken years of concerted effort but, at long last, Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers can finally claim victory: Teachers in Michigan are now paid less today in both real and corrected-for-inflations dollars. In 2009, the average teacher salary in our state was $63,025. In 2017, the most recent year for which we have data, the average was only $61,908. Adjusted for inflation, that’s 
