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Arne Duncan, Obama’s Education Secretary, announces he’s stepping
down after seven years/Photo: Andrew Harnik |
Duncan’s announcement came only days after a glowing profile in Politico described Duncan’s undersecretary getting choked with emotion and crying when he talked about how Duncan was “fighting for students.” The article also noted that Duncan left “an unprecedented national stamp on a policy area with a long and strong tradition of local control.”
Pundits who favor a Washington-top-heavy bureaucracy give Duncan high
marks, while opponents, especially Common Core opponents, like “white suburban moms,” whose children Duncan
claimed weren’t as “brilliant as they thought they were” (because they were
confused by the confusing Common Core standards and tests), see more of the
same in his replacement for interim secretary: John King, former education
commissioner of New York State, and the target of parents’ and the state
teachers union’s calls for resignation because of his disastrous implementation
of Common Core. After an astounding 20 percent of eligible students
sat-out the Common Core tests, and scores dropped precipitously for those
students who did take them, the state decided to shorten the test.
But another “educator,” radical jester/retired education professor from
the Chicago gang, Bill Ayers, announced his availability with a tweet. Some may recall that at the beginning of
Obama’s first term Ayers forwarded the name of Linda Darling-Hammond for
Education Secretary. She is as radical as Ayers when it comes to education
policy but has the advantage of not having set any actual bombs. She was put in
charge of designing one of the two national tests, with questions intended to
go along with the new emphasis on “non-cognitive skills,” or correct attitudes.
But Arne Duncan was “pals” with Bill Ayers back when Duncan was superintendant
of Chicago schools and Ayers was teaching future teachers about “a curriculum of questioning” or overseeing
dissertations on “nappy roots” hair at the University of Illinois
at Chicago. Ayers collaborated with Obama and Duncan and doled out millions of
dollars intended for education reform through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to ACORN-aligned
educational activities. Bill Ayers rails on today about excessive testing and
corporate control in education, but that did not stop him from participating in
a Department of Education conference in 2009 alongside a representative from the
company that wrote the Common Core standards.
Of course, Obama was too politically savvy to openly follow Ayers’s
suggestion, so he chose a pro-basketball player with a bachelor’s degree in
sociology to head up the Department of Education. Politico is typical in
touting Duncan’s athletic qualifications more than his academic ones. That’s
for good reason. Like the “architect” of the Common Core, David Coleman, Duncan
has no classroom teaching experience. He has written no books or academic
papers. He volunteered in his mother’s after-school program for inner-city
children in Chicago, but attended the private Chicago Lab School, which his own
children will go to. (Incoming Education Secretary King’s children also attend
private schools.)
Duncan’s career as an educrat began when he
hooked up with a friend from school days, investment banker John W. Rogers, a basketball-playing pal of
Michelle Obama’s brother. After playing professional basketball in Australia
after college, Duncan was appointed by Rogers to direct a nonprofit foundation
for mentoring children. According to his government
website profile, Duncan then became “part of a team” that later started “a new
public elementary school built around financial literacy.”
Duncan comes from Chicago’s elite but wrote his senior thesis at Harvard
on Chicago’s urban underclass. He parlayed that concern to
government practice. As Chicago superintendent his main objective was to
increase the scope of schools, to make them round-the-clock “community centers”
offering homework help, health care, and three squares a day. This has also
been his objective at the federal level. This is how a once “quiet outpost in the power landscape of
Washington, D.C.” acquires power. Under Duncan’s tenure, the Department of
Education has been busy, indeed, sending out notices to parents on everything
from summer meal programs to “Dad Talk” to advice on bullying. There has been an aggressive push for
“parental engagement” even a “parent camp” at the capital. (As I pointed out, “parental engagement” is a ruse for getting
parents on board the feds’ programs.) Duncan even floated the idea of
government-run boarding schools.
Duncan has expanded the political reach of the Department as he weighed in on the so-called “school-to-prison
pipeline,” gun control (at opportune times after school shootings), and financial aid for illegal aliens. Initiatives
have included so-called “immigrant integration” and “green schools.” The Department has addressed “suicide and
race.” There has even been outreach to barbers to close the achievement gap. Duncan
marched with Al Sharpton in the Black Lives Matter protest.
Duncan has done his part in Obama’s campaign to expand the reach of the
government under the guise of civil rights. He oversaw the expansion of the department’s Office of Civil
Rights as the department investigated sexual assault on college campuses. He
pushed the nation’s schools to change discipline policies because of the
disproportionate suspension and expulsion of minority children.
School administrators are more fearful of disciplining minority students
than ever and college campuses hold ridiculous workshops on giving sexual
consent. Frederick Hess charged that Duncan “supersized” the federal role by turning the
Office of Civil Rights into “an invasive army of lawyers bent on micro-managing
local schools” and infusing the issue of fair discipline with “the cause of
racial grievance.” Traditional modes of justice based on fairness and
neutrality have been abandoned for the “critical race theory” Obama once taught. Hess
cites Michael Greve of the George Washington School of Law in noting that the
new standard “‘goes a million miles beyond the requirements of the
Constitution; of Title VI; and even of OCR’s own (legally dubious) disparate
impact regulations.’”
The supersizing goes beyond grade 12 to college or higher education.
Increasingly, “K-16” or “P-20” (pre-school through graduate school) are being
used in the educrat world. The change in terminology will get people thinking
in a new way, but it also reveals the expansion of the Department into what was
once considered off-limits to the federal bureaucracy: college curricula,
standards, and testing. Duncan’s imprint on this sphere will be discussed in
the next installment.
Mary Grabar, Ph.D., has taught college English for over twenty years. She is the founder of the Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc., an education reform initiative that offers information and resources for students, parents, and citizens. The motto, “Resisting the Re-Education of America,” arose in part from her perspective as a very young immigrant from the former Communist Yugoslavia (Slovenia specifically). She writes extensively and is the editor of EXILED. Ms. Grabar is also a contributor to SFPPR News & Analysis.
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