Obama's Education Man

Arne Duncan, President Obama’s Secretary of Education, had a remarkable and wonderful education. It began in the laboratory school run by the University of Chicago, where Duncan’s father was a professor. Television was not allowed in the home. Every evening Professor Duncan read the classics aloud to the family; Arne’s athletic mother was deeply involved. When he was ready for higher education, he went to Harvard. It is doubtful that anyone could have a better preparation for being a professor, a lawyer, or a philosopher.
Instead, he played basketball professionally in Australia. But through his basketball and Lab School connections he became the director of Ariel Education Initiative, a privately funded educational enterprise. Then he was hired by the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, and two years later Mayor Richard Daley appointed Duncan to be the head of Chicago schools. To sum up: he lived as a child on Chicago’s South Side in an intellectual island of integration amid the black population of the area; his schools were all private and elite; his experience with public schools classrooms was non-existent.
His educational philosophy apparently can also be expressed briefly: He buys into the charter school movement, believes in merit pay for teachers, and is not a friend to teacher unions. That puts him squarely into the current trend among administrators in big city schools, and means that teachers nation-wide need to pay close attention. Duncan has money to spend and a bully pulpit from which to wield influence.
It is generally recognized that charter schools have not yet been proven superior to ordinary public schools; the statistics are inconsistent and do not justify a wholesale changeover from public to charter/private. Regardless, the political right endorses charters. John Kline of Minnesota, ranking Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, believes Duncan’s plans for American schools is “a Republican agenda,” and Newt Gingrich approves Duncan’s appointment.
Keep in mind that charter schools are little more than unregulated private schools paid for with tax dollars. They are consistently non-union if not outright anti-union, thereby placing themselves in the general move popular among educational theorists to crush teacher unions. Diane Ravitch of New York University, and Kenneth Saltman, professor of education at DePaul University, found Duncan’s policies out of line; she calls them teacher bashing “baloney”, and he refers to Duncan as Daley’s hatchet man.
But regardless of whether Duncan is admired or excoriated, there is one fact that demands attention: he has not taught a class of public school kids for so much as one day. What does he know of the experiences of public school teachers? How can he determine what public schools need and what their goals should be, when he knows nothing about them from first hand experience? Whom should we trust with the maintenance of public schools, with any needed changes or reform? Teachers’ organizations whose policies have been developed over years of actual experience teaching children, or a “leader” who never worked one day in public schools and has never been personally responsible for the education of a single classroom of real children?
Every teacher knows that all the grand theories and catchy methods learned in college education classes must be modified in order to fit the actuality of 35 kids in a classroom. When those kids come from poverty and broken homes and families not speaking English and neighborhoods beset by gangs, the textbooks on education become merely distant, airy goals. Good teaching comes from hands-on experience with kids in a classroom. Ask any beginning teacher; ask any veteran teacher.
Here’s a modest proposal: if Arne Duncan has the welfare of public education at heart, let him take a one year leave of absence from his position in the elegant offices of Washington DC and hire on - anonymously - as a teacher in an inner city middle school in any large city; Washington itself will do, but Chicago might be better. Let’s see if he still thinks it’s poor teaching that makes low achievement scores on student tests; let’s see if he still thinks it is good educational policy to predicate teacher salary on student test performance. In fact, let’s see if he wants anything to do with the whole giant “reform” agenda of those who now choose to privatize schools and bust teacher unions. He may decide that playing basketball is a lot more manageable.