Guest Post: Arne Duncan’s Kick-Off Keynote at EWA’s 66th National Seminar
Joy Resmovits of the Huffington Post is today’s
guest blogger.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a man of many words,
armed with well-rehearsed phrases to spell out his agenda. At
the Education Writers Association May 1 lunch in California,
Duncan brought out his greatest hits – while throwing new
material into the mix.
First, the new:
The day before his EWA engagement in Palo Alto, Duncan spoke at
the NewSchools Venture Fund summit in nearby Burlingame. There,
he delivered a sharp critique of the lack of diversity among
the education reform crowd. He chided “lily-white CEOs” for
“posing with black and brown” students while their management
teams are usually all or mostly white. That reality, he said,
can limit the ultimate goal of education reform efforts: to
level the playing field. If kids don’t see role models whose
faces reflect their own, Duncan said, why should they be
motivated to pay attention in school and pay for college?
When asked to elaborate on this sentiment at EWA, Duncan spared
no mercy. “Everybody wants to be listened to, [but] you
disenfranchise communities when you don’t listen to parents,”
he said. “You can put a limit on how far students can go.”
Duncan went on to sharply criticize education schools; pointing
to insufficient diversity among teachers, he threw blame on
institutions responsible for educating them. “Schools of
education show little interest in increasing that diversity,”
the education secretary argued.
Duncan also left open the possibility of further investigation
into charges of cheating in Washington, D.C’s public schools.
Veteran PBS reporter John Merrow – who has raised
questions about former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle
Rhee’s response to allegations that educators there changed
student test responses – wanted to know if Duncan still
supports her. Duncan didn’t give a clear answer, turning the
conversation instead to cheating in Atlanta and Chicago. The
Atlanta
cheating case, he said, was about leadership. When he was
CEO of Chicago Public Schools, he said, “We had to let go a
number of teachers.” If any city is “turning a blind eye to
things that are illegal and immoral, that’s unacceptable,” he
said. D.C., he noted, has been investigated for cheating
repeatedly. Should it be investigated further? “I don’t know,”
he said.
Now, from Duncan’s greatest hits:
· What education candidates? Duncan has long been interested in
raising the profile of education as a voting issue. Naturally,
he expressed this to a room of reporters. “It’s amazing to me
how … everybody is pro education. Nobody’s running on an
anti-education platform. The real question is what do they do,”
he said. “I don’t think there’s a … public conversation on
what do they do. … Hold all of us accountable.”
· Boosting our littlest learners: Over the last few months,
we’ve seen the Obama administration unveil a proposal to
dramatically increase the number of “high-quality” preschool slots for
4-year-olds. While this pitch is widely believed
to be dead on arrival given that it depends on an increased
tobacco tax, Duncan is still stumping for it. “We don’t take
lightly an ask for $75 billion,” he said. “We still think it’s
one of the best investments we can make.”
And in anticipation of a common critique of Head Start – that
there’s “fadeout” of its positive effects in later grades –
Duncan questioned the evaluation that produced that data point.
“It’s a fair question to talk about fadeout … but to evaluate a
program based on 20 percent of people who didn’t attend,”
Duncan said, seemed misleading. He also said it doesn’t take
into account the benefits of the “non-cognitive side of early
childhood.”
When a reporter noted the plan’s diminished prospects for
passage, Duncan acknowledged that reality. “I’m not naive or
anything,” he said. “Yes Congress is dysfunctional, we all know
that. [But] 27 governors talked about early education” in their
State of the State speeches. “If we have ministers and moms
talking about this,” Duncan said, that might push the issue
over the edge. “I’m not pretending it’s going to be easy, but
it’s something I’m going to put a lot of time and energy
into.”
· Teacher Effectiveness: The cornerstone of the Obama
administration’s education efforts in its first term was a
focus on changing the teaching
profession – in particular, incentivizing “rigorous”
teacher evaluations. Duncan said that professional development
for teachers is in a sorry state, and when he tells teachers
how much federal money is spent on those efforts, “they usually
laugh or cry. They are not feeling it.” Duncan said he is
casting about for “better ways to measure what are we doing to
obtain that great talent.”
School Violence: Duncan called the preponderance of school
shootings around the country “absolutely stunning and
unacceptable.” Beyond the physical injuries, he said, students
are left to cope with the psychological ramifications of having
their friends or family touched by gun violence. “One high
school in Chicago has had two dozen kids shot,” he said. “Is
there a high school in Iraq or Afghanistan that has had two
dozen kids shot?” Lawmakers who didn’t cast a vote in favor of
the gun control bill, he said, showed “dumbed down courage.”
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