 The Legacy of Arne Duncan, ‘A Hero in the Education Business’
Highlight "business," of course
http://www.thenation.com/article/the-legacy-of-arne-duncan/
To understand the legacy of outgoing education secretary Arne Duncan, look to the Crescent City. Hurricane Katrina, Duncan said once, was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” What the disaster did was enable state legislators and out-of-state reformers to transform the system on an unparalleled scale. Nearly all of the schools were converted to charters, which receive public funds but have less oversight than traditional public schools. Some 7,500 unionized teachers and other employees were fired, many of them people of color. The city’s teaching core went from 71 percent black in 2004 to less than 50 percent last year.
To avoid closure, new schools had to focus on raising standardized test results. Scores did go up; more than 60 percent of elementary and middle-schoolers passed state tests last year, up from 37 percent in 2005, and graduation rates have risen. But it’s not clear the gains are due to the kinds of reforms that people like Duncan champion, such as tying teacher accountability to test results. The flood of philanthropic and federal money that went into the charter system after the hurricane was unprecedented; such an investment might have improved the city’s traditional (and broke) public schools, too, if they hadn’t been shuttered.
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And while Duncan spoke often of accountability, he applied it selectively—to teachers and, to his credit, the for-profit college industry, but not to charter schools. The same week Duncan tendered his resignation his department announced new grants for charters totaling $157 million. The biggest winner was Ohio, where charters have misspent at least $27 million since 2001 and have “produc[ed] academic results that rival the worst in the nation,” according to the Akron Beacon Journal. A review conducted this year by the Center for Media and Democracy concluded, “The federal government has spent a staggering sum, $3.3 billion, of taxpayer money creating and expanding the charter school industry over the past two decades, but it has done so without requiring the most basic transparency in who ultimately receives the funds and what those tax dollars are being used for, especially in contrast to the public information about truly public schools.”
