Barack Obama named Arne Duncan as his pick for Secretary of Education today.Duncan's headed the Chicago School District since 2001.
His record, of couse, speaks for itself :
Duncan, hailed by Obama as a reformer, said he would like to take the lessons he learned in Chicago with him when he moves to Washington. “I'm also eager to apply some of the lessons we have learned here in Chicago to help school districts all across our country," Duncan said after Obama formally named him to the job in Chicago.
According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report for 2007, Chicago public schools have consistently performed below the national average during Duncan’s tenure.
The report measures students at the fourth and eighth grade levels in the subjects of reading, math, science, and writing, and ranks them at below basic, basic, proficient, or advanced levels.
Students in eighth grade are those most likely to have been in the Chicago system for a majority of Duncan’s tenure. CNSNews.com used the scores for these students to best determine the results of Duncan’s administration.
By 2007, only 17 percent of Chicago eighth graders were at or above grade level in reading. Thirteen percent scored at or above grade level in math. Twenty-three percent scored at or above grade level in writing.
By 2005, the only year Chicago participated in the NEAP assessment program, 16 percent of eighth grade students were at or above grade level in science.
In 2007, 29 percent of eighth grade students scored at or above grade-level in reading, 31 percent in math, and 31 percent in writing. In 2005, 27 percent of eighth grade students were at or above grade level in science.
Students in eighth grade are those most likely to have been in the Chicago system for a majority of Duncan’s tenure. CNSNews.com used the scores for these students to best determine the results of Duncan’s administration.
By 2007, only 17 percent of Chicago eighth graders were at or above grade level in reading. Thirteen percent scored at or above grade level in math. Twenty-three percent scored at or above grade level in writing.
By 2005, the only year Chicago participated in the NEAP assessment program, 16 percent of eighth grade students were at or above grade level in science.
That's some record of reform, Bubba!
Chicago has the third largest school district in the US, and they're well funded,with a budget for 2007-2008 was $4.6 billion. They're also near the top in money spent per pupil, at $10,555 per.
Incidentally, the school district that spends the most per pupil is Washington DC...who also have the lowest test scores in the country.
It doesn't surprise me in the least that Obama would name someone like Duncan to do to the nation's schools what he did so well in Chicago.
Not that the Obamas are going to be personally affected by any of that. Their kids went to exclusive private schools in Chicago, just as they will in DC.For that matter so do the vast majority of public school teachers and administrators do. And it's what I've done with my own children.
Of course,anyone truly interested in reforming education would provide vouchers so that working parents could abandon dysfunctional schools and take advantage of superior schools like the Obamas do. But we can't have that now,can we?
As long as the teacher's unions are appeased, that's all that matters..and if that means that the little buggers get an inferior education, tough tamales.
Simply shameless.
The Chicago schools are a disgrace, but both you & CNSNews missed the centre-point of Duncan's strategy : to pull as many students out of the public school system as was legally allowed & allow them to attend charter schools. The major problem is, as you correctly diagnose, the teachers' unions. Their influence at the state level is so great that the Ill State Legislature capped the number of charter schools at, I believe, 30. (There are about 10 or 20 thousand names of Chicago public-school students in the charter-school queue lists -- trapped by the Ill State Legislature's artificial cap.) Duncan has closed the very worst of the Chicago Public Schools & fired the teachers in them. You might be heartened to learn that the teachers' unions hate him & were outraged by the promotion to the federal level. The charter schools were not computed with the public schools. Don't get me wrong : all Duncan has been able to accomplish is raise the Chicago Public Schools from the 8th Circle of Dante's Hell to the 3d Circle of Dante's Hell. Personally, I believe that the Department Of Education should be abolished : the feds don't educate a single kid in the 50 states, so why is there a whole federal Cabinet Department dedicated to it? (Dole in 1996 campaigned on a pledge to abolish that department.) You are right to highlight the hypocrisy of the Dems, including the Obamas, re the private schools for their kids. I agree with you wholeheartedly re school vouchers. May I change the venue to the Boston schools for a moment? The schools in Boston were once so good that, up till about the early 1970s, they bragged that a high-school degree from Boston was the equivalent of a college degree in most places. Then a person named Judge Garrity entered the scene & decreed forced school desegregation by way of the school bus. Boston was (& is) deeply segregated : Irish Roman-Catholics resided in all-Irish, all Roman-Catholic areas & other groups were kept forcibly (if unofficially) out in supposedly liberal Boston. This residential segregation was reflected in the individual, locally-run schools : some apparently were 100% Irish Roman-Catholic ; some were 100% Black. (In polls, professional athletes still name Boston as the most racist city in America.) Garrity, in a single swoop, decided to end all local control of the schools, classify all students by race, & forcibly bus students away from their nearest schools to other (sometimes very distant) schools. Innocent Blacks were beaten in the 'Irish' schools ; innocent Irish were beaten in the 'Black' schools. After the 1st year of this, the Irish which had children, & which weren't rich, fled from Boston. Judge Garrity, living in the rich, separate suburb of Wellesley, then declared in another order that students couldn't be sent over official, city, corporate boundaries, to other towns & cities, as part of his desegregation master plan. I lived sporadically in Boston at different times during the 1960s & early 1970s, and again in the late 1980s & early 1990s. I can assure you that I have never seen such a dramatic collapse in safety & security anywhere else in the US. (I literally couldn't visit some of my former flats from years past.) As a relatively neutral person, (being neither Irish, nor of the Roman-Catholic denomination, nor native-born of Boston, nor Black, nor liberal, nor Democratic,) I could only view in complete disgust, horror, &, yes, fascination, what judicially-engineered social-engineering creates : the collapse of real, viable neighbourhoods, mass panic & middle-class flight. It was perfectly obvious from the 1st year (ca 1974) that the plan had been a fiasco, but nothing deterred that awful judge, Garrity. & then his ideology was imitated throughout the country. I think that he may very well have done more harm to American schools, as a single individual, than any other person in American history. I've noticed, from the 1970s onward, that nice, middle-class, childless couples will live in the few, remaining nice-areas of cities like Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, but if they have kids, they vanish like ghosts by no later than the child's 4th birthday. Local control must be restored to the local, INDIVIDUAL schools in order to turn things round, but the bureaucrats & teachers' unions will fight to the death against that. By the way, in the 1976 Democratic-Party Presidential Primaries, George Wallace carried Boston!
ReplyDeleteHello Anonymous and Welcome to Joshua's Army.
ReplyDeleteThe problems with charter schools are as follows:
a) They're still under the aegis of the huge dysfunctional districts
and subject to the rule of the teacher's unions and to whatever curriculam is in fashion with the district that semester.
b)As you probably know,each charter school is alloted a certain number of places by the district. Not everyone can get in. At least where I live, the charter schools have built in built in quotas, with certain ethnic groups given extra 'points'when it comes to obtaining a place in a desired charter school. Needless to say, whites and Asians are not among those groups.
c)The majority of charter schools do the best they can considering the impediments they're saddled with. However ( and again, I'm using where I live as a model) there are some charter schools that are run by absolute lunatics to push a particular ethnic/political agenda and are little more than brain launderies.Many parents, particular in the Black and Hispanic communities have no clue as to what's going on in their
children's schools, and assume because it's a charter school that their kids are getting a good education!
They stay open because the politically correct administrators either sympathize with their political viewpoint or are unwilling to risk the flak from closing them down.
Finally, there's this. Public school education originally came in being on a wide spread basis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when America was experiencing a boom in immigration,mostly from non-English speaking Europeans from Eastern, Central amd Southern Europe.
The idea behind the public schools was not only to teach subjects like English and math at a basic level but to teach these children of immigrants basic good citizenship, what being an American meant and to impart a certain moral education in the bargain.
The public schools stopped doing this by the 1970's,and the results are obvious...which is why home schooling in America is a growing trend, and those parents who can afford it send their children to private schools.
Since many of these parents pay for the public schools out of taxes, they are essentially paying for something they can't use and have no say over.
I guarantee you that Duncan is not going to do anything to change that situation,or to allow working parents to be able to vote with their feet and find a decent school for their kids.
And in the end, the kids are the ones who suffer.
Regards,
ff