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Arne Duncan The false prophet of public education is blowing it!

By Edward Hayes
Chicago Public Education Examiner

Arne Duncan has revealed more of his complete lack of knowledge of public education, what it is, what it isn’t, and what it never will be. Late last week this well-meaning Harvard-educated nice guy who is totally devoid of all perspective when it comes to educating America’s children spoke at a friendly venue: Harvard. ‘I absolutely see education as the civil rights issue of our generation,’ he said to a packed audience that included University President Drew G. Faust, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, newly elected Cambridge Mayor David P. Maher, and 300 others watching via telecast. ‘Children without those options are basically condemned to poverty.'

How absurd. In 1964, my uncle, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn, was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan as he was driving back from a short tour of military duty in Georgia. That’s a civil rights issue, not celebrity-fixated children that are too lazy to read a book and whose parents don’t own one. That this former professional basketball player ‘absolutely sees’ anything about which he is totally ill-equipped to comment on is the new political tragedy for nation’s urban school children.

Furthermore, Mr. Duncan, no American citizen is condemned to poverty, not even the economically least of us. True, there are boobs who do not take advantage of the opportunities available to them, but those are the choices people make for themselves, and unfortunately, for their children. Individual stupidity is the price of collective freedom. For over a century now, impoverished and minority American children have worked through social and parental barriers that Mr. Duncan can only know about by reading about them in history books, and gone on to achieve great things. Bad schools may be a temporary obstacle, but stupid government is a permanent menace

The U.S. Secretary of Education’s useless Harvard message was recorded by the University newspaper, The Crimson: ‘Duncan, who grew up in the diverse Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park where his mother ran an after-school tutoring program for under-privileged children, said he had witnessed gross inequities between his education at the University of Chicago Lab School and the education of his neighbors in other schools. This experience, Duncan said, spurred his interest in education reform—which has emphasized “rejecting the status quo” and which, he acknowledged, has sometimes led to criticism.’

His mother’s after school tutoring program?? Give me a break! This was as close as Duncan ever got a public school classroom, and this privileged son of a well-connected Caucasian family who has never taught any kind of school in his life, and who certainly never had the responsibility of running a school, is magically an expert on urban education because he saw some poor kids? The University of Chicago Lab School, where my oldest daughter also attended, is a very, very private school with the toughest of admission standards. The only proximity Duncan can claim to a public school is walking by one on his way to the basketball court. Arne the Duncan is the civilian male version of the Jessica Lynch combat hero myth. The difference between them is the honest Private Lynch knew her media-hyped story was a lie and admitted it. Duncan really thinks that once looking at poor kids made him a teacher.

As violins played softly in the background, Duncan crooned, ‘We want to level the playing field for children entering kindergarten,” he said. “We need to have college-ready, career-ready standards.’ That is a really sweet song Arne, but writing a standard on the blackboard doesn’t make up for idiot parents that don’t give a fish about their children. And spewing tree-hugger sentiments and touchie-feelie proposals in front of a bunch of equally ignorant Massachusetts liberals doesn’t do a bloody thing to help underprivileged urban children whose educational options may well be limited to bad schools. The reason schools are bad is because too many bad people send their bad children there. Consequently the bad kids beat the crap out of the good ones and create a school culture of abysmal failure as they frustrate well-intentioned and inadequate teaching staff. If good intentions were all that was required to be successful, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) would not be the worse system of youth warehouses in the free world.

Since our politically correct society hasn’t yet reached the point where we engineer family structures and deny parenthood to pinheads, the only way to unbad public schools is with kick-butt, highly motivated, and superbly compensated teachers who are demented enough to love bad-butt kids. And since it is unlikely that a white, female teacher is likely to love a black, bad-butt boy, it makes sense to use that $4 billion dollars Duncan has at his disposal to set up a super pay scale and hire some black men to commit to developing black children, and while we are at it, hire Latino men to jump into the fray and bust up their neighborhood connection to these violent Latina gangs like the Latin Kings and MS-13. Perky little Miss Anne ain’t cutting it.

As I have said often in this column, I could care less about the liberal fantasy world in which Mr. Duncan dwells except that he is sitting on billions of our tax dollars and has an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to really fix some schools by hiring super teachers. I refuse to believe that if you double the beginning pay of a first-year teacher that you will not attract quality applicants. If not, triple the starting pay! Moreover, I absolutely see where to find those quality people: Coming out of the U.S. military.