From the Chicago Public Education Examiner...

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Arne the Duncan, Evil Bill Bennett, and the Wolf

By Edward Hayes
Chicago Public Education Examiner

Incredibly, neither of the two well dressed, oversized men sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on CNN Sunday has ever taught a single student, in a single classroom, in a single school anywhere in any time zone in the United States of America. Yet millions of people watched these two education gurus define the state of public education. Yesterday, Wolf Blitzer interviewed both the current U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan and former U.S. Secretary, for Ronald Reagan, William Bennett. Ironically, democrat emeritus Duncan owes his job to the evil republican Bennett. In 1988, Bennett came to Chicago and declared that its school system was the worst in the nation. I was teaching at Kennedy High on the southwest side at the time and I saw no reason to disagree with Bennett, and assumed he was correct. I was later reassigned to South Shore High School and then knew he was right.

Six years after Bennett blasted Chicago, our schools numbered 47 out of 50 of the large, urban school districts in academic standards. Three years and a couple of failed professional school superintendent hires later, in 1995 Mayor Richard Daley assumed full responsibility for the school system and appointed the first of our city’s current trio of education CEO’s that have never taught school; Duncan was the second. So Arne owes Bill Bennett for embarrassing the Little Emperor of Chicago and precipitating the launch of Daley’s fifteen-year public school Ponzi scheme. Our schools still suck but Daley shuffled his three stooges around so deftly, the voting public cannot figure out what is happening.

After nearly fifteen minutes of watching these two boobs on CNN, the public is still confused. Bennett, though correct, loftily fired cruise missiles at targets in space. He criticized the country for falling behind other industrialized nations in math and science. Bill, who probably doesn’t know any real people, may not have noticed that, for the last decade, thousands of our college grads have been selling designer coffee because we have more college-educated young adults than we have professional level jobs. Falling behind the undernourished children of India in academic achievement isn’t a pressing problem.

Duncan, who should be embarrassed to appear in public without his new Chicago handler, President Obama, was completely off base by declaring public education as the Civil Rights Issue of our Time. He likes that line and repeats it often, as if black America needs a white guy to define civil rights for them. Arne, in response to Wolf’s softball probe: What is the single-most important thing the federal government can do to help public education, responded, ‘Reward Excellence.’ No Mr. Duncan, the best thing you feds can do for us is to FROG OFF!

So what could have been an important discourse on a critical issue, dissembled into fuzzy and trite exchanges about increasing academic standards so we can look better on an international list of children. Our public education problem has nothing to do with foreign kids; we gotta stop inner city thugs from ruining our urban schools and killing real students in drug war crossfires. Then maybe, after we figure out how to keep ‘em safe, we can teach them to read. It takes a special person to walk into a failed school populated with the semi-literate offspring of dysfunctional parents and raise the level of academic accomplishment. Attracting, cajoling, bribing, or blackmailing super job applicants into taking responsibility for tough youngsters is a difficult feat, but we can do it, especially if Duncan’s $4 billion slush fund is used to enhance, double, or triple teacher salaries in these easily identifiable bad schools.

Both former education secretaries took a cheap shot at George Bush’s infamous No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school policy, another space shot that was infuriatingly imposed upon recalcitrant school districts with mixed results, bad and not so good. While admittedly an awkward fit, NCLB served a higher purpose that the voting public usually did not understand. Put aside the teachers’ union mantra: Unfunded Mandate, for a moment. 1. NCLB forced cowardly administrators to improve measurable academic performance in every demographic group. What that translates to inside of the opaque walls of the education industry is that test scores had to go up for each category of child: black, white, male, female, special ed, the long, the short and the tall. There was no place in the byzantine world of data, and in their subterranean haunts for senior administrators to hide. That is why they hated NCLB. 2. Why is it that raising test scores has to funded separately from any other school expense, isn’t that what teachers should have been doing in the first place? 3. Worst of all, why is it that education policy has to be imposed on the teaching ‘profession’ by non-educators as NCLB was?

Answer: Both Mayor Daley and President Bush came to realize, possibly within the same nightmare, that professional educators with all their fancy post-graduate degrees and flowery, politically correct language, did not know how to teach students who came to them disinterested in learning. Both men, masters of their own universe, were desperate and reached out to people who previously demonstrated that they how to get things done: businessmen. So naturally NCLB fits like the shoe on Cinderella’s stepsister’s big foot; you may be able to get it on, but it hurts.

Now we are stuck with Duncan as the new Wizard of Oz and his popularity exceeds that of our mythical President. Why? Because he has 4 billion bucks of funny money to distribute to believers. And what school district is not in financial trouble?