{"id":1002,"date":"2019-02-19T18:43:57","date_gmt":"2019-02-19T23:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/?p=1002"},"modified":"2025-12-12T23:19:37","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T04:19:37","slug":"interesting-review-of-arne-duncans-book-by-fellow-chicagoan-bill-ayers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/2019\/02\/interesting-review-of-arne-duncans-book-by-fellow-chicagoan-bill-ayers\/","title":{"rendered":"Interesting review of Arne Duncan’s book, by fellow Chicagoan Bill Ayers"},"content":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/customer-reviews\/R1X8WUX1KNXQ3B\/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1501173065<\/a><\/p>\n

Arne Doesn’t Learn
\ncustomer review, by Dr. William C. Ayers<\/p>\n

If you pick up Arne Duncan\u2019s How Schools Work<\/em> hoping to learn something about, well, unsurprisingly I suppose, about \u201chow schools work,\u201d you\u2019ll be sorely disappointed. There\u2019s no policy prescription here, no substantive analysis whatsoever, and no actual accounts or examples of how schools work. Instead we\u2019re treated to random stories that circulate around several stuttering themes: Duncan\u2019s dismay and then anger when poor kids are told they\u2019re doing OK by school people when in reality they don\u2019t have the skills to go to college; his encounters with enraged parents that happily end when they chill out after he shows them that his heart is true and his intentions pure; and his insistent defense of \u201cbig data\u201d and high stakes standardized tests when promoting his preferred school \u201creform\u201d goals.<\/p>\n

The subtitle isn\u2019t especially helpful either: \u201cAn Inside Account of Failure and Success from One of the Nation\u2019s Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education.\u201d That might have proved useful, but the reader searches in vain for fresh perspectives or insights, for some discovery or surprise, contradiction or conflict, for an inquiring mind thinking out loud as it engages a conversation with itself\u2014anything at all that might be generative. What\u2019s on offer instead is untroubled categories and settled conclusions. Arne Duncan learns nothing at all\u2014neither in his many years at the helm of Chicago\u2019s and then the nation\u2019s schools, nor in the process of writing this personal account.<\/p>\n

Failure and success? An inside account? A good memoir might fruitfully explore all of that, but it would have to be free from the brutality of dogma and self-righteousness, which Duncan can\u2019t quite manage. He\u2019s a dedicated corporate reformer, avidly endorsing the underlying thesis that education is a product to be sold at the market place rather than a fundamental human right and community responsibility, and embracing the entire triple threat: reducing the definition of school success (for other people\u2019s children) to a single metric on a standardized test; marginalizing or crushing the collective voice of teachers; and auctioning off the public space to private managers and entrepreneurs. None of this is up for discussion or review, and that makes the entire account tedious and entirely predictable.<\/p>\n

Duncan\u2019s opening sentence is a calculated attention-getter: \u201cEducation runs on lies.\u201d Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post points out that that sentence begs for the services of a good editor\u2014education doesn\u2019t run on lies, she says, so perhaps he means that the school system runs on lies; but since there\u2019s no single school system in this country, perhaps he means specific schools run on lies. Whatever. It turns out \u201clies\u201d is deployed as an all-purpose metaphor: the big lie (which he returns to again and again) is \u201csocial promotion,\u201d moving kids along when they aren\u2019t up to par or college-ready; other lies include the lie that poor kids can\u2019t learn, manifest through low expectations by school people and politicians for children of the poor; the lie that self-serving teachers unions tell when they pretend to care more than a fig for the success of public school students; the lie spread by teacher educators that colleges of education effectively prepare teachers for classroom life. All lies according to Duncan. In support of the larger corporate reform agenda, Duncan dutifully side-steps any link (although well-established by authentic research and loads of data) between poverty or racial segregation and school success. Again and again he makes the dubious claim that test scores \u201cdon\u2019t lie\u201d and that the solutions to our various problems can be found in \u201cbig data\u201d\u2014selectively harvested to be sure.<\/p>\n

The only \u201cfailure\u201d Duncan will admit to is the classic \u201cfailure to communicate:\u201d \u201cRace to the Top\u201d was \u201cmisunderstood,\u201d parents and teachers didn\u2019t understand the incredible value for their kids of regular standardized testing, and sometimes he \u201cjammed my foot in my mouth.\u201d He repeats this disingenuous self-criticism so often that it brings to mind the stuttering exchange between the Captain and the prisoner in the classic film \u201cCool Hand Luke\u201d\u2014every substantive conflict is dismissed with the Captain\u2019s signature line uttered with utter contempt: \u201cWhat we have here is a failure to communicate.\u201d The phrase is consistently issued by power to dodge the import of any conflict, and as prelude to doubling down on harsher sanctions and brutal punishments.<\/p>\n

Arne Duncan\u2019s children have always attended schools that work\u2014public schools in the suburbs of Washington, elite private schools in Chicago\u2014 and these are schools with small class sizes, full arts programs, excellent facilities, and unionized teachers. Each of his kids is, of course, more than a score. Nothing wrong with any of that. The hypocrisy comes when he sets policy for other people\u2019s children that never mentions class size or the value of the arts or the importance of teachers\u2019 voices when it comes to school policy and practice. Duncan\u2019s prescription for the rest of us is an anemic curriculum and a single-minded obsession with standardized tests.<\/p>\n

We need to resist as we insist that in a democracy equality in education is a first principle, and that means that whatever the privileged and the powerful have for their children must become the baseline for what we as a community demand for all of our children. Nothing less.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/customer-reviews\/R1X8WUX1KNXQ3B\/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1501173065 Arne Doesn’t Learn customer review, by Dr. William C. Ayers If you pick up Arne Duncan\u2019s How Schools Work hoping to learn something about, well, unsurprisingly I suppose, about \u201chow schools work,\u201d you\u2019ll be sorely disappointed. There\u2019s no policy … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[80,210,31,90,32,113],"tags":[230,217],"class_list":["post-1002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-common-core","category-curriculum-instruction","category-education-policy-2","category-education-reform","category-k-12","category-sandra-stotsky","tag-arne-duncan","tag-us-education-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1002"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1529,"href":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions\/1529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nonpartisaneducation.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}