update...
Obama Slam-Duncans Education
Foul Choice of Basketball Buddy for Education Secretary
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
by Greg Palast
Hey, you Liberal Democrats. You may have won the election, but you're getting CREAMED in the transition.
Today, President-elect Barack Obama stuck it to you. He's chosen Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.
Who? Duncan is most decidedly NOT an educator. But Duncan has this extraordinary qualification: He's Obama's pick-up basketball buddy from Hyde Park.
I can't make this up.
Not that Duncan hasn't mucked about in the educational system. Chicago Boss Richie Daley put this guy in charge of the horror show called Chicago Public Schools where Duncan turned a bad system into a REALLY bad system.
And Obama knows it. Indeed, although he plays roundball with Duncan (who was captain of the Harvard basketball team), State Senator Obama was one of the only local Chicago officials who refused to send his kids to Duncan's public schools. (The Obamas sent Sasha and Malia to the Laboratory School, where Duncan's methods are derided as dangerously ludicrous.)
So, if The One won't trust his kids to Duncan, why is he handing Duncan ours?
The answer: Duncan is supported by a coterie of teacher-union hating Republicans. The vocal cheerleader for the Duncan appointment was David Brooks, the New York Times columnist; the REPUBLICAN columnist.
Hey, didn't those guys LOSE?
The problem with Duncan is not party affiliation. The problem is education philosophy. And Duncan is a Bush baby through and through, a card-carrying supporter of the program best called, "No Child's Behind Left."
At the heart of the program is testing. And more testing. Testing instead of teaching. When tests go badly, the solution is to push the low-test-score kids to drop out of school. If triage isn't enough, then attack their teachers.
Here's how Duncan operates this Bush program in Chicago at Collins High in the Lawndale ghetto. Teachers there work with kids from homeless shelters from an economically devastated neighborhood. Believe it or not, the kids don't get high test scores. So Chicago fired the teachers, every one of them. Then they brought in new teachers and fired THEM too when, surprise!, test scores still didn't rise.
The reward for a teacher volunteering for a tough neighborhood is to get harassed, blamed and fired. Now THAT'S a brilliant program, Mr. Duncan. But Duncan's own failures have not gotten HIM fired. As long as his 20-foot jumpshot holds, he's Mr. Secretary.
In no other cabinet department is the lack of expertise, lack of accomplishment, lack of a degree in the field found acceptable but in Education.
But what horrifies me more than Duncan's lack of credentials is Obama's kowtowing to the right-wing clique crusading against the teachers' union and progressive education. The ill philosophy behind the Bush-brand education theories Duncan promotes, "Teach-to-the-Test," forces teachers to limit classroom time to pounding in rote low-end skills, easily measured on standardized tests. The transparent purpose is to create a future class of worker-drones. Add in some computer training and - voila! - millions of lower-income kids are trained on the cheap to function, not think.
Analytical thinking skills, creative skills, questioning skills are left exclusively to privileged little Bushes at Phillips Andover Academy or privileged little Obamas at the Laboratory School.
For the rest of America's children, instead of hope, we'll have hoops.
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Greg Palast is the father of school-aged twins and the author of, "No Child's Behind Left," included in his New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse. Palast is a Nation Institute Puffin Foundation Fellow for investigative reporting.
Get a signed copy of Armed Madhouse for the holidays for a tax-deductible contribution to the Palast Investigative Fund at www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org
Subscribe to Palast's reports at www.GregPalast.com
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The early warning systems of progressives should be blinking red right now.
"Hey, you Liberal Democrats. You may have won the election, but you're getting CREAMED in the transition."
You say that as if Barack Obama was ever anything but a centrist Dem. He's not a liberal. Obama is only narrowly progressive. He's a lawyer! Get over it. Obama was never going to select Bill Ayers to be his Education guru.
Well, if David Brooks loves him he must be bad.
As a product of the Chicago Public School system I can attest to it not being the bleak failure Palast suggests it is.
Also, as a UC employee, Michelle Obama would be crazy-crazy-crazy to not take advantage of Lab School for her kids.
I am sick and tired of the press, including investigative reporters, who make their living through gathering fame by way of uninformed reporting that smacks of slander. I predicted to my friends that the same media gang who could not find anything bad to say about the worst president in US history would turn their guns on Obama within two days of his election - - and I was right. Not only did Obama fail to get the traditional 100-day honeymoon period (where the press keeps its mouth shut), the big guns (like CNN, CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC, NYT, WP, talk radio, as well as Palast, Parry and other investigative jounalists) revelled in speculation, accusation, character assassination and gratuitous back slapping. During the so-called war on terror the press gave Bush the green light to lie, cheat and kill innocent civilians in Iraq, but during this war on the growing economic crisis (much more consequential to americans and the world) they attack the solution even before he gets into office. If this keeps up, democracy has no chance in America. Shame on you, Greg.
Greg Palast gets it.
As a substitute teacher in Florida, a state that loves FCAT testing, I was able to witness a wide cross-section of what's happening in our elementary schools. And the attack on education isn't just NCLB.
While parents and the general public are very aware that something is wrong in our schools, they believe our politicians and their "expert" hacks that the problem stems from "bad teachers." And since that isn't the source of the problem, it only exacerbates the situation.
For sure, some teachers are better than others, and a few could even be classified as "bad." Mostly, however, it is caring teachers who are trying to hold everything together while the world of education crumbles around them.
The cancer in our educational machine has long ago gone systemic. Technically what's occurring is that the ABILITY TO LEARN is being actively denied.
This attack comes from all directions. Chief among them is that children are taught NOT to use a dictionary. Right there this denies them understanding and therefore the ability to think and reason for themselves. Instead they are told to figure out meanings from the context. In other words, they are left guessing. To reinforce this method they have specially written texts and workbooks which clearly define the unusual words in the context. Students are then tested on these words.
Of course real-life books and reading material are seldom written like this so those "educated" in this manner are ever more left guessing, and, more to the point, wide open to being told what to think.
Teachers work hard and instilling this system. It was part of their teacher's training and all but the older teachers were taught by this method in their own primary education.
To compensate for students' non-comprehension they are then taught "inference," a substitute for innate logic and native thinking skills. Inference is a relatively new and uncodified subject whose only two requirements are: one, it purports to support some system of causal relationships and, two, it is complicated. The already confused students end up trying to memorize all this in order to pass tests. The only lasting lesson they learn from all this is that it's better to do what you're told rather than think for yourself.
There are many other ways actual education is being denied in our schools. In our elementary schools, sugar has now replaced learning as the natural result of successful study. As odd as that seems, it's become a highly successful method to actively thwart the natural learning process whereby gaining knowledge is its own reward. This Pavlovian rewards system does run a semi-effective crowd control and even promotes participation in planned activities. But as a consequence the entire learning environment has been displaced with a synthesized system which subjugates student energy and demotes and obfuscates the importance of learning.
It is not surprising then that for a majority of students, attending school has become an exercise in enduring extreme boredom. By the time they hit middle school, apathy has been permanently instilled and all that remains for students is the arena of social opportunity.
Unfortunately, in realizing this, educators have bought into the lie that "learning is boring," and so curriculums now largely focus, not on learning, but on entertainment. In other words, how to make learning fun. Again, it's a synthetic (false) system that only compounds the problem.
Greg Palast exactly nails down the reason for all this; why it's happened, why it continues despite all efforts to resolve: slavery. They are hoping to churn out worker drones who cannot think for themselves and will merely do as they are told with little or no recompense.
Thanks for writing this. There are all too few voices saying what needs to be said,and far too many claiming this is a middle-of-the road choice since part-time AFT Prez Randi Weingarten thinks Duncan is OK. The fact is, Ms. Weingarten, by enabling mayoral control, and by championing the worst contract the UFT ever saw, enabled Mayor Bloomberg's "reforms," and created Joel Klein, who consequently recommended Michelle Rhee.
I'm heartened whenever I see the all-too-rare voices in support of working people.
I'm confused--how can Duncan be a "Chicago politician" who opens a high school for gay kids AND a card-carrying Republican? This is why no one (i.e., the average American) is listening to the criticism of Obama from those on the left or the right. He can't be a moderate and a socialist, a war hawk and a commie terrorist, or inexperienced and a "Chicago politician." You people need to make up your mind on what front you want to attack Obama.
Superb analysis of another horrible cabinet appointment.
There's more info on how bad Duncan is over at
substancenews.net
I was born and raised in Chicago (a/k/a "Chi-Town") and attended the CPS. Like much of the U.S., there are some very good public schools in the affluent areas of the city. I went to Whitney Young Magnet HS, where Michelle Obama is an alum. Obama put his kids in Lab School in Hyde Park (we used to call them "lab scabs"), but there were a few good public schools they could have attended in the area instead. I grew up in Hyde Park, home to the University of Chicago (where Obama lectured on the Constitution). I attended Bret Harte. Our valedictorian went on to Yale & Princeton to become a lawyer herself. The good schools in Chicago have maintained their excellence. Much of the problem is funding for predominantly black schools (particularly from the state republicans). Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, and funding for the public schools has decreased as more and more white kids go to the suburbs or private schools. Our schools are funded at a larger % of property tax than most states. Schools in affluent areas are also taxed at a lower property tax % than the poorer Black counterparts. Property values in poor Black areas also don't increase at the same rate as the affluent White areas, so the tax revenue in the poor Black areas is much lower. There is a small problem with getting rid of bad teachers b/c of unions, so Duncan may be okay as long as Obama is in charge. For more detail on the funding issue, I suggest contacting Ralph Martire, Executive Director of the Centr for Tax and Budget Accountability. He gave a presentation at the Campaign for High School Equity sponsored by the Chicago Urban League that was quite informative.
Also, the Chicago Urban League has filed a lawsuit against the State of Illinois and the Illinois State Board of Education claiming civil rights violations. One can learn more about the public education issue in Illinois at the Chicago Urban League (www.thechicagourbanleague.org/72321082013250413/site/default.asp) and Schott Foundation for Public Education (www.aplusillinois.org/media/articles.asp?pressReleaseID=467) websites.
Check out all the no-bid contracts being awarded by Duncan.
And, George Schmidt, of Substance News reports that many of the new charter schools are segregated. He calls it a "semi-private school system within a system."
So, this was the change Obama promised. I was wondering what that was all about.
Hey gumshoe...[New York. Tuesday, December 16, 2998], this is 2008!!!
We're fortunate to have a new president who wants to break through the 'us vs them' mentality that pervades public life in the U.S. But it's difficult -- it means overcoming the obtuseness of the right and the arrogance of the left, as this article demonstrates. Anyone who has followed Obama knows he favors multiple measures for assessment in education, not blind testing. Anyone who has followed Obama knows he is trying to break the logjam over who is to 'blame' for the problems in education. Is is the unions? Yes. Is it the teachers? Yes. Is it parents? Yes. Is it money? Yes. Is it a failed system that we as a nation continue to blindly support? Yes. So let's get over the blame game, the finger-pointing, the 'it's my way or the highway' solution, and open our minds and hearts to a new way of educating our youth. Let's consider everyone's ideas, and stop demonizing the opponent. Articles like this do not take us in that direction.
why does AFT support him? But in the same vein, I am more upset abot Shaun Donovan...I have personally experienced bad wors in N.Y.C. and am still recovering from his failure to remove a beauty salon, fully operating, from the 4th floor of an alleged coop. There are transcripts of the Judges visit to mine and that of the salon operator/tenant, and altough personally addressed, nothing was done to remove her, for 7 years. We are still recovering from the fumes which spread throughout the building and those which we then used to renovate the apartment. Those rent regulated tenants remaining are all sick with autoimmune diseases , we could not walk a block and after 3 years away, are still recovering....how disppointing this pick is...diane
can you update the part about his being a lawyer, which is apparently not true? It is hurting your credability with the people I am sharing this with. Thanks.
Let's not belittle the good things under Duncan's watch:
* Chicago has two public magnet high schools on the Top 100 US list.
* Public Elementary schools in Lincoln Park and other gentrified Northside areas are the best in the city.
Why? I suspect it's due to involved parents who pump extra money and time into the system. "All Children Left Behind", of course, has caused much grief and Duncan has to dance to Dubya's tune.
" They are hoping to churn out worker drones who cannot think for themselves and will merely do as they are told with little or no recompense. "
You bet. And , don't kid yourselves overly, Windy City drone-handlers Bill Ayers and Arne Duncan are like peas in a pod in their diligent approach to self aggrandizement as they saunter along their respective and awful career paths as mock educators.
After spending 34 years in a CA high school, it's clear to me that the no. 1 enemy of change in American schools is,alas, the NEA. Sad, but true.
I don't care whutcha say Greg.
Dis guy sounds like he's gonna help are kids learn how to talk and rite more better.
With a media that gives lavish credit to a school chancellor who is firing and union-busting (Michelle Rhee, DC) we need to shine a hard light on the selections our President-elect is making. Read the article in the current issue of the Nation, Beware School 'Reformers', by Alfie Kohn. Kohn characterizes Duncan as "virulently antiprogressive" and states that he has no idea how children learn. People who care about children and their education would never pick this man. He's an attorney, he is NOT an educator.
Peter: I think ya meant "more gooder." You're welcome.
I was one of the online tutors hired by Duncan's schools to teach to the tests. For 2 years, I spent up to 70 hours a week with kids almost all of whom were in Chicago, LA United, or NYC.
I was paid the lordly sum of ten dollars per hour as an "independent contractor," as if I were a Newtonian, rational, absolutely isolated point instance, right? It's not just the economy. After all, whence come economics?
From our beliefs, our mythos. "The Great Cosmic Newtonian Mechanism" is the dominant metaphor today. SO we just tweak the machine, right: pull strings, pull the levers of power, push buttons, etc., to get what we want. The mind, so the "thinking" goes, is a machine, susceptible to programming--or malicious hacking--just like any other computer.
I was hugely popular with the kids. I talked to them like real people, I expressed empathy. I often went way off the script. I wanted my students to know how to learn, not just practice mechanical reflexes. I even learned how to describe how words work: as self-emptying vessels.
I was promoted. My new position, monitor, allowed me to see the pattern. Most of the tutors pushed the kids through the lessons like pushing Slinkies through obstacle courses. The whiteboard and other virtual classroom technology was being used as a modem--"good" kids assimilated to the hive mind quickly, "bad" kids rejected the artificial implants, requiring slow and expensive "face time."
When I went from 60+ hours per week to less than 20, and complained, suddenly, the very methods that got me promoted became problems.
Don't get me wrong, I love science. I spent the morning browsing the Scientific American site. I recognize the mechanisms of existence. Our tragic mistake is to allow secular and sectarian priests of war gods to remain permanently at the controls of the great cosmic mechanisms. For example, we spend more on the machines of destruction, as many of you know, than the rest of the world combined. That's pharaoh crazy, baby!
So I say, it's the mythology. The Newtonian mythos of the atomized mechanical cosmos grows social Darwinian psychos, like Greenspan and Rubin and Summers et al., who use the rest of us as fodder for their egos.
The fundamental problems with Newton's cosmos are 1) its assumption of absolute dualism and 2) its reduction of historically unique and hypercomplex systems to bits and pieces.
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Stephen Jay Gould:
The implications of this finding cascade across several realms. The commercial effects will be obvious, as so much biotechnology, including the rush to patent genes, has assumed the old view that "fixing" an aberrant gene would cure a specific human ailment. The social meaning may finally liberate us from the simplistic and harmful idea, false for many other reasons as well, that each aspect of our being, either physical or behavioral, may be ascribed to the action of a particular gene "for" the trait in question.
But the deepest ramifications will be scientific or philosophical in the largest sense. From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. ("Analysis" literally means to dissolve into basic parts). The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems -- predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again — and when will we ever learn? -- we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena. Will Parsifal ever learn that only humility (and a plurality of strategies for explanation) can locate the Holy Grail?
The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology -- and for two major reasons.
First, the key to complexity is not more genes, but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code -- and many of these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes.
Second, the unique contingencies of history, not the laws of physics, set many properties of complex biological systems.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/19GOUL.html?pagewanted=all&ei=5070&en=2c47b79e49d07726&ex=1229922000
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The solution, to education reform and ending torture, is the same: We need to reclaim our humanity and stop treating each other and our Mother like mere machines, susceptible to malicious hacking. See how long you can go, before referring to yourself or your Other as a machine. For example, are we citizens, or voting machines on two legs? People, or "consumers:" appetites on two legs? etc.
The problem with the education system is that decision making has been kicked upstairs, in fact all the way to the President of the United States.
Responsibility and authority must reside in the classroom with the teacher. As a student in the fifties and sixties, I saw that each teacher was god in the class room, who we feared, respected and wanted to perform well for. The principal only intervened when a student just did not get the big picture.
The only caveat here is that those teachers knew their subject matter, knew how to teach, knew how to speak and write English. They cared about their students.
I don't think that one student in this country actually believes that GW Bush cares about them.
So what are we going to do about it? New boss looking the same as the old boss. NCLB is crap. I teach my kids at home as well as send them to school because I don't trust the schools to deliver an education. Which is sad because most of our property taxes are for the school system. I advise every parent to take the initiative and instruct your child yourself. If anything just so they understand how to learn. Reading, basic math, writing, literature, history. It's not that hard. They can try to screw us but we don't have to go along.
I went to the chicago public schools and ugh............ [flashback]... how do I hate thee, let me count the ways.....
That Dumbhead ruined our highschool in my junior year [I went to King High School, yeah on 44th] 90% of us showed up to school for lunch, not that we were hungry, it was about socializing, the teachers and everyone else made it perfectly clear that they would rather call in sick than teach us anything, or have any teacher fired who attempted to teach us [which happened more than once]. Then someone would kindly pull the fire alarm and we all went home. One day my best friend felt guilty about it, so we went back to the school to attend the last two classes of the day, the science teacher was shocked and frightened, he was sure everyone had gone home, we really felt bad about waking him up, he assured us it was alright and he let us play on the internet while he finished his nap[dont get me wrong, he was a very nice teacher from whom I learned..stuff that I dont remember].
I really get sick of those people who went to schools like Whitney Young, it and the few others like it are held up as an example, like they compare to anything [yeah right] while the rest of us sit in music rooms, passing around violins because we will never get the funding to have actual supplies. Meanwhile our school would literally get threatened if our scores get too high, when we do well we were punished.
The only reason why I can function is because my mom taught me at home, Plato's Republic and the fact that it is slavery with a smile never comes up at school, we were taught to the test PERIOD and thats why the majority of the children FAIL. I always tested 3-4 grades higher than the grade assigned, i'm not smart I was just PARTLY homeschooled.
Unions are not the problem, the goal is the problem, Obama's children are being given the education of the guardian class, thats why he has to get them in as soon as possible, they learn, like i did, with unscheduled time, play and curiosity driven motives, my mom didnt tell me to read chaucer she just put it in our playroom with our lego's and read us. Animal farm as a bedtime story, im not talking about big money, she was a single mother on welfare. At this point all three of her children have gone to college and the youngest is nearly done with his first year's flight training.
We are average, but we would be in BAD SHAPE if my parent had for ONE HOT SECOND expected the teachers who put their own kids in private school to teach hers anything. She considered putting us in the Lab School, but she could not afford it, so she just duplicated the method at home, our teachers were always impressed, curious and annoyed by the fact that the child who started school right before the Iowa testing began scored in the top 5%. She caught hell for it too.
My suggestion is if you have a child and live in chicago, TEACH THEM AT HOME, go to the library every day and let them check out any book they want, take them to the museum and let them explore within limits, have blank books around as toys and plenty of adventure stories to read, NEVER EVER trust the "deliberate dumbing down" system to teach you anything.
Look up John Taylor Gatto and Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt
Thank you Greg Palast for telling the truth, one rotten politician at a time!
The appointment of Arnie Duncan as Education Secretary is not only a travesty but an insult. Mr. Duncan is a shill for the Business Roundtable's agenda--which is to create a permanent 'servant class' through the dissemination of limited training and the subsequent denial of true education. Read the works of Susan Ohanian and HEnry Giroux for further clarification. This fits into the CFR agenda, train the unwashed masses for limited jobs, deny them the right to actually think--and watch the ongoing slide into the 'third world'. Just as no doctor can promise a cure, and no lawyer can guarantee a 'win,' no teacher can guarantee specific results. What the teacher brings to the table is at best half of the equation--the rest lies with the student. The true reason for making public urban education the scapegoat for all of society's ills--is to distract the public from the economic fleecing all around them. No democratic republic can survive without an educated populace capable of analytic thought. Such an educated population would have seen through the economic ponzi schemes of the last 20 years. Furthermore, they would have decried the theft of our civil liberties by Bush and Congress. The idea of sacrificing our liberties as necessary to safeguard our citizens would have been 'outed' as the false premise of snarky political snake oil salesman. Mr. Duncan's appointment is far more dangerous than the dismantling of public education; it represents the ongoing slide towards fascism, by denial of true education and real inquiry. President-Elect Obama should be ashamed.
Interesting that the damnation and praise of my report both cite the same fact: a few high-income and magnet schools have done well in Chicago. That's true in all cities. "Magnet" schools are class war by other means. As Mike Nichols said many years ago about Obama's Hyde Park: "A lovely neighborhood: Black and White, arm in arm, against the poor."
And thank you Mr. Parker for quoting Stephen Jay Gould whose writings I did indeed have in mind when pantsing Mr. Duncan.
I sympathize with the commentator who wants reporters to have a "honeymoon" with the President-to-be. Unfortunately, as they say in Texas, "We been kissed but we ain't been loved."