Arne Duncan Exhorts Teacher “Troublemakers”

The National Council for Social Studies held its national conference in Washington, D.C. from December 2-5. Craig Thurtell reports.

There was no reason for the teachers attending a breakfast event at the NCSS conference to welcome Arne Duncan into their midst.  After all, he means them no good.  In concert with a phalanx of hedge fund sharks-cum-school reformers, he wants to make teaching in the public schools harder and more precarious, and maybe even superfluous.  Nevertheless, upon his arrival, the gathering clambered to its feet and offered him a standing ovation.  He returned the favor by flattering them with a story about the social studies teachers on his staff who warned him that their ilk was composed of "troublemakers" who always question authority.  But that's a good thing, Duncan said; without troublemakers the US would still be a colony, slavery would still be with us, women would still have no rights, and so on.  He thanked the gathering “for all the trouble you’ve caused.” 

Then he set about his task:  to persuade the audience that his bag of reforms wasn't so bad after all.  Teacher “accountability” (“more testing, more punishment of educators,” as Diane Ravitch defined it) is a good thing, common sense, really, if only we can figure out a way to prevent those tests, which will determine whether teachers keep their jobs, from also convincing administrators that they had better focus on the two or so subjects covered on the tests, and forget about the rest—history, music, the arts, maybe even science.  That’s already occurring, but more to the point, linking student test scores to teacher effectiveness is fundamentally flawed:  How can an imperfect measure of one group’s performance validly measure another’s?

Duncan’s focus on "accountability” enabled him to avoid any mention of teacher-toxic topics like merit pay, weakening unions and tenure, and funding non-union charter schools—all part of his to-do list.  Once upon a time it was Republicans who promoted these reforms, but now, inspired by Wall Street money, the Democrats are leading the charge.  Democrats for Education Reform, funded largely by Wall Street executives, captured Barack Obama early on and, once he was elected, named Arne Duncan its most-favored nominee for secretary of education. 

Of course, none of the reformers’ aims have been shown to improve student performance.  In his remarks, Duncan never even approached the single greatest determinant of student achievement in the United States:  poverty.  The 1 percent took that discussion off the table long ago.  Duncan’s evocations at various points in his speech of slavery, women’s rights, and the civil rights movement were sapped of any power by his refusal to squarely address America’s greatest contemporary injustice.