Arne Duncan cuts an impressive figure even in Chicago, where the political landscape is riddled with them. “Six-foot-five in shoes,” as he describes himself, Duncan played basketball professionally in Australia before returning to Chicago and working at a foundation run by his powerful friend John W. Rogers Jr. The Ariel Education Initiative opened some serious doors: first at Chicago Public Schools, where Duncan became the longest-serving CEO in the district’s modern era, and later at the U.S. Department of Education, where he would become one of the longest-serving secretaries of education under another powerful Chicagoan, President Barack Obama.
Out of these experiences, he writes in his new book, “How Schools Work,” he realized that American public education “runs on lies.”
“Lies are emblematic of our educational system as an apple left on the corner of a favorite teacher’s desk,” he writes. “But, unlike the apple, the lies aren’t sweet. They are overripe and rotten.”
Throughout his career, from Chicago to Washington, Duncan explains, he has run headlong into lies that permeate the system. “The big lies are the ones that the system tells to parents about how their kids are learning — the ones that schools tell to every level of government about how great their students are doing.” The point of the book is to expose such lies so that the system stops moving children through schools that utterly fail to prepare them for adulthood. He also uses his pages to shame adults who use the banner of “improving education” to make decisions that benefit other adults — teachers’ union leaders, district officials, politicians or even private company honchos who reap big dollars off of our nation’s kids.
In one pointed example, he describes a dinner party in which he was seated next to Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, whose home state of Tennessee was receiving a boatload of money under the Duncan-led reform program Race to the Top. Duncan describes Alexander leaning over and commending the Department of Education’s efforts to better tie teacher evaluations to student test scores.
“That is the Holy Grail of ed reform, Arne,” Alexander tells him. Then the senator delivers a swift verbal blow in one move of his dinner fork, telling the U.S. education secretary that he won’t support his proposed Common Core academic standards, which grew out of favor with Republicans as political winds within the party shifted.
“I was stunned,” Duncan writes. “Senator Alexander knew the challenges of education better than most people on the Hill. This was the Tea Party talking, pure and simple. It was as if he’d been captured.”
The flaw with this argument, of course, is that Duncan has written a book titled “How Schools Work,” and this is not how schools work at all. What Duncan describes is how the education machine in America works. On the latter point, who can quibble with Arne — and, yes, he counsels his staff to address him on a first-name basis.
But when it comes to schools and education politics, there’s a difference — and while one influences the other, they should not be conflated.
How schools work is a different storyline. Duncan spends hardly any pages embedded in schools or talking to teachers, principals or students. His touchpoint for teaching is a youth and early adulthood spent tutoring poor African-American kids and schlepping snacks up the stairs of his mother’s long-running Kenwood after-school center. “She was and is the foundation of everything I know and believe about education,” he writes of his mother, Sue Duncan, an impressive Chicago figure in her own right. “What she showed was that teaching matters.”
He describes one tutoring session with a top-notch teenage basketball player and B-student from Martin Luther King College Prep named Calvin. Calvin dreams of going to college and playing Division I ball, but it soon dawns on Duncan that the teenager reads and writes on a second- or third-grade level, can barely spell and can’t answer any of the history questions on a sample version of the ACT college admissions exam. “It hit me so hard. The odds of him living out his dreams were close to zero — and why?” he writes. “Calvin Williams wouldn’t make it because of the lies that the Chicago schools had told him and his parents about how much he’d learned.”
Duncan heads off to high-end addresses in the Loop, and later D.C., determined to roll out reforms that hold a mirror of truth to the broken system. But what, then? We don’t learn how the surgical decisions being made at high altitudes end up impacting classrooms in cities like Chicago, Baltimore or Detroit — or kids like Calvin. As all around us swirls the fever for school choice, we don’t learn much about the outcomes of pushing for options beyond traditional schools, such as charters, which Duncan championed when he ran Chicago’s school system. And we don’t learn how some schools in high-poverty neighborhoods beat such odds and send their Calvins to college — stories that really illustrate how good public schools work in the era of limited resources and vast income inequality.
It may sound like a small thing, but we never learn what happened to Calvin, either.
Duncan, however, does offer a valuable window into Washington education politics: He played a pivotal role in ushering in a wave of testing and assessments, and it’s fascinating to hear him defend it. (“The fairest and most objective way to tell if kids are learning is by tracking their test results over time.”) He details the “bare-knuckle politicking” it took to roll out his signature Race to the Top program, which rewarded states game-show-style for ushering in reforms, and he explains the calculus behind the Common Core standards, which his critics came to derisively label “Obamacore.” He takes credit where it’s due and calls out which wounds were self-inflicted. (“Maybe we should have encouraged states and districts to take away other standardized tests as they added in the ones for Common Core,” he writes. “This added to the very real fact that too many kids were spending too many hours taking tests and preparing for them, and not enough time enjoying learning.”)
And he leans on basketball, a lot, as a metaphor for improving public education. I now know in excruciating detail how the Princeton Offense works.
Duncan waits until the end of the book to offer his explanation of how schools work, and when he finally does, he turns over the narration to the principal of a turnaround school in Chicago’s West Side neighborhood of Austin. The school is reeling from the shooting of a prekindergarten student. How to care for the child’s elder sibling — a promising but temperamental young man who was raising his siblings at age 10 — has everyone on high alert, from the principal, whose quotes make up the bulk of the chapter, to the janitor. The plan doesn’t involve testing the boy or shipping him off to another school: It involves having a “counselor on deck” and rallying a wave of support from all of the adults as well as his classmates.
“He has CEO potential,” Duncan quotes the principal as saying, “and yet he’s a below-grade-level black kid with special needs that some other people would have just passed over without a second thought. Not us. Not here.” This is how schools are supposed to work.
Cassie Walker Burke is the bureau chief of Chalkbeat Chicago, a new nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to telling the story of public education in Chicago.
‘How Schools Work’
By Arne Duncan, Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, $26.99
