Duncan, Robber Barons, and Victims

Clay Burrell over at Change.org is bothered by Arne's Duncanisms. Scary Duncan has been out and about saying all sorts of things. As Burrell excerpted:

In a recent interview, Secretary Duncan discussed how he went about assembling his team, targeting people like Ms. Melendez who came from modest backgrounds, had a passion for the work, and showed an entrepreneurial spirit—and were willing to take what was likely a big pay cut to work in a federal job. No education policy or district superstars with big egos were welcome, he said.

“If they’re scared off because they won’t make more money ... or if they wanted a certain job title, ... that’s not the kind of person we want,” Mr. Duncan said. “We want people for whom this is a real passion. This is mission-driven work. Everyone is taking pay cuts.”

To which Burrell responded

Call me crazy, but you'd think people who were "education policy superstars," who spent their lives in classrooms and later in research, would qualify as "passionate" more than the "missionaries" with an "entrepreneurial spirit." People like, you know, Linda Darling-Hammond, who's devoted her life to knowing through research how to improve education, rather than taking a left turn from entrepreneurialism out of some "money + passion = change you can believe in" zeal.

... Duncan's rhetoric smacks of a sort of anti-intellectualism and pro-entrepreneurialism, and his staff picks reflect that as well. His DoE staffers are overwhelmingly connected more to Eli Broad and Bill Gates than to universities and classrooms.

To put this all into perspective, it's time to review how Duncan got his position.

Duncan earned a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard. That is pretty much the extent of his intellectual foundation. After graduating, he immediately went to Australia to play professional basketball for four years.

When he returned to Chicago, Duncan needed a job (Wanted: employment for a not-particularly-go-getting, perpetually grinning, newly married, only-bachelor-degree-earning Ivy League graduate). Fortunately John Rogers - a fanatic basketball-playing, longtime friend and private high school co-alum - had become extremely wealthy and needed someone to run a new, small, local education-related non-profit he was starting. He slipped Duncan right in to that position. One of the enormous benefits of attending elite private schools is making these sorts of useful connections; it's probably more important than the education itself.

Duncan's only accomplishment in working in urban education at this point was that he had tutored poor kids in high school. We all know how much he likes to tell this story over and over again. By the way, his mother forced ALL of her kids to tutor at her center; she also wouldn't ever let them watch TV.

After a few years of running his friend's non-profit, this mushy, likable bureaucrat got a job in Chicago Public Schools as Deputy Chief of Staff, most likely because of his great connections. A few years later, Mayor Daley appointed the malleable Duncan as CEO of Chicago Public Schools. This was just after the public-school-system-hating, Broad-connected, education reformer-destroyers had settled down in town. I'm sure they immediately recognized that Duncan would be perfect to work with, and be the sort of perfect blank they could mold.

Meanwhile, having never attended public schools, nor be willing to use them for his own kids, Obama really didn't know all that much about public education. However, for years he had been regularly playing basketball with Duncan, who he met through Michelle's brother (a close friend, and former Princeton basketball teammate, of John Rogers). This is a tight foursome, folks.

And that's how our nation is now stuck with a cheerful, but bumbling, average bureaucrat who Obama has assigned authority for running the whole show. I repeat: one of the benefits of attending elite private schools is making these sorts of useful connections. Did I mention that the Obama's sent their girls to the same Chicago private school that Duncan and Rogers attended?

Duncan's presence at the Department of Education is not because of an incredible intelligence, a wide range of experience, or an exceptional level of knowledge; it's because he provides the White House with a level of comfort and familiarity (and honors mutual friend Rogers for his years of Obama political $upport, and who knows who else). By the way, Rogers’ ex-wife is the White House social secretary.

Mr. Casual "call me Arne" Duncan wouldn't select cabinet members with more intellectual gravitas than he has because he is fundamentally insecure about his own. He certainly realizes his status would be challenged by the presence of someone who is actually distinguished in the field of education, and who may not agree with him on every point, and who would probably win all the debates.

The fact that Duncan signed on to both the Broader Bolder Approach and the Education Equality Project (manifestos with two VERY different points of view) demonstrates to me that the mutable Duncan wasn't sure where to stand. He makes a perfect puppet for the corporate edu-schemers.

By the way, Alexander Russo recently blogged about Arne’s weighing in on a number of issues including raising the driving age in Ohio (against), a split lunch at Patterson Elementary next year (for), and changing monthly board meeting locations for Chattanooga public schools to the Denny's on Dalton Boulevard (against). Why would he do this? Sorry, but it makes me wonder about his level of intellect.

On the recommendation of Elijah Anderson, I am now reading Blaming the Victim, a classic work by William Ryan. As someone who is paying attention to the methodology of the corporateer-led destruction of public education, all in the name of doing "good," I couldn’t help but be struck by two lines on page 20:

In order to persuade a good and moral man to do evil, then, it is not necessary first to persuade him to become evil. It is only necessary to teach him that he is doing good.

This explains the disconnect I sense between the rhetoric spewed by the corporateers and Harvard MBA-type reformers, (“Education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century!”), and the fact that they never make a peep about the extent of our nation’s poverty and how it affects impoverished families, or our growing class divisions. Fervently believing that what they are saying and doing is good, they bristle and aggressively confront anyone who challenges their position. They declare that those who disagree with them is 1. a racist and 2. a traitor to the cause of wanting to help poor, disadvantaged children. Only their perspective is "good."

Ryan’s book was originally published in 1971. A revised edition was released in 1976 with a new introduction. By then Ryan says he had enlarged his vision of who the “victims” in American society really were.

In fact, everyone who depends for the sustenance of himself and his family on salary and wages, and who does not have a separate source of income through some substantial ownership of wealth, is a potential victim in America. He is vulnerable to the disaster of catastrophic illness in a private-enterprise medical-care system; he is vulnerable to the deliberate manipulation of inflation and unemployment; he is vulnerable to the burden of grossly unfair taxes; he is vulnerable to the endemic pollution of air and food and to the unattended hazards of the factory and the highway that will likely kill him before his time; he is vulnerable to the greed of the great oil companies and food corporations.

The victims in American society are not simply the 10 percent of us who are Black, the 15 percent or so who are officially below the “poverty line." The majority of us who are non-Black and, officially at least, non-poor, are also victims. At least two-thirds, perhaps three-fourths of us are relatively poor compared to the standards of the top 10 or 5 percent, and relatively vulnerable. Others own America, we’re just workers, whether we realize it or not. Some of us may think we’re flying pretty high and are much better off than those below us, but in the end, we’re just ‘house niggers,” allowed better food than the “field niggers” and wearing fancier clothes. But none of us owns even a corner of the cotton field. Massa owns it all and Massa – the two or three per cent who essentially own America—is the real problem.

It's probably good to be clear about who is really running things; it is Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, the Wal-Mart family, and other millionaires and billionaires along that line. If you are under the impression that we live in a democracy, this will bother you, or perhaps not.

Linda Darling-Hammond Didn’t Play Basketball

The latest to come out is an article in The New Yorker about Green Dot Public Schools and its founder and chairman, Steve Barr. The piece was written by Douglas McGray of the New America Foundation, a D.C. based policy institute which includes education reform as one of its key issues. Green Dot was founded in 1999. In 2006, billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad gave Green Dot $10.5 million to open up 20 more schools. It currently operates 18 high schools, mostly in L.A.

Years ago, Barr became friends with Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix. Hastings funded Green Dot’s launch. Hastings also helped to start the New Schools Venture Fund, an organization which additionally received $22 million from the Gates Foundation in 2003 to “create systems of charter schools through nonprofit charter management organizations.”

Hastings and Don Shalvey are the co-authors of the California Charter School Initiative introduced to the legislature by Assemblyman Ted Lempert and signed into law in 1998. This repealed the 100-school limit of California’s 1992 charter school legislation. With the cap raised for the number of charter schools in California, Hastings and Shalvey then co-founded Aspire Public Schools and started engaging in even more pro-charter activities.

Steve Barr calls Shalvey one of his “Most Influential People,” along with former California Governor Pat Brown. Incidentally, Barr named one of his dogs “Jerry Brown.” Other connections are that Broad and Hastings donated generously to State Superintendent Jack O’Connell’s campaign, and that Jerry Brown set up two charter schools in Oakland early during his tenure as mayor, Oakland School for the Arts and the Oakland Military Institute. He continues to aggressively advocate for these two schools and keeps them pumped up with extras. I’ve heard enough at Brown's public appearances to know that he despises the form of Oakland's traditional public schools.

According to the McGray article, this past March,

… Barr got a call from the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. He [Barr] flew to Washington, D.C., at the end of March, for what he expected to be a social visit. At the meeting, Duncan revealed that he was interested in committing several billion dollars of the education stimulus package to a Locke-style takeover and transformation of the lowest-performing one per cent of schools across the country, at least four thousand of them, in the next several years. The Department of Education would favor districts that agreed to partner with an outside group, like Green Dot. "You seem to have cracked the code," Duncan told Barr.

And according to the New Yorker’s abstract

This month, Barr expects to meet with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (A.F.T.), and her staff and outline plans for a Green Dot America, a national school-turnaround partnership between Green Dot and the A.F.T. Their first city would most likely be Washington, D.C.

But now let’s turn to basketball.

Luckily for him, Steve Barr played basketball in high school and playing hoops is still one of his main hobbies. He’s read Laker Coach Phil Jackson's The Last Season at least twice. Barr says, "Basketball is the perfect metaphor for anything.” This history and outlook sets him up nicely for being accepted by Arne Duncan and President Obama.

Secretary of Education, Call-Me-Arne, Duncan (see photo caption) is a former private-school attending Chicago native who graduated from Harvard in 1987 with a B.A. in Sociology. He was on the college’s basketball team, and after graduating, played professional basketball in Australia for four years.

After his oversees basketball adventure, Duncan returned to Chicago and was immediately given a job by John Rogers, a longtime friend and former Hyde Park basketball buddy who had also attended the Chicago Lab School. At that point, Rogers had become the CEO of the largest US minority-run mutual fund firm, Ariel Capital Management. Rogers is the son of the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School who then became a prominent Republican lawyer. It was she who nominated Richard Nixon.

So in 1991, Rogers placed Duncan in charge of running the Ariel Education Initiative, a non-profit set up by Rogers' firm to advance "...educational opportunities in economically disadvantaged areas.” It seemed like a good fit for Duncan, after all, he had tutored a lot at his mother’s inner-city after school program when he was a kid, he had an unused bachelor's degree in sociology, and he was Rogers' friend and a basketball player.

The rest is history. In 1998, after running Rogers’ local non-profit for several years, Duncan went to work for Chicago Public Schools, becoming Deputy Chief of Staff for former CEO Paul Vallas. In 2001, he was appointed CEO of Chicago Public Schools by Mayor Daley. At the press conference when Obama announced his appointment of Duncan as U.S. Secretary of Education, Rogers was right there to praise him. Duncan was sure to thank Rogers, his "mentor" and close friend of 35 years.

Basketball happens to be a HUGE part of Rogers’ life. For years he has played in three-on-three basketball tournaments where Arne Duncan has been a regular member of his team. Rogers also recently attended a Michael Jordan basketball fantasy camp where his playing caused quite a stir; he is interviewed here. By the way, an upcoming three day camp in Las Vegas with Jordan is priced at $17,500.

Another of Rogers' regular basketball teammates for many years is Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s older brother. Both men attended Princeton and played on the school's basketball team. After graduating from college, Robinson became a wealthy businessman but gave up that work in 1999 to become a college basketball coach.

Knowing Rogers via her brother, Michelle introduced Obama to him when she started dating Obama seriously, around 1990. This would have been about the time Arne Duncan returned to Chicago and was starting to work for Rogers' non-profit, as well as playing basketball with him again. Connections made on the court, rather than on the green.

So now the relationship between Rogers, Robinson, Duncan, and Obama is explained. By the way, Rogers' ex-wife, Desirée Glapion Rogers, is the new White House social secretary. Read more about Obama's basketball life here.

This is a world where basketball means a lot, and where it is believed that important qualifications for a person are borne out on the courts. From The Audacity of Hoops:

But before matters between Barack and Michelle could advance too far, she had a test to administer. Having grown up listening to her father and her brother, a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year at Princeton, insist that a man’s character gets laid bare on the court, she hatched a plan. Craig Robinson rounded up a quorum of friends of varied abilities. “I didn’t want the game to be too intimidating,” he says, because it would’ve been painful to tell Michelle the prospect with the odd name hadn’t made the grade. He needn’t have worried. Obama found that sweet spot between not shooting every time and not always passing to Craig. In campaign appearances Robinson would retell the story with a kicker: “If I could trust him with my sister, you can trust him with your vote.”

It's a cute story, but after figuring things out, it's a little scary to think that this type of thinking may have been a factor in why Arne Duncan was ultimately selected.

So let's not be surprised to imagine that Barr has also passed some sort of basketball-character test. I'd bet 20 bucks that, as of late, he's been heading for the courts so he can get himself back into tip-top shape.