Five Top Duncan Posts

When I started blogging, I had no idea I would post so much so fast so often. But now more company is coming over and it turns out that I am "Below Basic" in curating. So my goal is to do some collection posts for folks who think they'd like to see some of the old stuff, but did not bring their cyber-wading boots.

Nobody fires me up quite like our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Here are links to my top five favorite Arne columns.

Seriously, Arne

Arne and I actually agreed on something. He said that we're not serious enough about education in this country, and I tend to agree. But I think we reached that conclusion through different paths. He thinks we're not serious enough about following swell government policies. I'm pretty sure that if we were serious about education, Arne Duncan would not be our Secretary of Education.

#AskArne & Spleen Theater

Arne made a video in which some teacher-fellows at the DOE pretend to ask him questions and he pretends to answer them. I had so much spleen to vent that I may have hurt myself. I finished with this advice: "You should not watch this. Nobody should. It is one of the most cynical reality-impaired dog-and-pony-with-a-paper-cone-pretending-to-be-a-unicorn shows ever concocted, and now I have to go lie down."

Arne Duncan vs. White Moms

One of Arne's most famous mis-steps (though probably not his worst) was blogger gold. I was just one of many writers dumbfounded that a real government official would say stuff dumber than the things we could make up for them.
I thought these days it was supposed to be the GOP that dismissed contrary points of view simply by attaching them to women. "Ha ha. This is the crazy kind of objection you'd expect from one of those women. You know women, with their dumb vaginas and not-very-strong thinky parts. That's who comes up with this kind of stupid objection."

The Real Opportunity Gap

Duncan's response to the PISA tests was just one more opportunity to demonstrate his odd ideas about how the education thing is supposed to work. You give harder tests which you prepare for with great rigoriness, and then everybody gets smart enough to go to college, and then everybody gets a job and our country is rich and powerful again. I believe there are some flaws in that reasoning.

Duncan's Pre-K Top Ten

Duncan spoke to the governors to explain why Pre-K is the right political horse to back, and why helping eight-year-olds understand they are failing life will make us a stronger nation. He has ten reasons-- TEN-- for governors to jump on the Pre-K bandwagon, and not one of them makes me feel better about how the government is going to handle Pre-K programs.





So there you have it. We'll see if people find a compilation post helpful. Maybe it'll go so well that I'll finally release the black album.