Duncan's Thousand-Headed Hydra

by Clay Burell

categories: Charter Schools, Education and Business, Education Politics

Published June 05, 2009 @ 06:54PM PT

I really want to be sympathetic to and supportive of the Obama DoE under EdSec Arne Duncan. But for the life of me, every time I watch him speak or read him in interviews, I see contradictions that make me wonder if he's at all aware of how incoherent his vision is.

The latest example comes as Duncan explains why he rejects vouchers:

Vouchers usually serve 1 to 2 percent of the children in a community. And I think we as the federal government, we as local governments, or we as school districts, we have to be more ambitious than that. That’s an absolutely worthy or noble goal. If a nonprofit or philanthropy wants to provide scholarship money to children, that’s a great, great use of the resources.

But I don’t want to save 1 or 2 percent of children and let 98, 99 percent drown. We have to be much more ambitious than that. We have to expect more.

And this is why I would argue rather than taking one of these struggling schools, these thousands (inaudible) -- rather than taking three kids out of there and putting them in a better school and feeling good and sleeping well at night, I want to turn that school around now and do that for those 400, 500, 800, 1,200 kids in that school and give every child in that school and that community something better, and do it with a real sense of urgency.

Okay, so far, so good. Let's improve education for all students, not just 1 or 2 percent. But when he talks the "how" - closing 1,000 failing schools a year and re-opening them, often as charters, with new administration and faculty - things break down for me:

And let me tell you where I think charters can be very effective. First of all, you have to have a very high bar. This is not let a thousand flowers bloom. And some states, they'll just let anyone who wanted to open a charter open. You can't do that. This is a sacred work, and you've got to make sure that you're picking the best of the best to give them an opportunity to educate children.

Strike one: "the best of the best," we can surmise by Duncan's long history of touting KIPP and Green Dot and other "brands" - let's call them "chain schools" - perform so well on standardized tests (as if proficiency in reading and math are a full measure of what it means to be educated) because they usually don't enroll the lowest-performing students, and can expel those they do enroll for continuing to perform poorly. It's good to hear talk of high standards for charters, but that should include lowering the admissions bar to include the same students traditional public schools have to deal with.

Duncan continues:

Secondly, once you set that high bar, you have to do two things. You have to give these charters real autonomy. These are by definition education innovators. They're entrepreneurs. They have to be freed from the bureaucracy. And if you tie them too closely, they won't play.

Strike two? Maybe this isn't incoherent, but saying "set a high bar for only the best charters" implies control and a top-down definition of what a "quality charter" is. If this is true, then it undercuts the very freedom to innovate that Duncan urges.

Duncan goes on:

Second [sic], with that real autonomy, you have to have couple that with real accountability. You have to have five-year performance contracts. One without the other doesn't work. And so, if you just have autonomy without -- without accountability, you'll get mediocrity. If all you have is accountability and no autonomy, none of these education entrepreneurs would be interested. But that combination is very, very powerful.

Strike three - on several levels. First, if accountability continues to mean a math-and-reading standard of judgment, then autonomy is contrained by this emphasis. Second, closing 1,000 schools and replacing them with new operations that are given five years to succeed means, conversely, many of them will not succeed over that time. Study after study confirms that charters are often no better than the schools they replace.

The upshot: students at thousands of schools will go through five years of schooling - irreplaceable for them - that are in essence a gamble. How that's going to contribute to their salvation in this "sacred work" is something I just don't see.

The whole privatization scheme at the heart of Duncan's agenda is a Pandora's box that will be difficult, if not impossible, to remedy. If the turnaround strategy fails, there'll be a huge mess to clean up in its wake. This isn't "1,000 flowers," to be sure. If it fails, it's going to be more like a thousand-headed hydra. And how do you kill one of those?