Arne Duncan: Windbag or Douchebag? by Mr. Teachbad

Arne Duncan

LINK

Last night I watched Jon Stewart’s inter­view with Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion Arne Dun­can.
And it was just ter­ri­ble. Here is the link. He is the car­i­ca­ture of a crazy, zero inde­pen­dent thought, Wash­ing­ton, DC Talk­ing­Point Man. It’s amaz­ing how far that and an Ivy League degree can get you.

Though she has stopped return­ing my calls, I still con­sider Valerie Strauss my girl­friend and she had a great sum­mary of the interview.

But after let­ting the dis­gust from the ini­tial inter­view pass, and after remind­ing myself that this guy is the edu­ca­tion guy for a pres­i­dent I really like; here are my questions:

How engaged with edu­ca­tion pol­icy do you really think Obama is? Does he even know that Dun­can was on The Daily Show last night? Does he care?

Can the grow­ing dis­plea­sure of teach­ers with Dun­can be used in a way that mat­ters? Or are we stuck with the Dun­can Pup­pet danc­ing for the amuse­ment of Rhee and Gates for the next five years as our best-case scenario?

Just moments ago I joined Dump Dun­can on Face­book. You should, too.

Mr. Teach­bad

Comments:

1. 
   

   Dun­can is a com­plete and total douchebag. He’s a politi­cian, not an edu­ca­tional leader. It’s ironic that his responses were cen­tered around a few talk­ing points and that he could not offer a shred of on-the-spot, cre­ative, ana­lytic thought, con­sid­er­ing that the stan­dard­ized test­ing he so enthu­si­as­ti­cally advo­cates for causes stu­dents to look for a sin­gle right answer in every­thing and to not give value to outside-the-box think­ing. I voted for Obama, but I have never been happy with his deci­sion to make Dun­can the Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion. He’s Michelle Rhee with a dick, and –worse– he’s in a posi­tion to fuck-up our entire nation’s edu­ca­tion sys­tem (some­thing Rhee can only dream of).

   Reply
2. Two Cents

   February 17, 2012 at 10:20 PM

   # 3

   Nobody in the decision-making ech­e­lon of edu­ca­tion knows a god­damn thing about edu­ca­tion. Imag­ine hav­ing a brain surgery con­fer­ence attended only by mas­ter plumbers who deter­mine pol­icy (no dis­re­spect intended to plumbers, espe­cially those who know they aren’t brain sur­geons). That is the essen­tial struc­ture of any National or State Depart­ment of Mise­d­u­ca­tion. It’s a bad joke with no punch­line.
   Ask teach­ers! It seems so sim­ple. We’re not all geniuses; I’m not sug­gest­ing we’re all brain sur­geons, but WE wit­ness each day the pos­si­bil­i­ties, prob­a­bil­i­ties, and more impor­tantly, the ani­mated faces of the pop­u­la­tion we are let­ting down. More impor­tantly, WE have ideas that are influ­enced by real­ity.
   When our mil­i­tary sets out to cap­ture ene­mies of the State, nobody sug­gests the Cub Scouts plot a plan of attack. When our build­ings are burn­ing, nobody sug­gests send­ing in the Lol­ly­pop Guild with lit­tle hoses. We don’t expect AARP to spon­sor a team in the Olympics or the Braille Insti­tute to carve Mount Rush­more. But we rely on social retards and bil­lion­aires, or their min­ions, mil­lion­aires, to under­stand the nuances of effec­tive edu­ca­tion of com­mon folk and write pol­icy that advances the col­lec­tive intel­lect.
   The fur­ther away from the class­room the play­ers of “the game” get, the more detached they are. Yet, in keep­ing with some weird, expo­nen­tially inverse, per­verse, neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tion for­mula, the more igno­rant one is about edu­ca­tion, the more power they seem to wield.
   I was and sort of still am a vague sup­porter of Obama, but he’s proven he knows jack about edu­ca­tion. He’s another out-of-touch rich guy politi­cian jack­ing things up. The only refresh­ing thing is that he’s a rich black guy jack­ing things up, so there is hope in equal oppor­tu­nity. Obama is just another floater in the petri dish in the grand (and tenuous/possibly fail­ing) exper­i­ment that is Amer­ica. Arne Dun­can isn’t even a floater. The next douche bag Pres­i­dent will con­tinue the legacy no doubt.
   The key miss­ing com­po­nent to mak­ing edu­ca­tion work is edu­ca­tors. Until some­one con­fronts this void in the process, we will con­tinue to descend into an abyss we may never swim out of. Dun­can, Obama, nor any other mis­er­able, self-serving abom­i­na­tion of human poten­tial politi­cian will pro­vide any answer beyond that which pro­vides an expe­di­ent means to their polit­i­cal ascent. Strewn among the car­nage of this wreck­age is the future of peo­ple too young and inex­pe­ri­enced to kick back–our stu­dents. Cyn­i­cal though I am, I can­not but mourn the fact that amid this mess, they are the real vic­tims and casu­al­ties. Yes, even the con­tin­gent of ass­hole non­pro­duc­tive messes occu­py­ing our class­rooms are counted here, since to some extent their con­di­tion is the result of adults who have failed them. You and I know that any mea­sure of suc­cess we have is tied to some men­tor who bestowed on us some secret to success—where is theirs? Even if it is us, can they hear us above the din of igno­rant wind­bags who call their shots?
   I guess the only hon­or­able thing to do as edu­ca­tors is to com­mit to not being the cause of their fail­ures and instead pro­vide them clues to their suc­cess so that one day they can know hat some­one was in their cor­ner. It is a self­less endeavor. Sad, but real­is­tic. In short, I’m not a sup­porter of Dun­can because he’s a bag of shit who should not have any of his tainted fin­gers stuck up the butt of edu­ca­tion. I’d like to think I’ll care which whore runs this coun­try after the next hokey elec­tion, but I’m likely not to. They’re all the same really—talking heads. It’s up to us at a grass-roots level to make a difference.