WaPo's Closer Look at Education Secretary's Chicago Record

by Frederick M. Hess  •  Dec 29, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Cross-posted from The Enterprise Blog

http://www.frederickhess.org/2009/12/education-secretary-chicago-record

About a year after Arne Duncan was nominated to serve as Secretary of Education, today's Washington Post finally got around to running a story that takes a slightly critical slant in assessing just how well Chicago's schools actually did during Duncan's seven-year tenure as superintendent. Reporter Nick Anderson noted that Chicago's fourth-grade math gains from 2003 to 2009 ranked behind those of several big-city districts including Boston, New York, San Diego, Atlanta, Houston, and even D.C., and that its eighth-grade gains similarly lagged Boston, San Diego, Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles.

While better late than never, it would have been nice if we'd seen more of this kind of coverage last winter or during 2009 when the major newspapers were serving as something of a cheering section for Duncan, education stimulus spending, and the Race to the Top initiative. Indeed, the unbridled enthusiasm (and pooh-poohing of skeptics) that has marked news and editorial coverage is eerily reminiscent of the initial response to No Child Left Behind—and we all remember how swimmingly that turned out.

With regard to Duncan in particular, whose omnipresence has D.C. education media pros chatting about the dangers of overexposure, even the new WaPo story is remarkably gentle. Anderson says that Duncan told him that "he is careful not to exaggerate his record," though Anderson notes that Duncan also said at his Senate confirmation hearing last winter that his Chicago schools were proud "to really be a model of national reform." More significant, perhaps, is that it's easy to forget the wealth of advantages that Duncan enjoyed during his seven-year run, and why that suggests taking Duncan's prescriptions with a grain of salt.

Duncan was appointed by America's strongest mayor; followed a predecessor (Paul Vallas) who had cleaned house and gotten the books in order; was paired up with the Chicago Teachers Union, one of the nation's weakest big-city unions; led during a real estate boom that kept the coffers full and alleviated the need for hard choices; inherited the nation's single best district-specific research outfit (the famed "Chicago Consortium"); enjoyed the support of the lavishly funded and hard-charging Chicago Education Fund under the able hand of Janet Knupp; and had a "mutual consent" provision courtesy of 1995 state legislation, which meant that teachers could only be assigned to a new school if the teacher accepted the assignment and the school accepted them, a crucial bit of legislation that trumped the local contract and that most reformist superintendents would kill for. Given all this, it's appropriate to consider Duncan's more ambitious structural reforms—including school closures and his support for charter school creation—on something of a curve, and to note that the extent of his success on rethinking teacher pay was to introduce additional dollars for bonuses into a couple dozen schools out of 600.

Duncan seems like a good and honorable man. His tenure in Chicago featured some noteworthy efforts to promote structural reform. On the whole, I buy Checker Finn's assessment that Chicago is a "story of a large urban system that has made some gains and has made some promising structural changes." But there is something incongruous about his occasional shots at more aggressive and less privileged superintendents, such as D.C.'s Chancellor Michelle Rhee, for being unduly combative. It's easy to be a peacemaker when your opposition is weak, your pace is modest, and you have plenty of resources to buy off your critics. In listening to Duncan or reading his remarks, I sometimes find myself reminded of Ann Richard's gibe from the 1988 Democratic National Convention: "Poor George … he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple."

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