By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--March 13, 2017
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Once elected, Obama wasted no time: He tapped fellow Chicagoan Arne Duncan as education secretary. Duncan, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago and whose mother ran an after-school tutoring program for disadvantaged students there, was then head of the city's school system. And he'd already made a name for himself as a reformer by experimenting with various school turn-around interventions – most notably closing schools that were both underperforming and underenrolled. Together, Obama and Duncan convinced Congress to super charge the School Improvement Grant, a program aimed at overhauling states' worst schools by giving it $3 billion from the economic stimulus. And along with the nearly $4 billion in Race to the Top funding, the two set out to radically improve the country's poorest performing schools – an effort Duncan described as one of the "biggest bets" of the administration. "We could really move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children," said Duncan at the time.
As one of Obama's longest-serving cabinet heads, Duncan oversaw the program for seven years before stepping down, at which point the federal government had directed more than $7 billion to the School Improvement Grant, and millions more to smaller-scale programs, like My Brother's Keeper and Promise Neighborhoods, aimed at picking off smaller parts of the larger school turnaround effort. But just one day before the end of Obama's tenure at the White House, the federal government issued a report that showed that despite the intense focus and surge in resources, the majority of failing schools were hardly any better off. Using data from nearly 500 schools in 22 states, the report, published Jan. 19 by the Institute of Education Sciences, showed no evidence that the program had significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation or college enrollment. So there's a waste of eight years and billions of dollars. No improvement whatsoever. Thanks Obama!But anyone could and should have seen this coming, because the problem with public education isn't that there's too little support for educational institutions. It's that there's too little commitment to serving students and their families. The education establishment has become a fiefdom whose feudal lord is its own bureaucracy, committed above all else to its own self-preservation and the resistance of any change. The Obama/Duncan attempt to change it by pouring money and support into it was bound to fail because all that did was fortify the fiefdom.
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