Arne Duncan, Slayer of Irony

Year after his stint as secretary of education, Arne Duncan can still push irony so far that it collapses and implodes under its own weight,

Duncan appears in a recent EdWeek piece, one more asking the question, "What can Trump actually do to education?" This particular piece by Alyson Klein was considering how extensively Trump could rewrite curriculum. Klein notes that there are rules against that sort of thing, and that's when Duncan pops up with this- 

But Arne Duncan, who served as education secretary for seven years under President Barack Obama, doesn’t think wonky legalese will matter much to a chief executive who was found guilty of multiple felonies and was impeached twice by the House of Representatives—including for inciting a mob to disrupt the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

“They could trample those. They could run roughshod over those,” Duncan said of ESSA’s prohibitions. “There are literally zero schools in America teaching CRT right now. That’s not a thing. It’s not reality.

“But he doesn’t live in reality. He creates his own reality,” Duncan continued. “And so, they can take money from schools and say they are teaching critical race theory. They can just make it up and move it to a state where people support him politically.”

 As I've noted elsewhere, we know that Trump could hang on to Title I funding and use it as leverage to extort compliance from the states. We know he could do this because we have seen that trick before. It was a feature of No Child Left Behind, with its "gate all your test scores above or else," and was doubled down by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who declared that states would adopt acceptable standards (with the hint that Common Core would be acceptable) and acceptable standardized tests or else. "Or else" means "or else no money for you." He used Title I funds to threaten California and any states thinking of following them into not adopting his preferred tests. 

Why does ESSA have provisions aimed at reining in the Department of Education? Because the one bipartisan agreement that Congress could reach was thatArne Duncan had overreached his authorityway too much. And what was his reaction at the time?He told Politicothat the department had lawyers smart enough to circumvent any guardrails that Congress erected.

And when it comes to disconnection from reality, we could turn to the part where Duncan wanted to shift special education oversight because "We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to robust curriculum, they excel." In this construction, "excel" is doing a lot of work, but Duncan seemed to think that students with special needs only really specially needed encouragement and expectations.

Or we could discuss the reality of the policy notion that testing would fix everything, that, as we used to say till we were out of breath, weighing the pig will somehow make it grow.

Or we could discuss how, since leaving office, Duncan has repeatedly attempted to retcon his administration and create a new historical reality (here, here, here ).

Look, I don't want to stay mad at Duncan forever, and I have no doubt that the Trump administration is going to do many wrong things to education. But the unrepentant and devoid-of-self-awareness Duncan is not the guy to call him out. Linda McMahon isn't going to "trample" anything so much as just follow a trail that Duncan had a large hand in blazing (and DeVos followed), and if she responds by referencing pots and kettles, she’s not wrong. It's one more example of how some feckless Democrats abandoned public education and set the stage for the far right, and until they fess up and apologize, they aren't credible critics of the coming messes.