Arne Duncan: Your Voice for a Commodified Education

Last week, CNN's Campbell Brown took new Education Secretary Arne Duncan to task on "accountability," No Child Left Behind, and testing. As you can see, she gave him every opportunity to say something in the teeny-tiniest way progressive when it comes to education, and he steadfastly refused. Huzzah, Scantrons for everyone! (Greg Palast has a nice summary of Duncan's very pro-corporate education career.)

DUNCAN: We want to continue to raise the bar academically, raise standards, raise expectations, and there's opportunities in the stimulus package to do that.
[...]
CB: But be specific. I mean you certainly know about it, about No Child Left Behind and what it entails to have formed an opinion on whether it's the right way to go.

DUNCAN: Yeah well again, philosophically, directionally, it's the right way, but there's many things in the invitation that we think we can improve on moving forward.

CB: Like what?

DUNCAN: There's a number of things. I'm very interested in graduation rates, and we want to make sure more of our students are graduating from high school and prepared with college-ready, career-ready skills. I'm interested in raising the bar and having high standards. I'm also interested in growth towards those standards, how much a student is gaining each year. But again, I really want to get out...

CB: Let me stop you because there's specific complaints here, and the President has talked about them. He certainly did on the campaign trail. We have teachers saying that the reality of No Child Left Behind, is that because it uses testing to grade a school's performance that many teachers find themselves teaching for the test. And again, the President has talked about this. Now, I assume that's not what we think is best for the kids so how do you fix that?

DUNCAN: Again, what you need is good tests. You need good tests, good assessments, and there's a huge...

CB: But even if you have a good test, how does that prevent a teacher from teaching to that test?

DUNCAN: Well again if you want students passing Algebra, they need to know Algebra so that's not necessarily a bad thing. What you want to have is great tests with a high standard. You need to make the tests, make your standards very clear, simpler; you need to have real good assessments that help students get to that point. You need good data systems behind that and again I think we can take a real thoughtful approach to this.
[...]
CB: Let me ask you that because there's not a lot of time left. There are some people who will argue that we should let No Child Left Behind expire at the end of this school year as its scheduled to do and just start from scratch. Do you agree with that or no?

DUNCAN: Well, I think we'll look to reauthorize late this calendar year. Again these first couple months we're pushing very hard to have this historic stimulus plan passed. Once its passed we need to focus intensively on making sure we implement and execute against it impeccably and then use the next few months again to get out, to listen, to learn, to hear from the American public and then come back and reauthorize later in the school year.