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"On Thursday, August 21, 2014, United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used his "Homeroom" blog to announce victory in his war on schools and teachers. After six years of decrying the inadequacy of education in the United States, Duncan "celebrated that "America's students have posted some unprecedented achievements in the last year." In addition, after battling against teacher tenure and seniority rights, Duncan decided, "we should celebrate America's teachers, principals, and students and their families.""

Most teachers in the US not only voted for President Obama, they spent considerable time and money campaigning for him. Like many other Americans, they thought the Obama presidency would bring new initiatives to help working families and help people rise out of poverty after 8 years of policieswhich favored large corporations and concentrated wealth among top earners. However, they were shocked when President Obama appointed Arne Duncan, a man who had never been a teacher, as Secretary of Education,and when policies began emanating from the new administration favoring charter schools over public schools, requiring student test scores as a basis of teacher evaluation, and encouraging "school turnaround"strategies which led to mass firing of teachers. Worse yet, the rhetoric emanating from Mr Duncan often portrayed "bad teachers" ratherthan deeply entrenched poverty, as the reason for race and class inequities in educational achievement, and for poor US performance globally on standardized tests, a concern heightened when Mr Duncan praised the mass firing of teachers in Central Falls Rhode Island and called Hurricane Katrina " the best thing that had happened to education in New Orleans" because it allowed local officials to replace public schools with charter schools

Earlier this month Carol Corbett Burris, principal of high-achieving South Side High School in New York, wrote an open letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan about her concerns about his school reform agenda and I published it here. It ended with this sentence: "Right now the ball is in your court, Mr. Duncan." Duncan, who may or may not have seen the letter, just called her to talk about reform, and this is her account of the conversation.

"Beverley Holden Johns, a nationally recognized expert in the field of disabilities, strongly disagrees with Arne Duncan. Duncan wants children with disabilities to be able to perform on the highest level of NAEP tests. She points out that NAEP was not designed for this purpose. Duncan unilaterally changed the requirements of the IDEA act, without Congressional authorization. Having changed NCLB without Congressional authorization, he must think that ignoring the law is routine. In Néw York, we learned how students with disabilities do when they took the Common Core test: 95% failed."

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan loves evaluation. He insists that everyone should willingly submit to public grading of the work they do. The Race to the Top program he created for the Obama Administration requires states to evaluate all teachers based in large part on the test scores of their students. When the Los Angeles Times released public rankings that the newspaper devised for thousands of teachers, Duncan applauded and asked, "What's there to hide?" Given Duncan's enthusiasm for grading educators, it seems high time to evaluate his own performance as Secretary of Education. Here are his grades

A new group, Educators for Shared Accountability (ESA), has issued the first-ever Value-Added Measurement (VAM) evaluation of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Secretary Duncan was rated "ineffective," based on four indicators.

The New York Times online indexes the article "$5 Billion in Grants Offered to Revisit Teacher Policies" as education. It probably should have been listed under politics. After three years of demonizing teachers as the problem with American education with its Race to the Top program, the Obama administration apparently now realizes it will need teacher union support and teacher and public school parent votes to be reelected. Suddenly, Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants to "work with teachers in rebuilding their profession and to elevate the teacher voice in federal, state and local education policy." Other than promising respect, the proposal is called the RESPECT (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching) Project, the Obama-Duncan team is offering teachers very little. The title of the program is apparently taken from a top of the pop charts song sung by Aretha Franklin in the 1960s. What Duncan seems to have missed is that the song is actually a complaint because as a woman she is not receiving any respect.

This NEPC Policy Memo presents the text of a letter from Drs. Burris and Welner to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The letter was invited by Secretary Duncan during a phone conversation with Dr. Burris. It offers concrete guiding principles for evaluation of educators and suggestions for a way forward.

National Education Association delegates blasted Education Secretary Arne Duncan, passing a resolution that orders the NEA president to "communicate aggressively, forcefully, and immediately" to President Obama that the teachers union "is appalled" by a number of things Duncan has said and done in the name of school reform. The resolution of the country's largest union (see below) includes a list of Duncan's actions and statements with which the NEA disagrees, including his standardized test-driven reform policies.

West: From PRI, Public Radio International in Princeton I'm Cornel West and this is Smiley & West. Duncan:  All of us have to move outside our comfort zone. All of us have to change.  Unions have to be continuing to evolve. School superintendents have to show more courage. Boards have to not micromanage and be supportive of the process. And when unions are showing great courage and creativity we're going to lift that up. West: My dear Brother Tavis is away this week. I will be joined by education secretary Brother Arne Duncan.  He and I have been in dialogue in his office but today we'll get him on the record. Plus, we'll go inside Finland's renowned education system with school improvement activist Brother Pasi Sahlberg.

"As part of Teacher Appreciation Week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan published an open letter to America's teachers. Perhaps Secretary Duncan writes his own speeches-but the fact that the U.S. Department of Education lists 124 employees for the Office of Communications and Outreach suggests otherwise. Perhaps the secretary's mind wanders as he reads the texts prepared for him-and perhaps he inserts his own thoughts as he reads along. Here's Duncan's letter, along with what I imagine just what those thoughts might be."

In public policy circles, crises are called "focusing events" - bringing to light a particular failing in government policy.  They require government agencies to switch rapidly into crisis mode to implement solutions. Creating the crisis itself is more novel. The right-wing, free market vision of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman informed the blueprint for the rapid privatization of municipal services throughout the world due in no small part to what author Naomi Klein calls "Disaster Capitalism." Friedman wrote in his 1982 treatise Capitalism and Freedom, "When [a] crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around" In Klein's book The Shock Doctrine, she explains how immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Friedman used the decimation of New Orleans' infrastructure to push for charter schools, a market-based policy preference of Friedman acolytes. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools at the time, and later described Hurricane Katrina as "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." Duncan is of the liberal wing of the free market project and a major supporter of charter schools. There aren't any hurricanes in the Midwest, so how can proponents of privatization like Mayor Rahm Emanuel sell off schools to the highest bidder? They create a crisis.

In August 2008, many teachers in America and this one in particular were thrilled about Barak Obama's nomination. Linda Darling-Hammond was a leading spokesperson articulating the Obama campaigns' education positions. Darling-Hammond had pushed for professional education standards for teachers and had presented data showing the importance of teacher training. Yet, by November Alexander Russo of the Huffington Post was reporting "The possibility of Darling-Hammond being named Secretary has emerged as an especially worrisome possibility among a small but vocal group of younger, reform-minded advocates who supported Obama because he seemed reform-minded on education issues like charter schools, performance pay, and accountability. These reformists seem to perceive Darling-Hammond as a touchy-feely anti-accountability figure who will destroy any chances that Obama will follow through on any of these initiatives." In December, Obama tapped Chicago's Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Because Duncan had no real education experience it was considered highly likely that Darling-Hammond would be the Deputy Secretary of Education. On February 19, 2009 the New Republic reported, "Darling-Hammond was a key education adviser during the election and chaired Obama's transition education policy team. She has been berated heavily by the education reform community, which views her as favoring the status quo in Democratic education policy for her criticisms of alternative teacher certification programs like Teach for America and her ties with teachers' unions." They reported that she was going home to California to work on other priorities and would not be a part of the new administration.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a speech Tuesday pushed higher education officials to "think more creatively - and with much greater urgency - about how to contain the spiraling costs of college and reduce the burden of student debt on our nation's students." At a time when the Occupy movement has helped push college costs into the national spotlight, the Education Department characterized the speech, delivered in Las Vegas, as the start of a "national conversation about the rising cost of college." The department took the opportunity to call attention to steps the Obama administration has taken to reduce the net price that students and families pay for higher education and make it easier to pay back student loans.

I sat down with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan yesterday for a wide-ranging interview on the hot education topics of the day: waivers, Race to the Top, reauthorization, and the election. If you want more than just the highlights, check out the full transcript. Or, read through snippets of our conversation below.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan plays school with scantrons. Those lovely lead-filled bubbles help him sort the wheat from the chaff in classrooms all over America. He and other market-based reformers claim there is now "scientific evidence" to sort the ineffective teacher from the strong.  And after the weak contributors to scantron scores are found, we can fire our way to excellence.  We will drill and drill our students and raise the bar so high, every child will walk under it.  The caring teachers who spark creativity and joy will disappear. She will be replaced by those who cower in fear of their number score.  My colleagues are already seeing the transformation. The rich conversations about teaching and learning that used to occur after observations are being replaced by timid voices asking, "What is my number?" But do not worry, as we Race to the Top, Mr. Duncan has a plan of 'best practices' in place to increase educational productivity.

The Education Law Center has complained to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan about elements of the Christie administration's proposal for tracking schools' progress. In a letter to Duncan made public Tuesday, the center protested that the Christie plan could tap some federal money intended for disadvantaged students and use it instead to reward gains in schools with few at-risk children.

The similarities between contemporary American educational reform and Soviet educational reform of the 1930s are as striking as they are discomfiting. Of the following three statements, which refer to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and which refer to America today? 1.  "Teachers are asked to achieve significant academic growth for all students at the same time that they instruct students with ever-more diverse needs….The stakes are huge-and the time to cling to the status quo has passed."   2.  "We had to have a campaign for 100 percent successful teaching…all students must learn." 3.  "Poor work by the school and poor achievement by the entire class and by individual pupils are the direct result of poor work by the teacher."   Although all three of the above sentiments could be attributable to current officeholders in Washington, D.C., only the first is American-from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (Duncan 2010, January). The second and third are policy statements which emanated from old Soviet policy papers on educational reform (Ewing, 2001, p. 487).

Two rapping teachers with a microphone tell it like it is: A  must see/must hear video!  They ask Obama to fire Duncan and appoint Diane Ravitch as Education Secretary.

George Orwell might well be proud to see how Arne Duncan has risen to the challenge of using language to disguise government actions. Watching the Twitter Town Hall yesterday was an exercise in frustration. Unfortunately, the Department of Education has released only tweets that digest his responses down into little nuggets, so to hear what he really said requires careful listening. I took some time to take down some of what was said in the first five minutes, when interviewer John Merrow focused on No Child Left Behind and the process Duncan is setting up to grant waivers.