Nonpartisan Education Review (Feb 2019)
How to Become Secretary of Education Without Really Doing Anything
Abstract
Given the amount of turmoil that Duncan's U.S. Department of Education has caused among parents and others (not just Common Core's standards and tests but the intrusive collection of personal data from children), it would have been appropriate for someone with a magna cum laude degree from Harvard to tell us clearly what problems he and his staff were trying to address as part of their conception of reforming public education, or what education reform meant to someone in the central office in the Chicago schools, what major obstacles he believed he had to cope with, and why he ended up accomplishing so little that was positive and so much that made little sense to parents.