Arne Duncan and the Chicago Success Story: Myth or Reality? -...

When ex-President Bush was elected in 2000, he brought with him former Houston Superintendent of Education Rod Paige to be Secretary of Education. He also brought the "Texas miracle"—supposedly increased test scores attributed to Texas' strict accountability system. All eyes smiled on Texas as those measures quickly became part of No Child Left Behind, passed into law in 2001 by both political parties. Before the end of Bush's first term, Paige would leave in disgrace, thanks to revelations of cooked scores, forced-out students, and other barely legal means of inflating test results.

With the appointment by Barack Obama of Arne Duncan—a noneducator from the business sector who was Chicago's "chief executive officer"—as U.S. Secretary of Education, this phenomenon may repeat itself.

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We do not argue with those who claim that there have been some constructive steps while Duncan was CEO of Chicago's schools. We recognize that his administration has responded to some initiatives that have emerged from the community and been organized by grassroots organizations. These include, for example, support for the state-funded Grow Your Own Teachers program, designed to recruit community members to be credentialed in order to teach in local schools and a program to help 8th graders make a smoother transition to high school. However, the larger agenda has been corporate and privatizing.

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But Chicago Public Schools (CPS) policies are not really about Duncan or his successor. The biggest threat to finally achieving equitable and quality education in Chicago's low-income African American and Latino/a schools is not the individual who carries out the policy but a system of mayoral control and corporate power that locks out democracy. The impact of those policies includes thousands of children displaced by school closings, spiked violence as they transferred to other schools, and the deterioration of public education in many neighborhoods into a crisis situation.

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The impact of those policies includes thousands of children displaced by school closings, spiked violence as they transferred to other schools, and the deterioration of public education in many neighborhoods into a crisis situation.

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Schools are also anchors in gentrifying communities and signals to investors of the market potential of new development sites. For Chicago's working-class and low-income communities, particularly those of color, this has meant gentrification and displacement, including of thousands of public housing residents.

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Duncan has shown himself to be the central messenger, manager, and staunch defender of corporate involvement in, and privatization of, public schools, closing schools in low-income neighborhoods of color with little community input, limiting local democratic control, undermining the teachers union, and promoting competitive merit pay for teachers.

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Renaissance 2010 has been traumatic, largely ineffective, and destabilizing to communities owed a significant "education debt" (to quote Gloria Ladson-Billings) due to decades of being underserved.

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Children have been treated as cattle, shuffled around from school to school. One Mid-South school, Doolittle East, received over 500 students from June to September 2005 without additional resources to facilitate this change.

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there is no guarantee or requirement that students who attended the old schools will go to the new ones—and many don't.

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Schools that are "turned around" terminate all adults in the building, including security, custodial, clerical, paraprofessional, and kitchen staff (as if they contributed to students' poor performance), causing severe dislocation and job loss in the community. Tenured teachers who are released are reassigned for 10 months as negotiated in the union contract.

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