Joy Pullmann writes at the Federalist about former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s recap of his tenure at the head of the Obama education team.
President Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan published a memoir out Tuesday, in which the famously fatuous school leader who continually failed upward says he regrets not re-engineering even more of American life without the input of the American people or their representatives.
The memoir discusses, in part, the Obama administration’s decision to use an education slush fund from inside the 2008 “stimulus” money Christmas to lure nearly every state to adopt untried, then-unwritten curriculum mandates and tests called Common Core, then rate teachers and schools according to how well they followed these orders from people who almost uniformly had never taught in a K-12 classroom. The predictable result was years of chaos inside American schools and, nearly a decade later, zero improvement in academic outcomes.
But, Duncan says, the real problem was that Americans on both the political Left and Right strenuously objected to his pie-in-the-sky schemes for their kids and money. If he could “do all over again, I would push even harder than we did,” he writes, according to Education Week. This is the lesson the Left is learning from their failures, folks: Citizens are going to protest anyway, so compromise less. This level of arrogance is frightening.
