How Schools Work

In How Schools Work Arne Duncan, former Secretary of Education, details his journey with the U.S. Education system from his time as a student to working at the Department of Education. He highlights both the successes and failures of the systems he observed.

Arne’s mother, Sue, founded and ran the Sue Duncan Children’s Center which helped students on the south side of Chicago after school ended. In this case, help meant completing homework, preparing for the ACT, and giving children a safe place to learn after schools forced them out of the building. Arne recounts a jarring experience he had tutoring a gifted basketball player, Calvin Williams, who was unable to get a sufficient ACT score to go to college on scholarship even though they were a B Honor Roll student. The system had misled Calvin and thousands of other students into believing they were college ready by not only passing them but telling them they were meeting expectations to get into college when they were in reality too far behind to ever catch up.

Arne worked for Chicago Public Schools, confusingly abbreviated to CPS, after playing basketball in Australia where he was exposed to the cold reality of how students and parents were hurt by the school system. He discovered that the bureaucracy of public schools led CPS to advertising programs at magnet schools that did not exist and preventing after school programs from running. For the latter problem, he found that there was a misinterpretation of a contract that nobody had bothered to double check. He was eventually hired as the CEO of Education for CPS where his greater responsibility revealed more troubles. An economist helped Arne identify teachers that were cheating the system by altering students test scores to make themselves look better and keep their job. Arne also had to make the difficult decision to close down some schools while in this position after finding that schools who had been on probation and had received extra funding to improve their performance continued to not effectively teach students. When confronted, schools and teachers accused Arne and CPS of being racist tyrants and had parents adopt this narrative. They purposely obfuscated the truth that children were years behind where they should have been in an attempt to keep the broken system running.

Perhaps Arne’s most dramatic finding during his time at CPS, because of how far reaching it was, was how the No Child Left Behind Act led states to lower their standards. When reviewing the Illinois Standards Achievement Test scores to how many students scored a 20 or higher on the ACT, it was found that the majority of students who “Met Standards” did not receive a 20 or higher on the ACT and would thus not be able to attend college. Students, like Calvin Williams, were being led to believe that they were on track to going to college when that was far from the case. No Child Left Behind mandated that all states needed their students to meet expectations but did not specify how they needed to do that. To avoid losing federal funding, states had lowered standards so students would be meeting them instead of trying to provide a better education.

Arne was appointed the Secretary of Education by Obama where he was delegated with protecting the education of 100,000 schools across 14,000 districts that made up a $650 billion operation when it came to K-12 alone. Arne’s biggest initiative during this time, as I’m led to believe by the amount of space he took up writing about it, was the Race to the Top competition where states competed for additional federal funding by presenting their plan to better prepare students for higher education. No Child Left Behind was the stick which caused the states to lower standards as a side effect. Race to the Top aimed to correct that misturn by providing the carrot. At launch, there was worry that states would view the program as politically biased or not financially large enough to motivate states to participate but these things became less of a worry over time and three rounds of the competition ended up taking place.

Arne was unable to make the system perfect while in DC and there are still glaring flaws in the system today. Teachers are churned out every year with no experience and put into classrooms without adequate classroom management and content skills. They are also not held accountable for their actions in ways that can encourage them to be better. Excellent teachers were shown to have a lasting impact on students’ lives, but the system is not doing anything substantial to produce more of these educators. In addition to being lied to, students across the nation have to worry about gun violence both in and out of the classroom. Arne estimated that he went to two funerals a month of school age Chicago citizens when he was working as CEO at CPS. The tragedy of schools is moral and mortal with the root lie, according to Arne Duncan, is that we don’t value teachers or our kids.

I really enjoyed this quick read. It shed light on some problems around education I hadn’t considered. It also shined some light on some unique success cases and how data can be used to better improve the system. I was curious as to why Arne didn’t mention the Every Student Succeeds Act since it was passed while serving as Secretary of Education and replaced the No Child Left Behind Act. My biggest critique of this text was the author’s description of the Parkland shooting as something, “tragic yet remarkable,” happening in the way that students were slaughtered but also a coalition was formed to protest gun violence. That sentence struck me as a bit unsensitive but overall, I understand where he was coming from.

I can’t say I’ve seen a huge difference in the quality of education Arne described in his book and the one I continue to see and hear about today. Early into this book I had to ask myself whether I liked it because there were legitimate points being made or if I was just in agreement with it. The data backing the claims lets me believe it can be both. Today, hearing that less than two weeks of summer school can supplement a whole year of missed education, I don’t see a big difference between Calvin Williams and those public-school students. Except maybe that the present lie is blatantly apparent. Continuing with the status quo and doing everything just to get by when it comes to education is not sustainable and is a disservice to the teachers, students, and rest of the country.