If you’re interested, I did a radio interview today with Kathleen Dunn of Wisconsin Public Radio in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the topic of which was my recent piece for TomDispatch.com, “The Duncan Doctrine: The Military-Corporate Legacy of the New Secretary of Education,” an investigation into Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s record as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools.
More broadly, we discussed the future of public education under Duncan, the major issues confronting urban public schools and other education-related topics, and it was a pleasure being on the show, talking with Kathleen and fielding a question or two.
Here’s a link to the audio (the interview was Wednesday, February 4):
http://wpr.org/webcasting/audioarchives_display.cfm?Code=dun
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Comments ( 2 )
Good job on analysis.
However, be careful about crediting improvement in learning based on test scores.
Have you seen the students performance exhibitions, portfolios of work and results of teacher created assessments? Without these more important pieces of student assessment any picture of achievement is largely incomplete.
Brian added these pithy words on
Feb 04 09 at
7:54 PM
And if I could just add another comment…
the guest following you, Timothy Knowles said that Duncan is data driven in setting policy.
Well, how could that be?In some schools Duncan signed off on paying kids for grades as you mention and the research is in: as Alfie Kohn notes in his 1993 book, Punished by Rewards, this is an idea that has already been tested and it failed.
Paying kids for grades doesn’t work as many studies have shown.
See page 270 up the 1999 edition.So, is this the Duncan method? Try things that have already been proven failures?
Brian added these pithy words on
Feb 04 09 at
8:22 PM
