Dump Duncan

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is, in my opinion, incompetent. Yes, he plays basketball with Our President, and he was named CEO of the Chicago public schools by Little Rich Daley, but so what? His most noteworthy "qualification" seems to be that he hung out with some kids from the "hood" — including a few who "made it" — while he was still in high school. Did it have something to do with his mother's white liberal "outreach" to Chicago's poor blacks, or did it have everything to do with it?

(Did he ever spend so much as a semester in the classroom? Of course not! He's one of the elite, and they don't lower themselves to a point of actually teaching. I shit upon him — figuratively, of course, because I see no opportunity to do it literally.)

Gag me with a spoon. Duncan is just another elitist asshole with "free market" pretensions — pretty much the same as Our President. Firing every goddamned teacher and administrator in Rhode Island's Central Falls High School is just fine with fucking Arne — and with fucking Barack as well.

Okay, here's an idea: instead of firing all the teachers of Central Falls, how about swapping them with the "successful" teachers of East Greenwich? East Greenwich is even more Anglo than Central Falls is minority, and vastly more affluent. Let's see how well those "successful" East Greenwich teachers do when they're tossed into the hood.

(As to the reverse: it doesn't matter who teaches affluent kids — they still succeed.)

So how do we save American education? Personally, I like that idea of teacher exchange — which would demonstrate that "bad teachers" are not the problem. That won't happen, though, so here are some other impossible ideas:

• Fire all the kids who attend "failing" schools. Better kids, certainly, would improve those underperforming schools.
• Fire all the parents of kids who attend failing schools. If their parents weren't failing, the kids would be all right.
• Mix the kids from the "failing" schools and the "successful" schools together, applying massive, random transfers. The average success rate will not change, but the number of "failing" schools will decline.

Mostly, though, get rid of Arne Duncan — and everybody else who never worked a classroom but pretends to understand what is wrong with American education. Find ways to move America's underclass into, at least, the working class — and move the working class, via education, into the middle class. The problems with American education are problems of social class — and you can't fix American education without fixing America.