The Truth Teller

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says recent international test results are a "massive wake-up call." He describes himself as the "truth teller" whose job it is to wake us up to the facts: Our schools have a twenty-five percent dropout rate. The longer children stay in school, the worse they do. And on recent world-wide tests, American students are tenth in reading literacy, twenty-forth in math, and nineteenth in science. Mr. Duncan is the first education secretary in memory who doesn't sound like a cheerleader and has had the courage to say that we should stop chanting that we're #1 because we're not. Sadly, the truth teller's eyes are not fully open to the source of the problems in our education system. Or that he has become part of the problem.

In a December 7 forum on education, Mr. Duncan said that failure to reverse academic decline in America would result in a "national, permanent recession." He talked about needing "cradle to career" strategy for improvement. And to ensure higher graduation rates, he said, we must "fix the pipeline" from high schools to college. If language is a reflection of thought, the secretary's cradle-to-career plan suggests that those who aren't aware of the history of education reform are doomed to repeat it.

Over the last fifty years, students have been trained to win the arms and space races, then to be first in business, science, and technology. We did all that but in the process wrecked the education system. Even leaders—like Mr. Duncan with his magna cum laude Harvard degree—lack the critical thinking skills to assess the problem. We also created a nation that that is being run into the ground by corporate greed and political ambition.

It's no secret that over the last fifty years, the arts and humanities became expendable. While reading is a skill, reading well is an art that requires imagination, a point of view, and perspective. The same can be said for nurturing critical and creative thinking across the curriculum. A cradle to career curriculum lacks the soul, vision, and humanity that will inspire our children to learn and our nation to live according to the nobility of the principles it espouses.

When interviewed, Mr. Duncan rattles off his to-do list for implementing his cradle-to-career strategy: great principals, world-class teachers, longer school years, meals for hungry students, eye glasses for kids who can't see to learn. While I agree with the secretary, I also know from my teaching that the successful teacher is the one with the skill to transcend the realities of the system. We have a nation full of teachers who are struggling because they haven't received good training and are working for administrators who have been trained to keep the lid on problems instead of solving them. The slash-and-burn policies that would drive "bad" teachers and principals from schools may be shortsighted. Maybe what these teachers and administrators need is a more creative type of retraining...and the leadership to help them bring order and discipline to schools that have fallen into chaos.

I'm not sure that Secretary Duncan really understands what is happening to our children and our teachers in those pipelines to college. He is not seeing how fifty years of education reforms based on political ambitions and fads have resulted in schools where thirty thousand years of what it means to be human have been reduced to an occasional elective. He is not seeing how this narrow vision of education has stifled the spirit our children, as well as their capacity to learn, and how fifty years of this approach to education has damaged the national psyche.