The mythologizing of Arne Duncan is moving along at a pretty fast past. Bernie Noven alerted me to this adulatory article from the London Economist and urged me to respond using some of the recent data about Arne's record here in Chicago, saying that people "out there" have no idea about the reaiity here in Chicago. Here's what I sent.   

“Golden Boy” Arne Duncan is a pleasant fellow who held the position of Chicago Executive Officer (CEO) of the Chicago Public Schools for seven years without losing his cool.

He's so cool, in fact, that butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

As a long-time Chicago public school parent advocate, I have had a front row seat at the Arne Duncan show. When Mayor Richard Daley appointed Mr. Duncan to replace Paul Vallas in 2001, there was a palpable sense of relief across the city. The new CEO's Opie-from-Mayberry modesty was a soothing antidote to the previous six years spent with a CEO who could suck the oxygen out of a room.

We soon discovered, however, that Mr. Duncan simply provided a more complaisant and – more importantly – a more compliant cover for City Hall's machinations.

Mr. Duncan sounded so sincere when he proclaimed that it was his moral obligation to close down poor-performing schools so that the children who attended them would not have to go one more day without a high-quality education. We had to find out for ourselves that, in fact, most of the students in the closed schools were dispersed to other low-performing schools and never set foot in the newly-equipped, highly-resourced replacement schools. And when we tried to get the truth out, few in the media or among the city's powerful corporate and foundation leadership wanted to hear it.

Everyone wanted to believe Mr. Duncan's heartfelt promise to create “dramatically better” schools under the Mayor's Renaissance 2010 initiative. Doing our own research we discovered that many of the “failing” schools Mr. Duncan closed were outperforming the so-called “dramatically better” turnaround models serving similar populations. When we tried to get that truth out, the media ignored us or wrote their own “corrections” to our reports.

A report critical of Renaissance 2010 was apparently available at about the time of Mr. Duncan's confirmation hearings, but was not made public until after he took office and after the Chicago Board of Education voted to close yet another 16 schools to make way for more replacement schools. That report, by SRI International, was paid for and then spurned by the private civic fund that supports Renaissance 2010.

To date, neither of the major Chicago newspapers has reported on the damning evidence from the SRI report. Yet both newspapers regularly promote the public relations spin from CPS and charter supporters that the new schools have long waiting lists (“so they must be doing something right!”) along with the unreliable, unscientific internal CPS data showing that charter students are outscoring students in the neighborhood schools they would “probably” have attended.

Mr. Duncan has now accepted the position of top educator in the nation, although he has never taught a class, earned an education degree, or distinguished himself in education theory. He has promised to bring the same miracle to schools across the nation that he brought to Chicago. Let us hope that the truth will be more appealing to the American people than Mr. Duncan's golden promises.