Free Republic

There have been many frauds of historic proportions — for example, the financial pyramid scheme for which Charles Ponzi was sent to prison in the 1920s, and for which Franklin D. Roosevelt was praised in the 1930s, when he called it Social Security. In our own times, Bernie Madoff's hoax has made headlines. But the biggest hoax of the past two generations is still going strong — namely, the hoax that statistical differences in outcomes for different groups are due to the way other people treat those groups. The latest example of this hoax is the joint crusade of...

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan got a $50,000 payout in unused sick and vacation leave when he left his job as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools system to join the Obama administration. According to a new report by the watchdog group Better Government Association, the secretary was able to take advantage of department policy to covert unused, accrued benefits into a cash payout. Since 2006, Chicago's school system has paid $265 million to employees under this policy, with $227 million for sick days alone. The policy was put into place by the Chicago school board and predates Duncan, a...

Arne Duncan: Pay great teachers $150K By: Tim Mak January 27, 2012 09:28 AM EST Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Friday that the starting salaries of teachers should double, up to $65,000 a year, and that excellent teachers should be able to make up to $150,000. “I’ve been very radical on this. I think that young teachers, we should double their salaries [to] $60,000, $65,000. I think that great teachers should be able to make $130,000, $140,000, $150,000 - pick a number,” said Duncan on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Duncan suggested those figures while responding to a question about New York...

If Education Secretary Arne Duncan has his way, kids would be spending a lot more time at school — and a three-month summer would be a thing of the past. Duncan joked with attendees at a luncheon at the National Press Club Tuesday in Washington that he would like schools to stay open 13 months out of the year. Then he told the audience of over 100 that he seriously supports longer school hours. “In all seriousness, I think schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11-12 months of the year,” Duncan said....

Education Secretary Arne Duncan's insult to Texas public education was a politically motivated distortion that doesn't become a federal official in his position. What a load this guy is. We shouldn't hear lies come out of the mouth of the nation's top education official (photo at right) when he discusses the record of millions of students and dedicated educators. People work too hard to have their work dismissed with his pathetic statement about feeling "very, very badly for the children there." TEA Commissioner Robert Scott emailed Duncan a sharp response last night (keep reading for text), and I'm glad he...

States are rushing for the No Child Left Behind exit door. Within hours of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement Monday that he will grant waivers from federal mandates, several states announced that they would apply for relief. Many others are expressing interest, pending the release of more details next month. Tennessee didn’t wait for Mr. Duncan’s news conference: The state sent its waiver request two weeks ago. The mad dash to escape high-stakes testing and gain more flexibility represents “a sense of desperation” among states, said Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “There’s no question...

State and local education officials have been begging the federal government for relief from student testing mandates in the federal No Child Left Behind law, but school starts soon and Congress still hasn't answered the call. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says he will announce a new waiver system Monday to give schools a break. The plan to offer waivers to all 50 states, as long as they meet other school reform requirements, comes at the request of President Barack Obama, Duncan said. More details on the waivers will come in September, he said. The goal of the No Child Left...

Obama administration Education Secretary Arne Duncan is announcing today a system of waivers relieving public schools from federally-mandated reading and math proficiency tests.

Hard-hitting reporting of higher education has been so abysmal for so long that when newspapers cut back on their coverage of it, readers seldom notice. Too many reporters were inclined to merely parrot the press releases of the colleges and universities they cover. Now that readers can obtain this information for themselves on the internet, that approach is particularly superfluous. More than honorable mention on this score must be given to Scott Jaschik, co-founder and editor of Inside Higher Ed.com. As well, recently I had a chance to see the formidable Amanda Ripley in action. A contributor to Time and...

In a strongly worded legal brief, the Obama administration has said the federal act that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman was motivated by hostility toward gays and lesbians and is unconstitutional. The brief was filed Friday in federal court in San Francisco in support of a lesbian federal employee's lawsuit claiming the government wrongly denied health coverage to her same-sex spouse. The Justice Department says Karen Golinski's suit should not be dismissed because the law under which her spouse was denied benefits — the Defense of Marriage Act — violates the constitution's guarantee of equal...

Obama Administration Holds LGBT ‘Youth Summit’ – Gov’t ‘Has Finally Come Out of the Closet,’ Official Says Monday, June 06, 2011 By Penny Starr (CNSNews.com) – Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius spoke at the first “Federal LGBT Youth Summit” on Monday after being introduced by a homosexual on her staff, who said the secretary “gets us” and is “tireless” in her support of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender youth. “Your federal government has finally come out of the closet in support of LGBT youth,” said Pam Hyde, HHS administrator for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services. “It’s great...

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will give remarks at the Department’s first-ever Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) youth summit at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, June 7, at the Washington Court Hotel in Washington, D.C. The two-day summit, “Creating and Maintaining Safe and Supportive Environments for LGBT Youth,” will take place Monday-Tuesday, June 6-7. Duncan will highlight the administration’s commitment to ensuring equal access to education for LGBT students as it does for all students. He also will discuss the Department’s Office for Civil Rights recently released guidance on the protection against harassment in an education setting based on gender,...

Keeping the Dream Alive: President Obama's Work with the African American CommunityPosted by Michael Blake on April 08, 2011 at 10:30 AM EDT On Wednesday, April 6th, the National Action Network kicked off its 20th anniversary convention, celebrating "20 years of struggle, 20 years of progress, 20 years of shaping history." During the day, four Cabinet members--Education Secretary Duncan, Attorney General Holder, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan--spoke to convention attendees about how the Obama Administration has been working with the African American community. That night, President Obama spoke at the Keepers of the Dream Awards Gala....

White House memo notes shortage of applicants for contest to have Obama to speak at high school graduation The White House is ramping up an effort to promote a nationwide competition to decide which high school wins a commencement speech by President Obama. An internal White House memo indicates that the White House is facing a shortage of applications less than a week before the deadline. The competition was extended from the February 25 deadline until Friday, March 11 after few schools met the original application deadline. CBS News has learned a White House Communications Office internal memo dated February...

U.S Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told CNSNews.com today in a video interview that “nobody” can be satisfied with the reading and mathematics scores achieved by eighth graders in Wisconsin public schools, noting that “they’re clearly not what they should be.” However, Duncan declined to pin the blame on teachers for the unsatisfactory performance of Wisconsin public schools, arguing that "we can point fingers lots of places" and that “everybody” from parents, to school administrators, to the local community, to the business community also needs to be challenged to make the public schools better. In the latest round of National...

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and filmmaker Spike Lee teamed up Monday to urge more black men to consider teaching. More than 1 million teachers will retire during the next decade, according to federal estimates, and leaders have embarked on a nationwide drive to build a more diverse teaching force. Duncan on Monday took the campaign to Atlanta's Morehouse College, the nation's only all-male historically black college. Teachers should look more like the people they serve, Duncan said. While more than 35 percent of the nation’s public school students are black or Latino, less than 15 percent of the teachers...

This is scary: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/10/21/president-obama-it-gets-better

Obama's Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, pledged to turn America's school children into good enviro zombies at an appearance at a Virginia high school earlier in the month and he intends to use federal funds to do it. CNSNews reports: “Right now, in the second decade of the 21st century, preparing our children to be good environmental citizens is some of the most important work any of us can do. It’s work that will serve future generations--and quite literally sustain our world,” Duncan said at the Education Department’s "Sustainability Education Summit: Citizenship and Pathways for a Green Economy." "This week’s...

Malcolm A. Kline, Malcolm A. Kline Inquiring minds want to know if the U. S. Department of Education considered an Al Sharpton rally an educational experience. On September 2, 2010, Americans for Limited Government “filed an official Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Department of Education … related to Secretary Arne Duncan’s well publicized efforts to encourage attendance at a rally by Al Sharpton on August 28, 2010. “The FOIA asks that the Department provide copies of any records that exist in any of the following categories and that were created on or after January 1, 2010:...

The Department of Education on Thursday awarded $330 million to two groups of states to design new standardized tests to replace the end-of-year reading and math exams used over the past decade to measure achievement under the federal No Child Left Behind law. The new tests, which are to be aligned with the common academic standards that nearly 40 states have adopted in recent months, are to be ready for the 2014-15 school year, the department said. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the new tests would be of higher quality than the exams most states use now, which he has...

President Obama's top education official urged government employees to attend a rally that the Rev. Al Sharpton organized to counter a larger conservative event on the Mall. "ED staff are invited to join Secretary Arne Duncan, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and other leaders on Saturday, Aug. 28, for the 'Reclaim the Dream' rally and march," began an internal e-mail sent to more than 4,000 employees of the Department of Education on Wednesday. Sharpton created the event after Glenn Beck announced a massive Tea Party "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where King spoke in 1963. The Washington Examiner learned...

Despite promises that the exams -- which determine whether students advance to the next grade -- would not be dumbed down this year, students got "partial credit" for wrong answers after failing to correctly add, subtract, multiply and divide. Some got credit for no answer at all. "They were giving credit for blatantly wrong things," said an outraged Brooklyn teacher who was among those hired to score the fourth-grade test. State education officials had vowed to "strengthen" and "increase the rigor" of both the questions and the scoring when about 1.2 million kids in grades 3 to 8 -- including...

Obama administration calls for emergency education spending Posted: May 26th, 2010 01:07 PM ET From CNN Radio's Dick Uliano Arne Duncan is calling for emergency education spending. Arne Duncan is calling for emergency education spending. Washington (CNN) - Education Secretary Arne Duncan says President Obama "absolutely supports" a congressional proposal for $23 billion in emergency education spending in order to stave off teacher layoffs and cancellation of summer classes. Duncan told CNN Wednesday that the emergency spending request is needed to head off "an education catastrophe, " in which as many as 300-thousand teachers across the country could be laid...

While Washington, D.C., focuses on the federal power grab in health care, there's another ongoing drive for regimentation that hasn't received the scrutiny it deserves. A panel of educators assembled by 48 state governors and school superintendents just released a uniform set of math and reading standards for the nation's students. If the Common Core State Standards Initiative were totally voluntary, there would be little to fear. But for too many education reformers, whatever is not forbidden is compulsory. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said that "if we accomplish one thing in the coming years, it should be...

Chicago parents have long suspected that a shadow admissions system gave the elite an alternate way to go after a seat at the city's highly coveted college-prep high schools. Turns out they were right. The latest bit of evidence is this week's revelation that former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan's office kept a list of aldermen, businessmen and others in positions of power who called his office to appeal admissions denials at test-based public high schools. The flood of calls suggests these folks knew the regular route wasn't the only route. It appears that most kids were ultimately rejected,...

Politics: Education Secretary Arne Duncan taught us Orwell this week, showing how some are more equal than others with his VIP list for admission to Chicago's best schools. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. Duncan, hailed as a miracle-working reformer in the Chicago school system he once led, didn't quite persuade that city's well-connected elites of the value of his reforms, given the number who sought placement in the district's better schools. Duncan insists it was just an appeals list on which parents could place kids who didn't make it into the schools they wanted. He says that he didn't do...

Chicago Way Education Bethany Stotts, March 24, 2010 U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan may have left Chicago, but the politics of his former position as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools continues to follow him to D.C. “While many Chicago parents took formal routes to land their children in the best schools, the well-connected also sought help through a shadowy appeals system created in recent years under former schools chief Arne Duncan,” reported the Chicago Tribune on March 23. “Whispers have long swirled that some children get spots in the city’s premier schools based on whom their parents know....

Chicago Breaking News reported late last night that former Chicago schools chief and current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan manipulated a system to favor powerful political allies by placing their children in the schools of their choice. The discovery of a list, the existence of which had been long denied by the city, and its composition of mainly high-powered political figures calls into question the appeals system used to reconsider applications that had been denied by the top Chicago-area schools: While many Chicago parents took formal routes to land their children in the best schools, the well-connected also sought help...

Seeking to step up enforcement of civil rights laws, the federal Department of Education says it will be sending letters in coming weeks to thousands of school districts and colleges, outlining their responsibilities on issues of fairness and equal opportunity. As part of that effort, the department intends to open investigations known as compliance reviews in about 32 school districts nationwide, seeking to verify that students of both sexes and all races are getting equal access to college preparatory curriculums and to advanced placement courses. The department plans to open similar civil rights investigations at half a dozen colleges. Education...

How do we get politically correct students and schools? We get them by churning out politically correct teachers from teacher colleges and teacher credentialing programs which filter the teaching of education through the lens of political correctness. In a press release in October of this year, U.S. Secretary of Education's Arne Duncan stated, “By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom. America’s university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change--not evolutionary tinkering.” The press release...

The Democratic Party has battled for universal health care this year, and over the decades it has admirably led the fight against poverty — except in the one way that would have the greatest impact. Good schools constitute a far more potent weapon against poverty than welfare, food stamps or housing subsidies. Yet, cowed by teachers’ unions, Democrats have too often resisted reform and stood by as generations of disadvantaged children have been cemented into an underclass by third-rate schools. President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are trying to change that — and one test for the Democrats...

Barack Obama’s schools chief tries to incite dramatic reform that will last. Mr Duncan, the former chief of Chicago’s schools, finds himself in an unprecedented position. No education secretary has ever had so much money to drive reform. Thanks largely to the federal stimulus, he has more than $10 billion, including $3.5 billion to turn around schools. More than $4 billion will go to states that pursue specific initiatives: final guidelines for applications will be issued this autumn, and states are scurrying to prepare. Mr Duncan calls the money a “moon shot”—for his department and for the country. With his...

SNIPPET: "(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are both traveling to Copenhagen this week to promote Chicago's bid to host to the 2016 Olympic Games--and they will be making the 3,979-mile trip on separate airplanes." SNIPPET: "As reported earlier by CNSNews.com, a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report cited two cost estimates for an hour of air travel by the president, vice president and first lady. One estimate comes from the White House Military Office, the other from the U.S. Air Force. Using the CRS cost estimates and the inflation adjuster from the Bureau of Labor Statisitcs,...

Arne Duncan on Face the Nation saying it's silly what parents are doing, Bob Schieffer going right along with the theme...

Those who are whipping up hysteria over the president's address are playing a dangerous game with an unhinged segment of public opinion. While it long ago crossed the borders of reason and civility, the hysteria over healthcare reform is -- at some level -- understandable, because wellness and infirmity are really just stand-ins for those most terrifying of issues, life and death. But there is no similar way to rationalize the bizarre controversy now raging over President Obama's plan to deliver a brief televised address on Tuesday to the nation's grammar school children. According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan,...

Many of my friends on the left consoled me last November by saying I'd probably have more fun and more material working from the opposition. Holy crap were they right! That is, it's fun until this poop-flinging bunch of lefty monkeys completely dismantles the Constitution and exiles me to a patchouli camp in Berkeley. For the moment, however, it's an unmitigated blast watching Team Lightbringer egregiously overreach and stunningly underachieve. There's enough toolishness coming from the left to keep a staff of bloggers busy but I'll stick with the topic from the previous two days: the Obama "Can't Start 'Em...

Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praised the federal economic recovery package Wednesday, saying it had saved more than 1,600 jobs in Orange County's public school system alone and 26,000 education jobs across Florida. Speaking at Jackson Middle in Orlando, the two called public school teachers the key to improving the country's economic situation and said many already do excellent work. But they also said that President Barack Obama's administration isn't interested in maintaining the status quo but instead wants to use the unprecedented resources now available as part of the recovery act -- some...

As the Obama administration pushes for more charter schools, a teachers' union is pushing for a bigger role in them. It's a new development for the charter school movement, a small but growing — and controversial — effort to create new, more autonomous public schools, usually in cities where traditional schools have failed. On Tuesday in New York, the United Federation of Teachers expects to formalize a contract with teachers at Green Dot New York Charter School in the Bronx, a high school run by Green Dot, a nonprofit group that operates charter schools. Ten other New York charter schools...

The founder of the homosexual activist group GLSEN, which promotes homosexual clubs in high schools , middle schools and grade schools and is the driving force behind the annual "Day of Silence" celebration of homosexuality in many districts, has been handed a federal appointment where he will be responsible for overseeing "safety" in the nation's public schools. Linda Harvey of Mission America, which educates people on anti-Christian trends in the nation, said it is nothing more than a "tragedy" for an open homosexual who has "had an enormously detrimental impact on the climate in our schools" to be in such...

The founder of the homosexual activist group GLSEN, which promotes homosexual clubs in high schools, middle schools and grade schools and is the driving force behind the annual "Day of Silence" celebration of homosexuality in many districts, has been handed a federal appointment where he will be responsible for overseeing "safety" in the nation's public schools. ... The appointment of Kevin Jennings was posted – with little fanfare – on a government list of federal jobs recently. He was named by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to be the Assistant Deputy Secretary in the Office of Safe Schools. ... "In...

Washington, D.C.'s school voucher program for low-income kids isn't dead yet. But the Obama Administration seems awfully eager to expedite its demise. About 1,700 kids currently receive $7,500 vouchers to attend private schools under the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and 99% of them are black or Hispanic. The program is a huge hit with parents -- there are four applicants for every available scholarship -- and the latest Department of Education evaluation showed significant academic gains. Nevertheless, Congress voted in March to phase out the program after the 2009-10 school year unless it is reauthorized by Congress and the D.C. City...

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has signed a formal educational partnership agrement with the Peoples Republic of China, a Communist regime that, according to the U.S. State Department, subjects political dissidents to re-education through labor. Duncan signed the 2009 Joint Statement of Exchange and Cooperation with the Chinese Minister of Education Zhou Ji on April 16. The documents signed by both Secretary Duncan and Zhou Ji include, among other items, the following initiatives: “The U.S. Network for Education Information (USNEI) Web site be expanded to include links to the academic accreditation Web site in China and other countries (timeline 2009...

While President Obama, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and Attorney General Eric Holder share an anti-gun ideology, they might not be the greatest threat to the Second Amendment among the current administration. Their gun control efforts could be vastly outdone by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s habit of equating gun bans with curing a “public health epidemic.” Prior to becoming secretary of education, Duncan was CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) from 2001 to 2008. During that time, student performance in CPS remained static or fell even further behind the national average. For example, in October 2008 the Chicago Tribune...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan did a public service last week when he visited New York City and spoke up for charter schools and mayoral control of education. That was the reformer talking. The status quo Mr. Duncan was on display last month when he let Congress kill a District of Columbia voucher program even as he was sitting on evidence of its success.

The NYT reports that during a press phone call yesterday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan "unleashed a barrage of dismal statistics about the South Carolina schools" whose Governor, Mark Sanford "has told the Obama administration that he would not accept some $577 million in educational stimulus money for South Carolina unless he could use it to pay down state debt." During the putative barrage of dismal statistics Duncan noted that "only 15 percent of the state’s black students are proficient in math and that the state has one of the nation’s worst high school graduation rates." This is a pot kettle...

On his way to Washington to become Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan had to step over the bodies Chicago school children he was sworn to educate and keep safe. With incompetence as the hallmark of the Obama Administration, it’s no surprise the Chicago public school system left behind by Arne Duncan is a dangerous and decided failure producing few success stories and questionable academic progress. In a field of tax cheats, fakers and pretenders, Arne Duncan may be the worst of Obama’s gang of Chicago incompetents because of his failure to provide a safe environment for the children under...

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In 2001, when Arne Duncan became the CEO of Chicago Public Schools—the third-largest district in the nation, accounting for more than 600 schools and 400,000 students—some local education insiders worried aloud about his lack of experience and adopted a cautiously pessimistic wait-and-see attitude. Eight years later, Duncan, 44, heads to Washington to serve as President Obama’s secretary of education, having earned a reputation as an even-keeled pragmatist and mostly good grades across constituencies for transforming CPS in substantial—and occasionally controversial—ways. Duncan talked to Chicago magazine the day after Congress passed the $787-billion stimulus package, which includes $100 billion in new...

Those lazy days of summer may become a thing of the past if the new secretary of education has his way. Arne Duncan, the Cabinet secretary charged with overhauling America's educational system, is studying programs that keep kids in school longer to boost their academic achievements. "When I go out and talk about that, that doesn't always make me popular with students. They like the long summers," Duncan said in an interview Wednesday with CNN conducted in the Education Department's library. But Duncan said American students are "at a competitive disadvantage" because the United States has shorter school years than...

The managing editor of Budget & Tax News says no money for education should have been included in the recently signed economic "stimulus" bill. In a recent press conference, Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned that if the economic stimulus bill did not pass, up to 600,000 education workers could lose their jobs as states face enormous budget shortfalls. But Steve Stanek of The Heartland Institute argues that the bill should not have included the allotted $87 billion for education. Stanek argues that the stimulus basically amounts to a payoff for teachers and teachers unions who supported Obama. "The teachers unions...