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Arne Duncan, who served as a Secretary of Education under former President Obama, compared in a tweet those who are against wearing masks and getting vaccines to suicide bombers in Afghanistan who claim to be “fighting for freedom.” Arne Duncan, who was a cabinet member from 2009 to 2016, made his comments on Sunday.

If you were president of the United States, would you hire an alleged former spy for Fidel Castro to be ambassador to El Salvador, a country teetering on the brink of hard-core socialism? President Obama just did. On Dec. 9, Obama nominated Mari Del Carmen Aponte to be ambassador to El Salvador, despite the fact that in the late 1990s, the FBI discovered that she was working with Cuban intelligence officers. According to Insight Magazine, "When the FBI eventually questioned her about her involvement with Cuban intelligence, she reportedly refused to cooperate." Why would Aponte escape the Obama administration's scrutiny?...

How the president deployed white education secretary Arne Duncan to keep black students trapped in failing schools. “I was considered only because of the intervention of Gramps’ boss, who was an alumnus.” That may sound like some New York stockbroker’s son, just admitted to the upscale Trinity or Horace Mann schools. It’s actually the author of Dreams from My Father, formerly known as Barry Soetoro, touting his admission to the prestigious Punahou School, founded by Christian missionaries in 1841 and by all accounts the very best Hawaii had to offer. Though not named in the account, “Gramps,” is Barry’s grandfather...

President Donald Trump is hoping to win reelection on the economy, but the stats that he likes to tweet about — such as the value of the stock market and the unemployment rate — do not tell the real story. The truth is: The economy is badly broken for the vast majority of Americans across the vast majority of the country. About half of Americans don’t own stocks, and the share of national income going to workers — rather than investors — is actually near an all-time low. Meanwhile, almost half of all American workers earn an average of $10.22...

How would the nation's school system be different if teachers were paid like engineers? Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposed last month that a significant boost in teacher salaries could transform public schools for the better by luring the country's brightest college graduates into the profession. But it's possible that teachers would rather have more job security than a higher salary. When Michelle Rhee controlled Washington D.C.'s schools, she offered up to $130,000 salaries to teachers if they would give up their union's tenure and seniority rules and agree to be paid based on their students' test scores. She could...

In HBO’s The Wire (truly a transcendental television experience), there is a story line about an upcoming mayoral election and the concerted effort to manipulate the crime stats before the election to make the existing administration look better. Whether or not this was art imitating life, it replicates how things got started in Broward County, Florida, leading directly to the murder of 17 innocent souls in Parkland. It seems that every day more revelations come out about the collapse of the system in Parkland that failed to stop the murderer from roaming the halls of a high school with a...

In 2008 Michael B. Froman, then Citigroup executive, sends John Podesta a list of cabinet members. The email is dated Oct. 6, 2008 and bears the subject line “Lists.” It went to Podesta a month before he was named chairman of President-Elect Obama’s transition team. Froman’s list proved remarkably prescient. As it proposed, Robert Gates, a Bush holdover, became secretary of Defense; Eric Holder became attorney general; Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security; Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff; Susan Rice, United Nations ambassador; Arne Duncan, secretary of Education; Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services; Peter Orszag,...

Former President Barack Obama, on a two-day visit to Chicago that began Sunday, met privately with at-risk young men on the South Side to talk about gang violence, jobs skills and employment, a spokesman said. The meeting was with participants in a program created by Obama's longtime friend and former education secretary, Arne Duncan — and signified a return to Obama's roots as a community organizer 30 years ago on the South Side. "He said he grew up during that time because of the work he was doing," Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said. Now the former president wants to solicit...

By her public utterances, Betsy DeVos seemed spectacularly unqualified to lead the bureaucratic enterprise called the US Department of Education. But you really have to wonder: could she do any worse than the exalted mandarins of educational bureaucracy who preceded her? There is so much not right with public education these days that it could be the poster child for institutional collapse in America. Certainly in terms of the money spent per student, it illustrates perfectly Joseph Tainter’s classic collapse dynamic of over-investments in complexity with diminishing returns. Young adults are floundering in high school, or “graduating” as functional illiterates...

Former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says he’s returning to Chicago to work on improving opportunities for teens and young adults. Duncan said Thursday that he’ll join with Emerson Collective to work with people ages 17 to 24 who are neither working nor in school. The Emmerson Collective was founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. …

The Senate voted 49-40 Monday evening to confirm John B. King Jr., President Barack Obama’s nominee, as secretary of education. A total of 11 senators did not vote on King’s confirmation, while those who voted against him cited his loyalty to the system and support for Common Core education standards. King, 41, has been the acting secretary of the Department of Education since January, after Arne Duncan stepped down from the Cabinet post at the end of last year. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush, spoke in support of King on the Senate floor....

On the last day of 2015 the longest serving member of President Obama's Cabinet, Arne Duncan, quietly stepped down from his official position as what the Washington Post called "the most powerful education secretary in U.S. history." The federal government now provides about 10 percent of the money spent on public schools, and Duncan used that money, to an extent never before, to impose his will on local schools. Arne's departure is a good time to review what's wrong with America's public schools and how the federal government has made them worse. Instead of giving an account of his stewardship,...

It's a not-so rosy report card for the nation's schoolchildren. Math scores slipped for fourth and eighth graders over the last two years, and reading grades were not much better, flat for fourth graders and lower for eighth graders, according to the 2015 Nation's Report Card. ... Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged parents, teachers, and others not to panic about the scores as states embrace higher academic standards, such as Common Core.

Much has been written about Arne Duncan’s surprise announcement on October 2 that he would be leaving his post as Secretary of Education. A longtime friend of Barack Obama from Chicago, Duncan has also been the longest-serving member of the Obama Cabinet. Duncan’s announcement came only days after a glowing profile in Politico described Duncan’s undersecretary getting choked with emotion and crying when he talked about how Duncan was “fighting for students.” The article also noted that Duncan left “an unprecedented national stamp on a policy area with a long and strong tradition of local control.” Pundits who favor a...

On Friday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced he would be stepping down after nearly seven years on the job. This makes it a good moment to assess Duncan’s legacy, especially since his tenure has been shrouded by more than its fair share of puffery and overheated PR. This was predictable when it came to the usual Obama cheerleaders (Tom Friedman wanted Duncan to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state). But it also showed up at times as generous, even fawning, laurels tossed by the likes of David Brooks, Jeb Bush, Newt Gingrich, and Lamar Alexander. ... Duncan —...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan—an advocate for reform and, at times, a target for criticism from the left and the right—will be stepping down from his post in December. Duncan is one of just two remaining Cabinet secretaries who have served in the administration since the beginning of President Barack Obama’s first term. The other is Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. Obama lauded Duncan’s efforts at education reform saying “America’s going to be better off for what he has done.” During his tenure, Duncan occasionally drew the ire of liberals and conservatives for such as initiatives the Race to the Top competitive...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan grew up in Chicago and attended the private, prestigious University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. The pre-K-12 Lab Schools are progressive institutions ... resident Obama’s two daughters attended the school before moving to Washington in 2009, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s children are enrolled there now. And in the fall, Duncan’s children will be attending Lab, too, while his wife works there. .... his children will attend a progressive private school in Chicago, a school that does not follow key school reform policies that his Education Department has set for public schools. It does not, for example,...

Obama, Hu toast 'strategic mutual trust' at state dinnerBy Christina Wilkie - 01/19/11 10:30 PM ET President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao toasted U.S. and Chinese collaboration and mutual interests on Wednesday night at a festive state dinner for 225 guests at the White House. Their toasts marked the high point of an evening notable for its strict adherence to the protocol and symbolism valued in Chinese culture, but which, at the same time, managed to fulfill the Chinese delegation's request for a thoroughly American dinner party. Guests dined on a meal of pear salad, lobster, ribeye steak and...

"You'd have to be made of stone not to feel for these students," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said as he announced an Obama administration decision to forgive as many as 350,000 loans taken out by students of the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges. "Some of these schools have brought the ethics of payday lending into higher education." I do feel for any adults who took out loans to pay for college courses that they expected to help land them jobs -- but didn't. If the government forgives their debts, then they still never will get back their time or restore their hopes....

Common Core has many players in the background that most of us are not aware of. This has been a long-time coming, and a hard-sell for a vast cast of Progressives, but sell it they did, and eventually it received the clueless support of state Governors and departments of Education who thought Race-to-the-Top bribes would shore up state education coffers. Surely, no one would teach that the Boston Tea Party was a terrorist action or that Allah is “God,” or that Shariah law provides for the poor and has an exceptional code of moral conduct. Who would believe that could happen in America, but...