Report: Obama fibbed about Arne Duncan’s “success”

posted at 4:00 pm on July 13, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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When Barack Obama appointed Arne Duncan to be Secretary of Education, he bragged about Duncan’s achievements in improving Chicago’s schools as a reason for the appointment.  A new report from a group that supported Duncan gives quite a different assessment, though, and calls into question Obama’s honesty in making those claims.  Instead of the supposed miracle in Chicago education, a new study says that schools have shown “little progress” in the last six years, and that at least one of the metrics cited by Obama was fallacious:

New research from a Chicago civic group takes direct aim at the city’s “abysmal” public high school performance — and puts a new spin on the academic gains made during the seven years that Arne Duncan led the Chicago schools before he was named U.S. Education secretary.

The Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, a supporter of Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s push for more control of city schools, issued the report June 30. It says city schools have made little progress since 2003. …

In December, Obama said that during a seven-year tenure, Duncan had boosted elementary school test scores “from 38% of students meeting the standards to 67%” — a gain of 29 percentage points. But the new report found that, adjusting for changes in tests and procedures, students’ pass rates grew only about 8 percentage points.

Obama also said Chicago’s dropout rate “has gone downevery year he’s been in charge.” Though that’s technically true, the committee says it’s still unacceptably high: About half of Chicago students drop out of the city’s non-selective-enrollment high schools. And more than 70% of 11th-graders fail to meet state standards, a trend that “has remained essentially flat” over the past several years.

Even among those who graduate, it says, skills are poor: An analysis of students entering the Chicago City Colleges in fall 2006 showed that 69% were not prepared for college-level reading, 79% were not prepared for writing, and 95% were not prepared for math.

The cheerleading for Duncan intended to also endorse the greater control given to Daley.  Spinning those numbers is crucial for Daley, who will be loathe to give up any of the power that he got to rescue the failing Chicago public-school system.

The most dishonest spin comes from using statistics that do not reflect the changes in testing and scoring and treating them as a consistent series of data.  Instead of focusing on actual improvement in education, it appears that Duncan and Daley instead focused on ways in which to give the false impression of progress.  The results are sadly predictable.  Despite the almost-doubling of elementary test scores, the end result is the same — a high dropout rate, and an outrageously high failure rate on state standards.  The obvious conclusion is that Duncan and Daley were a lot more interested in political and statistical machinations than in making the kind of dramatic changes necessary to ensure quality education for Chicago’s children.

Now, thanks to Obama and the Chicago Way, we have that mindset applied to the national educational effort.  Too bad the media didn’t do more diligent reporting on Duncan and Chicago-area test scores when they instead breathlessly repeated the White House/Daley Machine spin on Arne Duncan.

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