What Arne Duncan Didn’t Do for Special Education
So the tree is down and the egg nog is drunk and Arne is leaving. Everyone is sharing their parting thoughts, so I thought I would address Arne’s big moments with special education.
Arne’s Letter to Parents
Perhaps the place to start is the letter Duncan sent in 2010, making it sound like he understood parents and their needs when it came to their students with disabilities. I think it is interesting and especially disingenuous that he begins by saying, We need to move beyond the bubble tests. And we need to better support our teachers. To build a first-rate accountability system, states have to significantly improve existing assessments used to measure our students’ growth and move beyond fill-in-the bubble tests.
We need to ask ourselves where we wound up with that. The answer is, there is more of a focus on testing students with special needs with bubble tests than ever before! And about that support for teachers…HERE is the recent NPR report.
Arne Wants Proof Students with Disabilities are Achieving
Big news came June 24, 2014, when Duncan, who never taught as a real teacher a day What Arne Duncan Didn’t Do for Special Education:
