#102 Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: Education Runs on Lies

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Arne Duncan, Chicago Public Schools, How Schools Work, Lynn Tomman
2. 5:00 – 10:00: Chicago Public Schools, Common Core, James Heckman
3. 10:00 – 15:00: Common Core
4. 15:00 – 20:00: Chicago Public Schools
5. 20:00 – 25:00: Chicago Cred

Notable quotes from "#102 Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: Education Runs on Lies"

• With former Secretary of Education Arie Duncan before becoming Secretary of Education he was CEO of Chicago Public Schools President Obama has said quote Arie has done more to…

  about Chicago Public Schools · at 0:29

• Was really the driver between us trying to raise standards we can talk about the Common Core whatever we all talk about the cost of college being too high and the cost of…

  about Common Core · at 5:34

• Done very little in the early childhood space and getting our babies off to a good start again it's James Heckman here at the University Chicago Nobel prize winning Economist…

  about James Heckman · at 9:43

• Thing I've ever done the most heartbreaking but by far the most inspiring as well tell us about Chicago cred yeah just lser focused on reducing gun violence in Chicago violence…

  about Chicago Cred · at 22:59

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Lynn Tomman — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:21
  Careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman he everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode today I'm excited to…
• Arne Duncan — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:31
  Episode today I'm excited to be here with former Secretary of Education Arie Duncan before becoming Secretary of Education he was CEO of Chicago Public Schools President Obama…
• James Heckman — Person · 1 mention · first at 9:47

Books & papers

• How Schools Work — Book · 1 mention · first at 1:09
  Being here today thanks so much for having me my pleasure Arie I loved your book how schools work and as I've told you it's one of the most memorable books I've ever read the…

Companies & orgs

• Chicago Public Schools — Company · 4 mentions · first at 0:33
• Chicago Cred — Company · 1 mention · first at 23:02

Concepts & topics

• Common Core — Concept · 3 mentions · first at 5:37

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman he everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be here with former Secretary of Education Arie Duncan before becoming Secretary of Education he was CEO of Chicago Public Schools President Obama has said quote Arie has done more to bring our educational system sometimes Kicking and Screaming into the 21st century than anybody else unquote I'm looking forward to seeing how arc's education now and what we can do to further improve education and opportunity especially for our most dis advantaged young people

1:01 welcome Arie and thanks so much for being here today thanks so much for having me my pleasure Arie I loved your book how schools work and as I've told you it's one of the most memorable books I've ever read the first sentence of the book is that the education system runs on lies can you tell us about that and about Calvin Williams was a bit of a provocative statement but I wouldn't say it if I didn't believe it I'll just give you a couple quick examples of where I think our words and actions don't match up and I can tell you about about Calvin three specific examples one we all say we value education you wouldn't talk to anyone who says they don't care about education but the truth is almost no one votes around education and I always say education should be the ultimate bipartisan or nonpartisan issue there's nothing Republican and Democrat about helping more babies get off to a good start about raising graduation rates

1:57 about trying to lead the world in college complet rates no one has Monopoly on good ideas but very few of us go to the voting booth and hold politicians Mayors congressmen Governors the president local State national you don't go to the voting booth and vote with that in mind and as a result I think many politicians give nice education sound bites but don't really invest and don't hold themselves accountable and don't put the resources in that we need so we say one thing our action say another the second one would be we all say we love teachers and value teachers but I would argue teachers are wildly underpaid under respected undertrained underrecognized and our words and our actions don't match up and the final one and maybe the hardest one is Dr hun ad's 100 would say we value our children but we tolerate a level of gun violence in this country that is wildly higher than basically any other

2:55 industrialized nation and so we say we value education but we don't vote on it we say we love teachers but we don't support them we say we care about our kids we don't keep them safe and so I think we are dishonest I think those are lies and things that we don't act upon the story of Calin Williams is a deep one and grew up as a part of my mother's inner city tutoring program it had just a formative impact on me my sister my brother we all ended up trying to follow in her Footsteps in various ways but I took a year off between my Junior and Senior year of college which is a little bit non-traditional to really figure out was her work like a part of who I was or was it actually who I was and most of my friends would go to law school become investment bankers go to Wall Street or whatever it may be and I didn't quite think that that was what I wanted to do and during that year I decided I wanted

3:43 to sort of follow you know do do her work at some form of fashion didn't quite know what that meant but that was going to be my life's work and that summer before coming back for my delayed Senior Year young man who lived literally right across the street right across the corner from my mother's program was we knew the family well came over and asked could I help get him ready for the ACT he was a basketball player I was a basketball player he was a lot better than I was I was thrilled yeah let's get to work let's do something I'll never forget it was warm we sat out on the on the church steps and just started to do a little work in that first session in the first few minutes just saw that he was basically reading at maybe the third or fourth grade level and it was just beyond heartbreaking for me he happened to be on the B honor role in his high school in a really violent neighborhood he

4:29 wasn't caught in the gangs in the neighborhood lots of drugs and alcohol available he didn't touch anything then he played by all the rules and he had no idea how far behind he was and it was just devastating and we did some work but I knew at that point I just didn't have enough time I started the previous summer maybe if I would had a year but that summer working him was not g to be enough time to catch him up and have him do well and he did not do anything like what he could have done in college just seeing how the system had absolutely failed him and lied to him throughout his life that was one of many motivators to make me want to go into education and really try and tell young people the truth and and have high expectations for them and challenge them and sort of take all the lessons I learned from my mother's program every single day and try and take those to scale how common is it for the grade level standards to

5:20 be too low for kids and parents to believe that the kids are meeting grade level standards or are even honoral students when in reality are far behind where they should be that happens unfortunately in many states and that was really the driver between us trying to raise standards we can talk about the Common Core whatever we all talk about the cost of college being too high and the cost of college is too high what we don't talk about is we spend 8 to nine billion with it be 8 to9 billion dollars each year on remedial class in college and what that means is young people with a high school diploma go to college and then have to take non-credit bearing classes bring through P grants bring through loans terrible for them terrible for their parents terrible for taxpayers nobody wins but that's the conversation we don't have and it was true I talked about in the book as you may remember that when I was running the Chicago

6:12 Public Schools our test scores were going up every year we were celebrating we were feeling great and then the Consortium on Chicago School research did a really important study Illinois was one of many states that had reduced standards so we were living that we didn't know it and with the consor did is it did a correlation between quote unquote meeting the Illinois state standards and taking the ACT if you were meeting standards that correlated to a 16 on the ACT if you get a 16 on the ACT you basically have a 10% chance of graduating from college you're not ready and so we had been lying to kids and families we didn't know we had but it was an unbelievable punch in the gut and so we stopped paying attention to the kids that were quote unquote proficient that was no longer the goal the goal is to get kids into an advanced St status on the state test that correlated to a 20 and those numbers for us in Chicago

7:03 Public Schools were small and so it really was an hugely important impetus for us to push harder but when you have a measuring stick that short changes kids that deceives them in families I think that's one of the most Insidious things you can do in education is give people a false complacency or a false sense of optimism a false sense of hope when we're actually setting them up for failure down the road I think it's horrific you quote president Bush who has eloquently said quote the soft bigotry of low expectations unquote can you tell us about that it's an interesting phenomenon it's pretty deep that too often you'll hear maybe more sense than hear because people often don't quite say it out loud the sense you'll get is that these kids are are poor or these kids are minority students or these kids are immigrants or these kids are English language Learners the implication is there's only so much they

7:57 can do or that if really want to do academically are you have to end poverty first that that's the first thing you have to do and trust me I would love to end poverty tomorrow you know President Biden's taking some pretty interesting steps to reduce poverty but while we fight those macro battles we can't not educate kids and I would argue quite the opposite the best way I know how to break cycles of poverty is by providing a high quality education that's what my mother devoted her life to yes she was an educator but she was trying to really lift kids out of power and in one generation we able to see many families where no one had any college education many did not have high school diplomas the generation that she worked with go on to be successful and break it and so I'm passionate about education for all the educational reasons my bigger passion is I see education as the best path to help end

8:52 cycles of poverty provide some economic Mobility give a ladder up into the middle class and that's really what my life work work has been about of trying to create opportunity for young people for communities that have historically been denied those what are you proudest of accomplishing as Secretary of Education under President Obama I have a list of successes and list of failures and happy to talk about all of those but uh take the successes and none of this stuff is ever a mission accomplished moment it's always you know so much further to go and you're just trying to accelerate the pace of change and do more but on things that we're proud of really proud to put more than a billion behind high quality early childhood education and I will always argue that the best investment we can make is in high quality prek if I had one additional tax dollar give me one more dollar where I put it that's where I

9:41 would put it historic l department had done very little in the early childhood space and and getting our babies off to a good start again it's James Heckman here at the University Chicago Nobel prize winning Economist has studied this longitud for decades and talks about a 7 to1 Roi there very few places where investment in a public sector activ gives you $7 back less teenage pregnancy less dropouts less incarceration more young people graduate from high school going on to be productive citizen so big play there um secondly we were able to get high school graduation rates up to alltime highs and they're still not high enough again in the gr dropout rate is still too high but having historic highs and seeing every subgroup at historic highs white black latino kids Asian English language Learners poor children special needs whatever it might be every subgroup includ movement felt great about that invested very heavily in

10:32 community colleges I think those are sort of the unrecognized gem along the education Continuum and did a lot of partnership with Department of Labor and then we were able to put an additional $30 billion dollar into pel grants it was a fascinating Washington lesson we basically cut out the middleman literally without going back to taxpayers for nickel we just cut out the middleman did The Lending internally ourselves that was wildly controversial there but we thought it was sort of common sense and I think we went from 6 million to 9 million pal recipients a 50% increase we had another million students of color go on to college and felt great about creating opportunity for young people had worked hard but weren't born with a silver spoon in the mouth and needed those P resources to make that college dream a reality one of your most ambitious efforts as Secretary of Education was the common core

11:19 education standards as an attempt both to make us schools more challenging and to make the curriculum more similar from state to state can you tell us about that how effective it's been and what more we can do the concept again is for me pretty basic but this one was wildly controversial it's just simply trying to make sure that if young people graduate from high school they can take credit bearing classes in college they don't have to take remedial classes that was literally all we were trying to do and we weren't setting a National Standard and we know about local control and education what we were saying is if you're in Texas you just need the University of Texas to certify that your state standards are good enough so you can go to the University of Texas and take a college level class and same for Wyoming and California whatever it might be and so significant progress didn't mandate anything put some incentives out

12:15 there for states to do this and to do this together I've always said the fact that we have 50 different yard sticks 50 different states measuring how we're doing educationally that's never made sense to me if you follow a sports team in the newspaper there one score for that game there aren't 50 if you invest in the stock market and a publicly traded company you can look in the newspaper every day or look online and find out the stock price for your company aren't 50 ways to measure value is not an accident in education it's very intentional I think it's a way to keep things opaque it's a way to not be clear not be transparent and so we were able to get many states to work together and to raise standards initially it went extraordinarily well what we didn't foresee and I'm no good at Randy and marketing this is a joke but it's really true that we did not foresee the rise of the tea party and the push back against

13:06 President Obama you had Obamacare and that was you know supposed to somehow stigmatize it and ObamaCare got translated to Obama core in education so we got political push back on that and in hindsight calling it The Common Core which thought was pretty in Oculus we probably should have called it the very uncommon unique to all 50 states core and the Bucky core and the whoer core in the Align High Core whatever what happened is a lot of controversy you had many states Rebrand which is fine but keep 9 95% of Standards so we were able to make some real progress but with the benefit of hindsight and sort of understanding the push back I'm always honest my interpretation of much of the push back was less on the substance and more really uh racist reaction quite frankly to our first African-American president and that anything he was trying to do whether it was to provide health care or provide a better

13:59 education was going to be resisted not so much on rational terms but on more emotional terms uh don't have zero regrets for doing it definitely with the benefit of the wisdom of hindsight would have branded it and marketed it a different way there is not a single other country in the world that has 50 different systems of Education as we do in the US one of your other focuses was the increased use of data in education including standardized tests to determine and how schools students and teachers are performing how is the United States doing with standardized testing now and how can we best use it well I'll say relative again as you said we live in a globally competitive economy and so we're not competing for jobs you know Wisconsin versus Illinois versus Indiana with know where I live here in the Midwest we're competing with jobs with India and China and South Korea and Singapore and so in order to

14:54 compete we have to try and win that the good jobs the middle class jobs the high wage jobs are going to go to where skilled workers are we're in a flat world now and I worry desperately about those jobs leaving our country and going to other countries where there's more of a skilled and educated Workforce so for me this is not really about education it's really about trying to keep us globally competitive an economy that can Thrive and with a upwardly mobile population because of educational opportunity creating Economic Opportunity so if you look at whether it's reading or mass scores or whatever might be we're usually somewhere between 15th and 30th on access to to pre UK I think we're 28th or 29th now College completion rates we led the world a generation ago it's interesting with Flatline other country that pass by we're about 12th now the hard truth Lyn is that we're top 10 in nothing Early

15:42 Childhood P to 12 higher ed and I don't think that's acceptable I don't think we can be complacent and we should be challenging that every day and not just sort of resting on our Laurels or resting on our Glory Days from a couple decades ago so I do think again test scores don't tell you everything by any stretch but I also think it's an important Benchmark to know where you are and it's actually a very interesting debate now with the pandemic and so many kids so far behind and couple million kids not even in school which is devastating to me and there's a debate of whether we should assess kids or not now and I just don't know L honly how do you help kids catch up if you don't know where they're strong and where they're weak I had my annual checkup for the doctor recently and what does the doctor do she doesn't just start prescribing me a bunch of medicine she ask me how am I doing and how am I feeling what's going

16:31 on she assesses my health before she does anything and I think we need to be assessing kids where they are educationally and those that are highflying Let's help them move and those that need more help let's get them more help but I don't know how you help kids in a effective efficient way if we don't know where we are and I worry that because maybe we're a little embarrassed or we're a little ashamed or because it's a hard truth we shy from those things and I just think it's really important not to guess but to know what kids strengths and weaknesses are how best to help them and then to hold us as adults accountable particularly now for helping tens of millions of kids who are pretty far behind after this past horrific year in education we got to help them catch up as fast as we can you've seen now generations of students from prek all the way through lower school middle school and upper school as

17:28 CEO of Chicago public schools and as someone who's worked with students now for decades what are the most important predictors for Student Success in lower school middle school and high school I'll just go back to my mother's philosophy like yesterday you know five decades ago she said see where kids are find out where they are and just take them from there and you'll have kids come to you that are a couple grade levels you know ahead or a couple grade levels behind you'll have kids that are really fast Learners in some things and slow learning and other things you have kids with one passion or another for me the predictor is much less what kids bring to the table and much more what we as adults do to meet them where they are and take them where they need to go the benefit I've had of the lifetime of experience of seeing kids who happen to live in all black all poor very violent neighborhoods many do extraordinarily

18:23 well and do things that theoretically should be impossible and none of this is easy but I saw what they could do because I saw the difference in the impact my mother and her volunteers had in their lives and so the predictor isn't race the predictor isn't social economic class the predictor isn't neighborhood the predictor is educational opportunity and support and guidance and staying with it for the long hul and I always say the best teachers it's obviously partly significantly intellectual and helping kids you know expand their thinking but so much of this is a heart in really helping young kids to believe in themselves and to believe that even if no one their family's ever gone to college that they had the capacity to do that and to believe that they belong in that environment and exposing them to a world of opportunities that they don't know exist it's hard to Aspire to a career or profession that you've never

19:12 heard of or you don't know anyone who has and so where you have love and opportunities and support and guidance and that's the best predictor of Student Success it's not whatever strengths or challenges they bring to the table when you first meet them are there other predictors such as for example reading behind grade level in third or fourth grade or absences from school can we tell the kids that are in danger of falling behind in a heartbeat you look at attendance okay first grade whatever every child wants to go to school when you have a test if you get a 90 90% that's an a that's pretty good if you have 90% attendance let's take the average school year is about 180 days if you have a 90% attendance that means you're missing 18 days you're basically missing a month of school that's not good and if you're missing two months of school or three months of school that's never the child's Choice

20:11 that's something really you know wrong or challenging your dysfunctional going on at home so yes that is absolutely for me the earliest predictor way before there's a grade or a test is a students are coming to school and they're on time that just tells you something about the kind of support they have at home and if they're struggling to do that those are kids that you have to pay an extraordinary amount of attention to and do that as early as possible another critical issue that you've focused on is crime and the disproportionate impact on young black men and this is especially true in major cities like your home City of Chicago as a country we have addressed crime primarily with one tool enforcement how should we think about crime and what else can we do especially for young people yes it is crime but it's actually violence and very specifically gun violence that I'm focused on you're right we have

21:07 basically had an incarceration strategy a lock them up strategy we in the United States have I think 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's inmates that are as you say disproportionately you know black and brown men of color and let me clear I think if you know people commit a crime they should absolutely be held accountable but what we don't do is we don't invest in these communities and we don't invest in these people and where there is high unemployment where there is inferior education where there is inferior Health Care where there's lack of access to quality food when there's disinvestment in communities I guarantee you Lynn you will see higher crime and higher violence and that's honestly a choice that we have made and with the pandemic there's this new term socially distance the communities I work in 15 neighborhood in the South and West sides of Chicago they had been socially

22:01 distanced for decades we didn't use that term but they've been redlined they've been disenfranchized they've been marginalized in we've seen Capital leave and the violence the crime that's the manifestation that's the blood pouring out of the wound but this wound has been caused by all these other things and so what we're trying to do is give our young men and young women who are caught in these horrific cycles of violence a chance to change their lives and do a number of things we have an amazing Street Outreach team that recruits young men and women into our program we have life coaches for every single young person we have a clinical team and amount of trauma that folks are are living with and Liv with all their lives frankly is pretty extraordinary we have an education team we've had lots and lots of folks get high school diplomas which has been amazing we got a small set in college now then we have a jobs

22:48 team and our goal is to move people from the illegal economy which in places like Chicago almost inevitably leads to violence leads to gun violence to the legal economy it's been the hardest thing I've ever done the most heartbreaking but by far the most inspiring as well tell us about Chicago cred yeah just lser focused on reducing gun violence in Chicago violence is not unique to Chicago but it's uniquely bad we're about six times more violent than New York we about three to four times more violent than La it does not have to be that way it should not be that way what breaks my heart L and motivates me is our children who grow up on the South and West sides literally literally every single one knows at least one person who's been shot and it's often multiple people when I go to classrooms I'll say how many of you know five people been killed 10 people been killed 15 people been killed and you get up to that and a

23:42 half to a third of the room's hands are still in the air it's obviously never our kids fault and my whole life I've talked about deferring gratification and going to college and all that and obviously I still believe that but when you're literally trying to survive daytoday particularly for young men who honestly don't believe they're going to live past 18 or live past 21 and that's a rational that's not an irrational thought that's a rational reaction to the war zones to the environment they're living in then when I'm talking about college and stuff I'm I'm speaking a foreign language so I'm really just trying to give our kids and our communities a chance to just to grow up healthy and safe and we made some significant progress the previous three years this past year 2020 with the pandemic with George Floyd's murder we took a big step in the wrong direction we got more violent so we have a lot of

24:28 hard work ahead of us this year and going forward to try and continue to make Chicago as safe as other major cities on the Eastern my schs what can we as Americans as parents and as caring people do to improve the circumstances and the opportunities for disadvantaged young people I think the pandemic has taught us so many lessons but good and bad but one of the biggest ones is just how interconnected we are that none of us are okay if we're not all okay and that if my family's healthy but our neighbors family's sick well we're we're all at risk we can separate geographically we can separate by Community we can separate by gated community but it's really understanding our common Humanity this is the most humbling work I've done I'm learning so many tough lessons every day but probably the biggest lesson is not to judge I got a million crazy stories but one of our guys told me he said AR I

25:23 grew up in a household full of guns and I wish we would had toys but we had guns oh and guess what he grew up to be a pretty big shooter and created a lot of Mayhem and havoc and destruction he's doing much much better now but I thought about both my parents were Educators and my sister brother and I grew up in a household full of books and guess what all three of us became Educators we followed in their footsteps and it does not make me or my family any better than him it's just we're all at some levels preaches of our environment shaped by our environment and so what can we all do we can do whatever we can to create opportunity and to not judge and to give other people's children the same kinds of opportunities and supports and guidance and love that we try so hard to give our children and on one hand you would say it's you know altruistic and yes that's true but I would say more than ever that our faiths are

26:17 intertwined are interconnected so you can almost do it in a selfish way if you want what's best for your children one of the best things you can do for your children is to make sure other people's children are doing well as well Arie before I ask for your three takeaways is there anything else you'd like to discuss that you haven't already touched upon no I appreciate the conversation the proper questions I've enjoyed it what are the three key takeaways that you'd like to leave the audience with today a couple I think one that education should be the ultimate bipartisan issue and that no one has a monopoly on good ideas and I would plead with folks listening and watching to vote in part at every level local state and National for the candidates that are going to create educational opportunity in your community and that I don't hold politicians responsible for not being committed here I hold us as voters

27:12 responsible for not holding them accountable to do the right thing so please vote I don't care liberal conservative Democrat Republican I truly don't care please vote B based upon education secondly that we are top 10 in the world in nothing and so the status quo is not good enough and how we reimagine education how we reinvent how we move from a K to 12 system to a prek through 14 system at a minimum we have to do a much better job both for educational but also for economic reasons and then the third one would be to never judge or never discount you can't tell a book by the cover and I can give you countless examples of young people I grew up with and young people I worked with who by any normal prediction should not be contributors to society but are doing extraordinary things as contributors to society because they had educational opportunity and people who loved them maybe judge less and invest more Arie thank you so

28:18 much for all you have done to improve education and opportunity for all of our young people and thank you for our conversation today this has been terrific thanks much the opportunity to have a great day now if you enjoy today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new Fresh weekly episodes be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3 takeaway.com or follow us on Instagram Twitter and Facebook note that 3 takeaway.com is with the number three three is not spelled out see you soon at three takeaways

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "#102 Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: Education Runs on Lies"?

In order: 0:00 Arne Duncan, Chicago Public Schools, How Schools Work, Lynn Tomman; 5:00 Chicago Public Schools, Common Core, James Heckman; 10:00 Common Core; 15:00 Chicago Public Schools; 20:00 Chicago Cred.

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

7 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Chicago Public Schools, Common Core, Lynn Tomman, Arne Duncan, How Schools Work, James Heckman. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#102 Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: Education Runs on Lies"?

The episode runs 29 min; the transcript is about 5,541 words in 33 timestamped sections.

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