Ed Sec Duncan Tips a Troubling Hand

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made a few remarks in his speech to the American Council on Education Monday worth noting (and some, worth head-scratching):

From Teach for America to the KIPP charter schools to instructional innovations at colleges and universities, we have proven strategies ready to go to scale.

"Proven strategies"? "Ready to go to scale"? If KIPP, with its non-union teachers so often recruited from the likes of Teach for America, are all that - then why this, from three days earlier in the New York Times? -

When the United Federation of Teachers announced last month that it had collected enough signatures to unionize the charter school, Dave Levin, KIPP’s co-founder and New York superintendent, said he was willing to work with the union and was optimistic things would proceed smoothly.

But in the weeks since, several teachers said in interviews, the atmosphere at the school has grown increasingly tense, with administrators making veiled threats about the effect of creating a union. E-mail and text messages that would usually be returned at all hours have gone unanswered. And late last month, teachers said they were told by their students, school administrators pulled students into a private meeting and asked them to critique their teachers.

“The general tenor has been of increased distance, and administrators felt more inaccessible than they have ever been,” said Leila Chakravarty, a seventh-grade math teacher who helped collect signatures to form the union.

The union filed a complaint this week with the state Public Employment Relations Board saying that KIPP’s administration was intimidating the organizing teachers. (Full article.)

This suggests the KIPP-TFA marriage is far from "proven," and far from "scale-ready."

Duncan moves on to hint that he favors something like nationalization of high school standards here:

What can we do together—not only to make college more accessible—but to boost our overall success rate?

We have to start by recognizing that our system of education is not aligned. Every state has different high school standards.

If we accomplish one thing in the coming years—it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America.

Regular readers may know this is an idea that tempts me. But Duncan's earlier touting of KIPP as a model of successful education gives me pause. It supports the counter-argument that, while all states may benefit when federal education policy-makers push good models, they will also all suffer when they push bad ones. And Duncan's KIPP- and TFA-boosting makes me fear he may belong in the latter category.

A Side-Note: What Duncan's Apparent Lack of "Basic Skills" Says About Their Value

Is it just me, or do any of you find the transcript of Duncan's speech on the official DoE site surprisingly ungrammatical and non-standard, from its use of "incent" as a verb, to its mis-use of long dashes where commas should be?

To me - and I mean this seriously, not sarcastically - this is ironic proof that other skills besides "the basics" - the social skills, public speaking skills, collaborative skills so often tossed under the "21st Century Skills" or "Progressive Education" umbrellas - are as, or more, important for future success. Because, assuming Duncan wrote the speech, it shows that a lack of basic grammar and vocabulary won't stop people with other skills from getting to the top.

Does KIPP's "proven success" at boosting scores in basic reading and math "prove" anything about its success at developing these other skills?