Dunking on Arne Duncan.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports - Viewpoint essay

"I think we are putting together the best basketball-playing cabinet in American history." So said Barack Obama upon naming Arne Duncan his nominee for Secretary of Education.

There is no doubt that when it comes to hoops, Duncan has game. The man stands six feet five inches. He was an Academic All-American baller at Harvard University and played professionally in Australia for four years. Long before becoming chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools, Duncan put in time in the U.S. minor league hoops circuit with teams like the Rhode Island Gulls and New Jersey Jammers.

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Unfortunately, we aren't selecting a pickup squad. What is at stake is the future of public education. And when it comes to our schools Duncan's record brands him as a scrub. As someone who taught in the D.C. public schools for four years and whose wife still slogs through the crumbling infrastructure of our schools, this is personal for me. If you believe that "we can't just throw money" at schools, that unions are a block to reform, that the military should have open access to our kids, and that charter schools are the greatest thing to happen to education since corporal punishment, then Arne Duncan should warm the cockles of your heart.

Duncan has rejected many of Chicago's local school councils and has converted roughly twenty Chicago public schools a year over to private operations. He loves the stultifying test taking used to judge national standards, and stands firmly with the notion that teachers at poorly testing schools should be canned. He has also turned a blind eye to addressing a study from his alma mater, Harvard University, that Chicago's public school's are "only a few percentage points from an experience of total apartheid for black students.

At Chicago's Senn High School, students, parents, and teachers organized together in a high profile campaign to keep the city from installing a Naval Academy inside the school. "We asked Duncan to postpone the decision to put the military school at Senn," wrote teacher Jesse Sharkey in Counterpunch . "Duncan's answer was a classic. He said: 'I come...