o this book is fascinating. On page after page, I was cheering Duncan on, agreeing with him on the issues and wishing him success. And, on page after page, I was asking myself, if I agree with him on so many issues and admire him as a leader, what in blazes went so wrong? You need to read this book because this turns out to be an important question for the United States.
Duncan is unapologetic about his program. If anything, he says, he is sorry that he did not press even harder on certain pieces of it. His big regret is that he did not do a better job of helping the public understand what he was doing and why he was doing it. I don’t think that was the problem. This book is beautifully written in highly accessible language. Arne Duncan is a great communicator. Communication is not his problem. The problem, I think, lies elsewhere.
Arne Duncan is his mother’s son. Ann Duncan spent her life running an after-school children’s center in Chicago, serving mostly very poor Black children who the Chicago schools were failing badly, “…making up for what the local schools couldn’t or wouldn’t teach…” Arne and his brother grew up in that school, in the company of these children from the projects. That was his world. After his junior year at Harvard, Duncan took a year off to work in the school and do his sociology thesis, which was, of course, on the school. Again and again, in his book, Duncan tells stories about the kids he met in his mom’s center. What comes through is his admiration for the grit and determination he found in kids living in desperate circumstances and his anger at the failure of the schools to do what his mom was doing for them, to give them a fighting chance.
He tells a story about a high schooler named Calvin who he is tutoring. Calvin has had good grades, has worked hard in school and expects to go to a good college. Then Duncan discovers that Calvin cannot read simple material or put a simple sentence together. His grades have been lies. Over and over again in the book, Duncan’s outrage against lies like these fills the pages. What makes this book so compelling is that these lies are not presented in the abstract, as a policy analyst would write about them. They come with live people like Calvin attached. They have a real cost in human lives stunted. They develop in the reader a growing anger at the system. That is what they are intended to do.