Arne Duncan is What's Wrong with America

As many of you have probably heard, the Department of Education issued new rules regulating the for-profit education sector, which were significantly watered down from the Department's earlier intentions after the for-profits lobbied extensively, although it still is a net positive.

But if you think the new rules will really have any significant negative effect, or will check colleges' behavior, I encourage you to check out how Wall Street responded to the news:

As the Times article quotes Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, this whole education sector has the characteristics of a bubble, just like the housing market: "that they can capture all the upside of increasing volume while shifting all of the downside to somewhere else, which is students and taxpayers." One would think that applies in equal force for non-profit education as well, as it's hard to imagine how they aren't doing the exact same thing by shifting the downside risk to taxpayers and individual students. And as LSTB explained in its two-part post, people who are skeptical this is a true bubble are missing the mark.

But what really galled me about the Times article was this following quote from government mealy-mouth Arne Duncan, our Secretary of Corporatized Education: "As a country, we need this sector to succeed. This is not about ‘gotcha.’"

Are you serious, Arne? Half your job is to regulate institutions of higher learning, to be a cop that will stand up there and say "gotcha!" to keep ensure that the system stays honest and that good schools that actually exist to better their students' lives can thrive while the dishonest two-bit "you'll be rich!" schools go out of business.

Could you imagine if the executive branch took this approach to all licensing? If the liquor board refused to revoke people's licenses when they regularly sold to 14-year olds because they didn't want to say "gotcha?" Why do we allow this sort of "reform-first" attitude with education? Reform? When has industry-led "reform" ever worked in American education?

This dope had the perfect opportunity to take a major stand against much of the profligate, bad apple behavior that fuels American higher education - not just the for-profits, but the non-profits who were watching from the gallery. Instead, he bent over and let the mafia buy softer policing.

"[W]e need this sector to succeed." Will someone buy this guy a book on capitalism? According to our esteemed Department of Education head, we "need" a sector where students take on non-dischargable debt to give them a credential that may not increase their economic productivity. We "need" a sector that is run by federally-backed loans that would die if left to the free market. We "need" the sector about as much as we "need[ed]" inflated home values, or inflated .com stocks.

Of course, this one is far worse because it involves a generation of consumers taking on debt that can't be discharged, which will move a greater proportion of the future economy into debt servicing and lower home prices, discretionary spending, investment, innovation, new small businesses, etc. Arne, my man, we "need" to ensure that those in generation y can actually earn a living wage and not be bogged with non-dischargable poor investments.

But Arne, I fear, may not be able to see the problems at the ground floor. Let's look briefly at Arne Duncan's biography, shall we?

Arne is from the elite liberal Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, his father being a university professor at the U. of Chicago. He grew up with elite friends attending Chicago Lab School, an elite private school, after which he attended Harvard and majored in sociology and basketball. He then spent four years (1987-1991) playing professional basketball in Australia.

In 1992, a "childhood friend and investment banker" made Duncan - who had no significant work experience, mind you - Director of the Ariel Education Initiative. Four years later, the initiative became the corporate sponsor of a local public school that now feeds kids into "elite" Chicago high schools by getting "half of their funding from the Chicago Public Schools and the other half from a private investor, the Ariel Education Initiative."

Three years later, he got a gig being Deputy Chief of Staff at the Chicago Public Schools. Yes, you read that right: a god-awful public high school system brought in a guy who had done nothing in his life but study sociology, play basketball, and run a school with corporate backing. And of course, the icing on the cake is that two years later he was appointed CEO of the Chicago Public Schools.

How was he qualified, exactly? Running a large public school system means trying to fit square pegs into round holes on a shoestring budget. This guy had no formal training in education, had never actually tried to run a public school, and only had his position in education because of his rich friend. So he added private money to a small, crappy public school and got better results. Anyone could do that, and it's not an option as head of an entire public school system. See here for another take on this.

And now he's our Secretary of Education, and he's a pawn for corporate America and a champion of the "same old, same old" approach. And why wouldn't he be? This guy grew up with elite friends in an elite neighborhood in a professor's house, went to an elite college, and got every major job he's had by association with elites.

He's never been at the ground level himself in anything, preferring to start on third base. He has no idea how real people actually get to third base when they have to start at home, and likely assumes it's 100% the secondary education system (my guess is that he thinks his Harvard degree is what got him where he is). Of course we "need" scamming colleges, because if they're not there, poor people will just remain poor forever and ever! And if we just put a few new multi-billion dollar programs in place, intercity school kids will be doing calculus and they'll have the best test scores and theyll be zit-free and we'll all drive shiny new Bentleys and play polo atop unicorns!

The irony is that Arne may actually want to be helping impoverished youth, but if they go to a college that saddles them with nondischargable debt that can't be paid back, he's only succeeded in making them poorer by his lax standards. Again, this was the perfect opportunity to step in and prevent much of this nonsense, both in the for-profit and non-profit fields. But people like Arne can never truly understand the need for that type of protection when they've never actually had to live near the margin and take a flier on a night program or a new career that will supposedly make them a more attractive candidate in a crowded labor market.

Maybe if Arne had, he would realize that his job is about playing "gotcha" and actually enforcing regulations for the good of the public (note: not equal to the short-term investing public), because if the guy at the top isn't going to stop you, there's no reason to stop the gravy train, which, sadly, is how a large proportion of higher education views incoming students and federal loan money. Arne's apparently too busy with serpent lobbyists hissing sweet nothings into his ear while showing him illogical and skewed charts and clever diagrams, like this one:

'Cause that's pretty much the education plan I'm seeing from our "new and improved" Department of Education.

Kids, if you want to be an executive some day, follow Arne Duncan's lead. Make some rich friends, early and often. Be good at basketball and go to Harvard. Got it?

The next time someone pulls out that ridiculous "pay your dues" line on recent graduates who have the audacity to want enough money to pay back their loans, ask them what dues, exactly, the current Secretary of Education paid, or 75% of people in high places, for that matter. And before you snipe that he graduated with honors from Harvard, I'll tell you there are thousands of kids who graduated Harvard and equally-rigorous schools in far more strenuous subjects than sociology that are struggling right now.

What's wrong with America isn't necessarily that the rich use these connections, though. It's how the sheep just swallow lines like "we need this sector to succeed" without any kind of inquiry, how they accept these unqualified people being launched into public sector jobs, and they refuse to examine basic ideas like the value of a secondary education or the system itself. Arne graduated with honors from Harvard and the best he can come up with is "well, we need this sector to succeed." Brilliant, let's keep sending our kids to these places at any cost and having a malleable-hooker attitude. Just brilliant.