Ex-education chief learned school could be a lifeline

Arne Duncan learned his best lessons about education not at Harvard, but on the streets of Chicago and sitting around his mother’s dining table.

If Duncan’s name rings a bell, he was President Barack Obama’s very active U.S. Secretary of Education. Remember the furor over Common Core, lots of test-based measurements of stu- dent and teacher progress, and the Race to the Top, which brought hundreds of millions of federal education dollars to Georgia schools? Duncan helped implement those.

It’s easy to question his policies, but more difficult to question his passion. He got that honestly.

His new semi-autobiographical book “How Schools Work,” is an explanation of his values as much as it is about educational failures and successes. Two words caught my eye early in the book: Moral courage.

He got that from his mother Sue Duncan, who ran an after-school program for largely African-American kids in the Kenwood sec- tion of Chicago. He and his siblings worked and essentially grew up working in the program. I asked Dun- can about it.

“I think of her courage, of going into the hood and deal- ing with gun violence, bringing her children in with her.”

The building she had her program in was firebombed by a gang for reasons that had nothing to do with her. She moved it down the street.

“She was working on something bigger than her and bigger than us,” Dun- can said.

“She was fighting to do the right thing for kids and ... (you have) the courage to put yourself in harm’s way because the work is so important.”

Some didn’t want her there. A man walked into her building one day with a gun. Sue Duncan looked him in the eye, reminded him that he learned to read sitting on her knee, and the man put the gun away and left. Another man threat- ened to kill her if she came back the next day.

“Mother said, if you run, you’ll never stop running,” Duncan said. She showed up the following day, with her three kids. The man didn’t.

On her daily round of picking up kids in a van, she turned into an alley for a pickup and drove into the middle of an attempted murder. She backed out, fast, but continued to return for the child.

The 6-foot-5 Arne Duncan went to Harvard on a basketball scholarship, but eventually returned to Chicago to work with his mother and others, eventually rising to run Chicago Public Schools. His connection with the Obamas took him to Washington, where the fighting styles were a good deal different, but his pas- sion remained high.

As a boy in Kenwood, he learned if a teenager got a diploma, he or she got a chance at a way out. Some young men his age who didn’t, who he knew and played basketball with, died.

“That scars you in ways that is hard to understand ... at that time I didn’t have any friends who were killed who had a high school diploma,” Duncan said. All those who were killed had dropped out.

“For me, I started to see education as literally a lifeor-death issue.”

And he grew up with an inherent understanding of why poor kids going to bad schools were being cheated. They did not have the same chance at the American dream, as having a decent life, as kids from affluent neighborhoods.

“Education runs on lies,” are the first words in his book.