“And we wonder why our boys are struggling,” Duncan said. “We need more Latino and African American male teachers. We need to show these kids that they can also educate people just like them when they grow up.” Duncan used the convention to promote the federal TEACH campaign that persuades male minorities to enter education.
 The program was launched in the Fall 2010.

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Duncan recounted a story from the days after he was appointed to President Obama’s cabinet in 2008, when he sat down with Sharpton and professed that the civil rights issue of the 21st century was no longer race.

“The issue is education,” Duncan told Sharpton. “We have to do whatever it takes to educate our children and we’re currently failing,” said Duncan.

.

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A Knight Commission analysis released Thursday found that, over the past five years, nearly $179 million was earned for athletic conferences by tournament teams that weren’t on course to graduate at least half their players.

The commission developed its report with help from research by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics that showed 10 of the 68 teams in the men’s tournament this year didn’t meet the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate goal of being on track to graduate at least 50 percent of their players. Duncan and Knight Commission officials believe only teams that meet the threshold should qualify for tournament play. Their position was supported by the NAACP and UCF researchers.

Teams that aren’t graduating players “should simply not have a chance to compete,” Duncan said during a teleconference. “If you can’t manage to graduate half of your players, how serious is a coach and the institution about their players’ academic success?”

Under the NCAA’s revenue distribution plan, each game played in the NCAA basketball tournament in 2011 earns more than $1.4 million for the each team’s conference.

Of the $409 million distributed in the five most recent tournaments under the NCAA’s formula for rewarding performances, the Knight Commission reported that nearly 44 percent was earned by teams with APRs below 925, equivalent to graduating half of a team’s players.

UCF’s institute released its annual reports this week on the graduation rates of teams that qualified for both the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments.

It found a 2 percent overall graduation rate increase to 66 percent for men’s Division I players, with 76 percent of men’s programs in the tournament graduating at least 50 percent of their players. It also showed the rate for white players is increasing more substantially than the rate for black players.

The gap has grown from 22 percent in 2009 to a current level of 32 percent. White players show a 91 percent graduation rate, which is up 7 percent. Black players have a graduation rate at 59 percent, up 3 percent from last year’s study. This is the third straight year the racial gap has increased.

Only five schools (Boston University, Northern Colorado, Old Dominion, Pittsburgh, North Carolina-Ashville) had graduation rates for black players that were higher than their figures for white players. Belmont, BYU, Illinois, Notre Dame, Utah State, Vanderbilt, Villanova and Wofford graduated all of their players, black and white.

All the teams competing in the women’s NCAA tournament graduated at least 50 percent of their players. And 91 percent of the teams graduated at least 70 percent of their players, compared to 48 percent of the men’s tourney teams.

As is the case with the men, a racial disparity exists between white and black players on the women’s side, but the gap is not nearly as wide.

Duncan said that while he would want the same standards for men’s and women’s teams, that the shortcomings are a lot more pronounced on the men’s side.

According to the UCF institute report, the 10 men’s tournament teams that did not meet the NCAA’s current APR standard were: USC, Syracuse, Kansas State, Purdue, Alabama State, Morehead State, San Diego State, Alabama-Birmingham, UC Santa Barbara and Texas-San Antonio.

NAACP president and CEO Ben Jealous said that his group plans to visit all of the schools that are currently below the APR standard during the coming year. He said they hope to get commitments and plans from all the schools on how they can improve, noting what he called “unconscionable” disparities among the graduation rates of black and white players at some schools.

“Shame is a great motivator,” Jealous said. “Right now we tolerate coaches that are preparing their athletes for success on the court, but failure in life. … Word has to be going down the line that we expect all their athletes to graduate and that the schools will help them to.”

The primary author of the UCF institute’s reports, Richard Lapchick, said he’s excited to support the call of the secretary and NAACP. Lapchick said earlier this week that he would like to see the NCAA’s APR standard go up to 60 percent.

“Things are getting better, but we have to focus on those that are consistent violators,” he said.

NCAA president Mark Emmert said Thursday that he would take the secretary’s call seriously.

“Secretary Duncan and I have spoken on a number of occasions about educational attainment issues, (including) his concern, that I share, about the preparation that young men and women bring in to college today, and that we all need collectively to improve on that,” he told reporters during a news conference at Washington’s Verizon Center, a site of second- and third-round men’s tournament games.

The Knight Commission has been advocating NCAA tournament eligibility and revenue being tied to school’s ability to graduate half their players since 2001. Executive Director Amy Perko said that the feedback they have gotten so far from the NCAA has been positive and that though it hasn’t set a timetable for reviewing its standard that “it’s on the table.”

“Strength of comments and commitment from the secretary and NAACP will be critical to universities and the NCAA as work to make changes,” she said. “There have been improvements, but standards are too low and the bar needs to be raised.”

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In a speech in Chicago Saturday, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan said if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he’d be disheartened to see so many schools still effectively segregated.

“Dr. King would have been angered to see that too often we underinvest in disadvantaged students, that they still have fewer opportunities to take rigorous college prep courses, that many black and brown and low-income students are still languishing in aging facilities,” the former chief of the Chicago Public Schools said.

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This week on Washington Watch, Roland speaks with U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, about the state of urban education, specifically in New Orleans.

What he has to say is SHOCKING:

Arne Duncan On New Orleans’ progress in education since Katrina:

“This is a tough thing to say, but let me be really honest. I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That e- — education system was a disaster, and it took hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that “we have to do better.” And the progress that they’ve made in four years since the hurricane is unbelievable. They have a chance to create a phenomenal school district. Long way to go, but that – that city was not serious about its education. Those children were being desperately underserved prior, and the amount of progress and the amount of reform we’ve seen in a short amount of time has been absolutely amazing.”

Text continues after gallery…

On New Orleans’ educators:

“I have so much respect for the adults, the teachers, the principals that are working hard. I spent a lot of time talking to students at John – John Mack High School there, many of whom had missed school for six months, eight months, 13 months after the hurricane and still came back to get an education. Children in our country, they want to learn. They’re resilient. They’re tough. We have to meet them halfway. We have to give them an opportunity, and New Orleans is doing a phenomenal job of getting that system to an entirely different level.”

Catch this week’s FULL episode Sunday at 5pm & 11pm on TV One!

What do you think about Sec. Duncan’s comments? Are you from New Orleans? Do you agree or disagree?

Submit your video questions and comments HERE!

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This week on Washington Watch, Roland speaks with U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, about the state of urban education, specifically in New Orleans.

What he has to say is SHOCKING:

Arne Duncan On New Orleans’ progress in education since Katrina:

“This is a tough thing to say, but let me be really honest. I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That e- — education system was a disaster, and it took hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that “we have to do better.” And the progress that they’ve made in four years since the hurricane is unbelievable. They have a chance to create a phenomenal school district. Long way to go, but that – that city was not serious about its education. Those children were being desperately underserved prior, and the amount of progress and the amount of reform we’ve seen in a short amount of time has been absolutely amazing.”

Text continues after gallery…

On New Orleans’ educators:

“I have so much respect for the adults, the teachers, the principals that are working hard. I spent a lot of time talking to students at John – John Mack High School there, many of whom had missed school for six months, eight months, 13 months after the hurricane and still came back to get an education. Children in our country, they want to learn. They’re resilient. They’re tough. We have to meet them halfway. We have to give them an opportunity, and New Orleans is doing a phenomenal job of getting that system to an entirely different level.”

Catch this week’s FULL episode Sunday at 5pm & 11pm on TV One!

What do you think about Sec. Duncan’s comments? Are you from New Orleans? Do you agree or disagree?

Submit your video questions and comments HERE!

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In Katrina’s Aftermath, The Struggle To Help Residents Continue

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President Barack Obama is sending Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to Chicago next week to discuss the recent beating death of a 16-year-old honors student.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says Holder and Duncan will meet Wednesday with school officials, students and residents and talk about school violence.

Earlier this week, Gibbs described as “chilling” a cell phone video showing the fatal beating of Derrion Albert.

Chicago prosecutors have charged four teenagers in the beating of the sophomore honor roll student. Officials say Albert was walking to a bus stop when he got caught up in street fighting.

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Education Secretary Arne Duncan is a man on a mission: to hear what teachers, students and parents in at least 15 states think about No Child Left Behind, the controversial education law championed by former President George W. Bush. Duncan is visiting schools in West Virginia Tuesday, the first stop in the first steps toward reviewing and reforming the program.

President Barack Obama has pledged to overhaul the law, but he has been vague about how far he would go, or whether he would scrap it altogether.

“I don’t know if `scrap’ is the word,” Duncan told reporters last week. “Where things make sense, we’re going to keep them. Where things didn’t make sense, we’re going to change them.”

Whatever the administration decides to do, it needs the approval of Congress, which passed the law with broad bipartisan support in 2001 but deadlocked over a rewrite in 2007.

Duncan gives the law credit for shining a spotlight on kids who need the most help. No Child Left Behind pushes schools to boost the performance of low-achieving students, a group that typically includes minority kids, English-language learners and kids with disabilities.

“Forevermore in our country, we can’t sweep those huge disparities with outcomes between white children and Latino children and African-American children, we can’t sweep those under the rug ever again,” Duncan said.

Yet Duncan has many criticisms of No Child Left Behind, and he has plenty of company. Opponents insist the law’s annual reading and math tests have squeezed subjects like music and art out of the classroom and that schools were promised billions of dollars they never received.

Critics also say the law is too punitive: More than a third of schools failed to meet yearly progress goals last year, according to the Education Week newspaper.

That means millions of children are a long way from reaching the law’s ambitious goals. The law pushes schools to improve test scores each year, so that every student can read and do math on grade level by the year 2014.

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“What No Child Left Behind did is, they were absolutely loose on the goals,” Duncan told the Education Writers Association, meeting in Washington. “But they were very tight, very prescriptive on how you get there.

“I think that was fundamentally backwards,” he said.

Duncan said the federal government should be “tight” on the goals, insisting on more rigorous academic standards that are uniform across the states. And he said it should be “much looser” in terms of how states meet the goals.

The education community is watching closely to see just what Duncan means by “tight” and “loose.” So far, the administration has offered few clues.

But Duncan has left no doubt that he wants to change the name of the law, which is deeply unpopular, according to public opinion surveys.

“I do think the name `No Child Left Behind’ is absolutely toxic; I think we have to start over,” Duncan said. He has said he would like to hold a contest for school kids to come up with a new name.

Since the law’s passage, students have made modest gains, at least in elementary and middle school, the grades that are the focus of No Child Left Behind. The biggest gains have come among lower-achieving students, the kids who now are getting unprecedented attention.

The story is different in high school, where progress seems stalled and where the dropout rate, a dismal one in four children, has not budged.

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Education Secretary Arne Duncan says schools must make drastic changes to get money from a special $5 billion fund in the economic stimulus bill.

“We’re going to reward those states and those districts that are willing to challenge the status quo and get dramatically better,” Duncan said Monday at the White House.

Those who keep doing the same old thing, however, won’t be eligible for the money, he said.

Schools will be getting tens of billions more dollars through regular channels. On top of that, Duncan will have an unprecedented $5 billion to award for lasting reforms.

To get an award, schools and states must show they have been spending their money wisely. They are supposed to find innovative ways to close the achievement gap between black and Latino children who lag behind their white counterparts in more affluent schools.

Specifically, states are supposed to:

-Improve teacher quality and get good teachers into high-poverty schools;

-Set up sophisticated data systems to track student learning;

-Boost the quality of academic standards and tests;

-Intervene to help struggling schools.

Applications for the special grants will be available later this spring, and money will be awarded beginning in October. The other stimulus dollars for education will be distributed beginning later this month.

Duncan was meeting with urban school leaders who belong to the Council of the Great City Schools.

“This is the home team; they are fighting for the future of our country,” Duncan said of the school chiefs and other leaders gathered behind him on the White House grounds.

Duncan was the CEO of Chicago public schools until Obama chose him to run the Education Department.

At the meeting, which was closed to the media, Duncan focused on reform, said New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein.

“He talked a lot about the need to make sure real reform follows the dollars,” Klein said afterward.

When President-elect Barack Obama began naming his Cabinet members, we paid much respect to his practical, middle-of-the-road choices. The wisdom of his choices was proven by his ability to look at rivals, old guard veterans, and unpopular figures. After exchanging unpleasant words with Hillary Clinton through the primary, he named her Secretary of State. Arne Duncan, who helped to reform Chicago schools, is accused of being too middling, hardly choosing sides in any debate. But on the other side, Susan E. Rice is viewed as a stubborn up and comer. She will only accept opposing views once she has set her terms. 

The interesting common theme among Barack Obama’s Cabinet members is their love of basketball. Duncan played overseas for a year after college. Susan E. Rice was the point guard of her high school basketball team. Barack Obama has shown his skills in various clips taped on the campaign trail. He and Duncan played one-on-one on Election Night. It begs the question: Does Obama’s basketball savvy help him to make balanced decisions? 

Spot by spot, we’ll analyze his strategy. 

• Susan Rice, Point Guard – The PG has to look at the whole court [the globe], and decide how to stake her claim against resistance. Rice’s unforgiving attitude is perfect for the player who begins with the ball. The United States has taken a strong moral stance in its foreign relations, sometimes for the worst. Rice must measure her tendency to grunt her way through disagreement, and find ways to give the ball up when it matters. She has to see the United Nations as teammates, not opponents.  
• Hillary Clinton, Shooting Guard – Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant play shooting guard because they can score. They make the defense bend to their best efforts. Hillary Clinton can make key decisions, command the attention of her enemy, and then surprise all with the outcome. Not capturing the presidency was a loss, but the battle was won. She scored the Secretary of State seat and remained one of the most powerful people in the world. These tactical wins define her in her career. 
• Barack Obama, Small Forward – Think of the small forward as the hinge on a door. The other players rotate around him as he maneuvers the center and sides of the court. Barack Obama is a small forward with dexterity, a killer jump shot, and the ability to finish difficult baskets in a crowd. He also knows how to move the ball around between his teammates, so that the whole gameplan revolves around unity of theme. He fits on any team because his individual talents make him a standout, but he’s never going to overlook open teammates. Barack Obama is like Grant Hill or Lebron James because he’s versatile, but still aggressive. 
• Arne Duncan, Power Forward – The power forward makes the plays easier for everyone else when he organizes from his position. By grabbing rebounds and defending the basket area, he sets the standard for strong shots versus weak ones. Arne Duncan will have to make responsible choices for the school system to maintain its recovery in the urban centers of the U.S. He will also have to do the dirty work of relieving people who are failing their students to indefinite dismissal. Duncan’s personality is a bit soft for the position, but education is a frontier that will be at the top of the Obama agenda. 
• Robert Gates, Center – Like the point guard, the center has to control the ball movement from the area near the basket. He also has to defend against attacks from the opposing team. Gates was one of the custodians of the Iraq War under President Bush. He demanded more troops when forces were stretched thin, and he advocated for more of the counter-insurgency work to be delegated on the outskirts of Baghdad, where many of the small brigades of rebels had caused carnage. Everything has to begin and end with the center on a good basketball team. If Obama wants to end the war as he said, “cautiously,” he will need to defer to Gates’s judgment, and Secretary Clinton’s recommendations. 

Bench Players: Eric Holder, Attorney General – Holder will have the fun job of restoring the Justice Department to form after the Patriot Act challenged many basic civil rights in order to pursue terrorists. Holder is a natural basketball player, with smooth moves to reach the goal. With the backing of the exec branch, he should have no problem repairing the damage done by crooked judges and an overzealous Dick Cheney and friends. Lisa Jackson is the Environmental Protection Agency chair and comes in with a specific mandate to reduce emissions, which is tricky because detractors claim her record in New Jersey was not one of reform. She’ll be pressed to come to the table with unique solutions for our ozone issues, and energy-saving vehicles.

The proposed team will not mesh all the time, with talent at every position vying for the number one label. Regardless of how egos will mesh, the player-coach we have as a President-elect will look to make the decisive shots in the clutch and overtime.

HELL NO.

HELL.NO.

I don’t want to hear any BS about him hiring the most qualified.

Under no circumstances is Arne Duncan the most qualified person for the job. I will not even entertain the argument.

Duncan’s entire career has been nothing but an exercise in White Privilege. There is no Black person, that I have ever seen, get to the levels of this man, without having the BASIC proper credentials.

With all the Black folk who have PhD’s in Education, he chooses Duncan, who has a sociology degree.

A sociology degree.

I didn’t say Masters in Sociology. I didn’t say PhD in Sociology.

He has a damn Bachelors in Sociology.

He is a flunky tool crony choice of King Richard Daley II. He has done nothing for the Chicago Public School system. Not for the children that need it the most.

Click here for full post.

Duncan has run the country’s third-biggest school district since 2001, pushing to boost teacher quality and to improve struggling schools and closing those that fail. Student test scores have risen significantly during Duncan’s tenure.

One of the schools Duncan turned around — Dodge Renaissance Academy, which he shut and then reopened on Chicago’s West Side — was chosen as the backdrop for Obama’s announcement Tuesday. Obama and Duncan visited the school together in 2005.

The individuals who confirmed the selection of Duncan on Monday spoke on condition of anonymity because Obama had not made the decision public.

A 44-year-old Harvard graduate, Duncan has played pickup basketball with Obama since the 1990s. Duncan co-captained the Harvard basketball team and played professionally in Australia before beginning his education career.

He ran a nonprofit education organization on Chicago’s South Side before going to work in Chicago schools under former superintendent Paul Vallas, now the New Orleans schools chief.

Duncan’s nomination will please reform advocates who wanted a big-city schools chief who has sought to hold schools and teachers accountable for student performance; they had backed Duncan or New York’s Joel Klein.

These advocates have squared off against teachers’ unions in a contentious debate among Democrats over whom Obama should choose. Unions, an influential segment of the party base, wanted a strong advocate for their members such as Obama adviser Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University education professor.

Yet Duncan’s nomination may please the unions, who have said Duncan seems willing to work with them.

“Arne Duncan actually reaches out and tries to do things in a collaborative way,” Randi Weingarten, head of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, said in an interview earlier this month.

Obama managed during his campaign to avoid taking sides in the debate, which centers on accountability and the fate of President George W. Bush‘s No Child Left Behind law. Duncan also has tried to appeal to both factions; he signed competing manifestos from each side earlier this year.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which must confirm the education nominee, called Duncan a consensus candidate.

“Arne has been a pragmatic and effective leader of Chicago’s schools,” the Massachusetts Democrat said in a written statement. “He’s brought people together to address difficult challenges and expand opportunities so that every child can succeed.”

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., called Duncan “a very good choice for school reform and our schoolchildren.”

“He is an experienced and accomplished leader who is open to new ideas for improving our schools,” Miller said in a statement.

The choice of Duncan answered those who had wondered whether the investigation of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich might hurt the chances of a Cabinet contender from the same state.

As for the governor, Obama told a news conference Monday that an internal investigation by his transition team shows that he had no direct contact with Blagojevich about the appointment of a replacement for Obama in the Senate and that his transition aides did nothing inappropriate. Blagojevich, who has the sole authority to appoint Obama’s successor, was charged last week with putting the Senate seat up for sale.

Obama promised to release the results of the transition’s investigation but said federal prosecutors asked him to hold off until next week to avoid compromising their investigation of Blagojevich.

Obama also introduced his environment and energy team, including Steven Chu as energy secretary, Lisa Jackson as Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Carol Browner as his energy and climate “czar” and Nancy Sutley to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

In the education debate, the competing sides differ over the degree to which teachers and schools should be held accountable for how well kids learn and over the role test scores in measuring that.

Central to the dispute: No Child Left Behind, the law that has grown as unpopular as Bush, the lame-duck president who championed it.

The reform group agrees with the law’s general principle of penalizing schools where test scores fail to improve, although nearly everyone sees some problems with the law. The union coalition says test scores aren’t the only measure and that factors beyond the classroom affect how well kids learn.