“Regrets? He’s had a few, but not too many. And even these lack much self-reflection.”
That judgment, with apologies to the song “I Did It My Way,” pretty much sums up Aaron Pallas’s review of How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success from One of the Nation’s Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education, the new book by Obama appointee Arne Duncan.
Duncan’s “strong opinions about public policy [are] bolstered mainly by vignettes and anecdotes,” Pallas, TC’s Arthur I. Gates Professor of Sociology and Education, asserts in a piece published , “and issues often rise or fall on the policy agenda as much on the basis of stories as on hard evidence... This is the essential contradiction of Arne Duncan: He claims to be driven by data, but he prefers a good story.”
Pallas’s review is also cited extensively in a Washington Post column about education by reporter Valerie Strauss.
Read “The Answer Sheet” column and the Hechinger Report review .