Giving Compass' Take:

• Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan highlights the disparities he sees between the lip service politicians and voters give education and real systems change. 

• Where has real progress been made? 

• Learn about the success of Chicago schools. 

Arne Duncan, the former education secretary under President Barack Obama, has always been more candid than others who’ve served in that role. He’s often used his platform to talk about what he sees as the persistent socioeconomic and racial disparities in access to quality schools. His new book, How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success From One of the Nation’s Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education, further cements that reputation. How Schools Work’s first chapter is titled “Lies, Lies Everywhere.” The first sentence: “Education runs on lies.”

Duncan writes that even the countless fantastic schools across the country “haven’t managed to defeat the lies that undermine our system so much as they’ve been able to circumvent them.” These lies, according to Duncan, include a culture of setting low expectations for high schoolers who later discover they’re not prepared for the real world, and poorly designed accountability systems that allow teachers to fudge their students’ test-score results.

What compelled you to frame your memoir around the theme of lies?

Far too often political leaders mouth platitudes. I’ve never met a politician who was anti-education.

So whether it’s valuing education or truly valuing teachers or valuing the lives of our kids and giving them a good start to life with early-childhood education, everyone will say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, but their actions don’t follow, don’t correspond, don’t correlate. It’s intellectually dishonest, and the stakes are too high. I worry about a caste system; I worry about people feeling like they can’t get ahead.

Read the full interview with Arne Duncan about dishonesty in the American education system by Alia Wong at The Atlantic.