Giving Compass' Take:

• Aaron Pallas calls out Arne Duncan for contributing to the dishonesty in the American education system that Duncan claimed to expose in How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success from One of the Nation's Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education.

• How can funders avoid lies and find truth? 

• Read a Q&A with Arne Duncan about his book. 

This is the essential contradiction of Arne Duncan: He claims to be driven by data, but he prefers a good story.

After graduating from Harvard, Duncan played professional basketball in Australia, and upon his return to Chicago, worked for the Ariel Foundation, which offered programming based on Eugene Lang’s “I Have a Dream Foundation.” Similar to Lang’s approach, the Ariel Foundation offered support, mentoring, and paying the cost of postsecondary education for a cohort of sixth-graders at a Chicago elementary school. The vast majority of these youth graduated from high school, which Duncan describes as “intensely gratifying.” (Unfortunately for Duncan, the What Works Clearinghouse operated by the U.S. Department of Education has found no evidence demonstrating the model’s effectiveness.)

Later, when he joined the Chicago Public Schools at the invitation of Mayor Richard Daley, he became enamored of a high school program called “After School Matters,” championed by Mayor Daley’s wife, Maggie. Duncan recounts his efforts to win over an “old-school” principal who didn’t think the program would work. The program “was an immediate success,” he tells us, and the principal came to see “hundreds of kids flock to the program,” and “how important it was to them.” Over the years, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, After School Matters has served over 200,000 Chicago teens. (A careful evaluation sponsored by the Wallace Foundation found some positive effects on youth development, but no detectable effects on school performance or job skills. No matter: “I knew in my heart that afterschool programs mattered,” Duncan tells us.)

Read the full article about Arne Duncan by Aaron Pallas at The Hechinger Report.