{"id":1480,"date":"2008-12-17T13:14:55","date_gmt":"2008-12-17T17:14:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1480"},"modified":"2008-12-17T13:14:55","modified_gmt":"2008-12-17T17:14:55","slug":"okay-its-arne-duncan-back-to-the-substance-already-willya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1480","title":{"rendered":"Okay, it&#8217;s Arne Duncan. Back to the substance already, willya?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The following is one of those trick questions you should never answer: Was Arne Duncan appointed because he&#8217;s a cipher\/Rorschach test for those with an axe to grind in national education politics, or is he an appointee primarily because of his personal and political connections? In between other tasks, I&#8217;ve been reading the comments flying past at half the speed of light, and after <a href=\"http:\/\/educationpolicyblog.blogspot.com\/2008\/12\/what-arne-duncan-means-for-educational.html\">the most sensible and well-grounded supporting piece<\/a> I&#8217;ve seen yet (disclosure: I&#8217;m a sometimes contributor to the blog), I&#8217;ve been reminded of Stephen Carter&#8217;s response when asked if he ever benefited from affirmative action: so what? <\/p>\n<p>So what if he&#8217;s a policy cipher? He won&#8217;t be making decisions by himself, and if anyone has a bully pulpit on education, it&#8217;s going to be Duncan&#8217;s boss. What matters is the collective decision-making, including the debate over the hard decisions to be taken with NCLB.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>So what if his appointment is far more closely tied to networking than many of the other Cabinet appointees? He&#8217;ll now be in a far more public and less insulated role than as aide to Paul Vallas or the CPS head serving at the pleasure of Richard Daley. He&#8217;ll rise or fall on his own merits, at this point.<\/p>\n<p>As <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/001426.html\">I wrote six weeks ago<\/a>, let&#8217;s move on to some discussion that is less personality-based. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following is one of those trick questions you should never answer: Was Arne Duncan appointed because he&#8217;s a cipher\/Rorschach test for those with an axe to grind in national education politics, or is he an appointee primarily because of his personal and political connections? In between other tasks, I&#8217;ve been reading the comments flying [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-nS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}