New Education Secretary ignored power of books

As a 26-year veteran of Chicago's public school system and an admirer of the President-Elect, I still have to wonder at President-Elect Obama's selection of Arne Duncan to be the nation's Education Secretary. On paper Duncan has some good stats: Harvard graduate, seven years of relatively peaceful stewardship of a historically troubled school system, and a recent national award for his work. Obama can be pardoned for seeking someone familiar, bowing to the old Spanish adage "Better known though bad than unknown though good." (Duncan is one of his basketball buddies and Hyde Park neighbors, and his wife was active in Obama's campaign). Not to demean Obama's judgement, given his choices, I do wish he had spoken to a few schoolteachers before making his selection. Here's why:
- Duncan has very little teaching or local administrative experience in a public school system. His position was achieved partly because of his parents, both noted educators, and mostly because of his connections to the Daley machine.
- Duncan favors charter schools, which have been widely criticized and have yet to show they are an educational panacea, with many of them having failed or shut down.
- Duncan has neglected to ensure that the schools have enough books for students to benefit from wide exposure to literature, and to have the opportunity of hitting upon that book which could make them lifelong learners--and lifelong achievers.
Most schools have very inadequate libraries and miserly book budgets. Teachers are unable to order books from the latest publisher catalogs because they lack the funds. They are also unable to take advantage of student reading interests, and to turn them into reading and writing tools. Imagine, for example, if we teachers had been able to order, in advance, sets of one of the latest Harry Potter book, which J.K. Rowling, herself a teacher, creatively uses to teach footnotes and bibliography. How much easier would it be for us to teach students the rudiments of the research paper?
Perhaps this blog is unfairly critical of Duncan's budget policies, given the stagnant economy. But at no time during his seven-year tenure has Duncan ever spoken out in favor of books as the one true tool to improving reading. We have not seen him at any book-related functions, including Printers Row and One Book, One Chicago. The elite schools like North Side College Prep do not need such promotion, certainly, but the many scchools with deplorable reading scores do need it, in spades.
Let's hope that Obama, himself a bookman of sorts with a wide reading regimen and two books to his credit, will push Duncan to get books into the schools, or at least promote them as a major solution to the nation's educational ills.