43. Arne Duncan Says All Kids Deserve a Chance — and Criminals Deserve a Second One

Steve Levitt (0:04)

My guest today, Arne Duncan, has played professional basketball, ran the Chicago Public Schools for over seven years, and was a US Secretary of Education under Barack Obama. I suspect you'll be surprised to hear though, where you'll find him these days. He's on the streets of Chicago, running an organization called CRED, that's giving young men who everyone else has given up on, the chance to build meaningful lives.

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt. I've known Arne and admired him for 20 years now. We first met under difficult circumstances, when I discovered there was widespread teacher cheating in the Chicago Public Schools where Arne was in charge. More recently, the last three years, totally by chance, Arne's been my next door neighbor. So, compared to my typical interview, I have a much better sense where things might head. But I do think Arne is in for some surprises, because I have a couple of stories about him that I've never told before, and I can't wait to hear his reactions.

So you were Secretary of Education under Barack Obama, and after you left that job, you wrote a memoir entitled How Schools Work. And the first line of that book is, education runs on lies. And I cannot imagine a Secretary of Education other than you ever saying something like that publicly. What did you mean by that?

Arne Duncan (1:37)

Well, I always try and listen to what people say, Steve, but I always watch what they do. And when there's a disconnect between what I hear and what I see, what I witness, that's disconcerting. We all say we value education, but if you look at where we are in the United States relative to other nations, always break it down. Early childhood, K to 12, higher education. We're top 10 in nothing. So as much as we would say we value education and care about it, we don't invest, we don't innovate, we don't hold ourselves accountable. A second example related obviously is that we all would say we care about teachers. If you survey an American public, 99% of us would say teachers are really important, but we don't value them as professionals. We don't train them as professionals. We don't compensate them as professionals.

And it's not fair either to our teachers or to our students. And then the third one, which is a tougher one, is that everybody, everybody would say that we value our children, but we tolerate a level of gun deaths in our country that simply doesn't happen in other nations.

And I hate to say this, it breaks my heart, but I truly believe we value our guns here in the United States more than we value our children. And there's just a loss of life and a level of living with fear and trauma that our children here in Chicago and the South and West sides, when unfortunately we're on the country, live with that simply doesn't happen to children in other nations.

Steve Levitt (2:57)

So I know you had a really unique upbringing because your mom Sue ran an after school program here in Chicago called the Sue Duncan Children's Center. Could you just talk a little bit about how you spent your afternoons as a consequence of her job when you were growing up as a kid?

Arne Duncan (3:11)

Yeah. So we grew up about two blocks from where you and I live now, so I haven't escaped too far and very intentionally stayed in the neighborhood. My dad was a professor at the University of Chicago for about 40 years in psychology and my mother ran an after school program. She started in 1961, literally like 12 blocks from our house at 46th and Greenwood.

And in those days, 47th Street was the invisible barrier between middle class integrated and all black, all poor. So her program was like just a block on the other side of that. I had my friends during the school day at lab school, I had my after school friends, and just seeing the inequities in opportunity, that my friends in the afternoon were as smart, as talented, as hardworking, as resilient as my friends during the school day, but just wildly fewer set of opportunities, whether it's educationally, whether in terms of safety, whatever it might be.

And just the fundamental unfairness, people talk about different zip codes, it's basically the same zip code. It's a mile and a half, but just a different world. And that's been the driving force in my life, is trying to create opportunities, whether it's here or in Appalachia, on Native American reservations, wherever it might be, just trying to take opportunity to where the talent is. And I would say talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not. And that's what she devoted her life to. And my sister, brother and I have all tried to follow her footsteps in various ways. You can't unsee or can't unfeel something that's such a critical part of you for all your years until you went away to college.