How Schools Work

August 13, 2018
In this heartfelt memoir and explainer, former secretary of education Arne Duncan recounts his life in education and lays out his ideas about where schools have gone wrong and what they should look like. The book begins with an anecdote from Duncan’s early work as a volunteer tutor in his South Side Chicago neighborhood, where he quickly realized that high school students excelling on paper were not remotely prepared to enter college. The narrative progresses chronologically through Duncan’s experiences as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools and his eventual work as secretary of education during Obama’s presidency. As CEO of CPS, Duncan worked with Steven D. Levitt, a statistician and professor from the University of Chicago, to determine which students were falling behind, which teachers were lying about their students’ progress to protect their own jobs, and why CPS was failing to prepare its students for life after graduation. He highlights his work as secretary of education, where he focused on unearthing the personal stories underlying the large-scale numbers used to measure the health of the American educational system. He passionately argues that the student, the only person in education systems not getting paid yet the one at risk of losing everything, must come first. Duncan’s experienced perspective will interest anyone invested in American public education. Agent: David Larabell, CAA.