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Originally Posted by aceventura3
I think my point was that it was a patronage choice and had less to do with objective qualifications in terms of results than with the two being "buddies", or the "Chicago way". I acknowledged that the choice was well educated and qualified. I was clear in saying that I would have chosen someone who actually got some results or who lead a successful school system. So, I am not even sure you understood the point I was making, and you did not seem to ask for clarification.
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I understood your point. I also understood that you had no real objective basis for believing that Duncan was unqualified (or at least you didn't have one that you could actually communicate) Your conclusion, that Duncan's appointment was more based on patronage than qualifications, depended entirely on your assertion that Duncan lacked qualification. The fact that you are unable to actually support your assertion that Duncan was unqualified with anything close to actual evidence leads me to believe that your conclusion is erroneous.
Here's what you said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by aceventura3
Obama announced Duncan as his Education Secretary. Duncan is currently the head of Chicago schools, among the worst schools in the nation. Duncan's performance in Chicago has been poor based on actually improving academic performance relative to other professionals who may be better qualified, yet he was selected - why? Could it be that Duncan and Obama are pals? Could it be they play ball together? Could it be the both graduated from Harvard? Is this the fresh change you refer to? Or, is it just cronyism? Or, just business as usual in the world of Chicago style politics?
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Then, when someone asked you for some sort of objective information to support your assertion that Duncan's "performance had been poor based on actually improving academic performance relative to other professionals who may be better qualified" your response was to either cite folks you know personally who don't like the quality of Chicago Public Schools or cite a single year's worth of data. As far as evidence goes, neither of those things is all that compelling. Your friends' opinions, while no doubt important during cocktail parties, don't constitute definitive evidence of anything, at least as far as I can tell. Are any of them licensed school district inspectors perhaps?
The other links you provided (unless I missed some) were snapshots and were thus not the appropriate information from which to draw conclusions about general trends (i.e. whether the Chicago Public School system had been improving). What you were doing was similar to trying to draw conclusions about the acceleration of a car traveling smoothly down the road by looking at a still picture of it.
So to reiterate: I understood your position. I also understood, with your help, that your basis for that position wasn't grounded in reality or the rules of logic.