In a special episode of The Tea, April Ryan is joined by non-profit leader and former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to discuss the state of play in Chicago, where ICE raids are becoming increasingly hostile. As noted, ICE presence in the city is impacting every aspect of life.
Duncan specifically highlights the disruption of education, revealing that “you have kids who are too scared to go to school. You have people not showing up, you have parents that can’t take their kids to school anymore, and these are people who are hardworking, they’re paying taxes, they’ve lived here all their life.” How are we supposed to build the next generation of productive members of our society if they can’t get their basic educational needs met?
April and Duncan also chat about a new documentary coming out soon that features Duncan and the non-profit Chicago CRED. The documentary is called How to Change the World and is a multi-episode series spotlighting different non-profits around the world making a real impact.
To learn more about Chicago CRED, click here.
Arne Duncan is the Managing Partner of Chicago CRED. Previously, he served as U.S. Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2016. From 2001 to 2008, Arne served as Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Public Schools where he was Deputy Chief of Staff for the CEO.
The transcript below has been edited slightly for clarity.
April Ryan
Welcome to a special edition of The Tea with April, and this time we have a guest who’s been here before. He sipped the tea and knocked the pot over. We have none other than former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Hello, sir, how are you?
Arne Duncan
Good afternoon, April. Thanks so much for having me. How you doing?
April Ryan
I’m… you know, I’mma be honest… I’mma be honest with you, not as great as we could be. And I say we, commutatively.
Arne Duncan
That’s real, that’s very real.
April Ryan
Particularly in Chicago, your town, where you play basketball and do all sorts of things still, what’s on the ground in Chicago, particularly when it comes to education?
Arne Duncan
Well, I’m gonna start with ICE, because that’s what’s happening in our town.
April Ryan
Yes.
Arne Duncan
It’s impacting everything, including education, because kids aren’t coming to school. April, for your listeners, for your viewers, I can’t overstate how bad things are in Chicago with ICE. They are breaking up families, they are separating children from their mothers, they are arresting the lady who sells tacos, the man who sells tamales, they are, just a gang. They are Trump’s private gang that is unchecked, unfettered, in the amount of stress and trauma is just… it’s staggering, April. The images coming out of there, coming out of our city, are just horrific. They’re hanging out at the local high school right by my house now. I have no idea why they’re doing that. And, it is devastating. What they did to the apartment building at South Shore on 75th Street.
They had a helicopter above the apartment building. They had guys rappelling out of the helicopter. They landed a helicopter on top of the apartment building, can you imagine? Middle of the night, took kids out in zip ties, flashbangs, and they said they, you know, got 20, gang members or whatever. And April, you know why I know they’re lying? Because they showed no guns.
I work with gang members every day. They have guns. They would have had a whole table full of guns. So what they basically did is they arrested and attacked a whole bunch of hard-working Venezuelans, African Americans, it’s a mixed building, and can you imagine being dragged out at 3 in the morning?
April Ryan
African Americans, too now. It was supposed to… and it doesn’t make it right with anyone, but it’s supposed to be migrants, illegal migrants, or those who have… well, migrants who have overstayed visas or have not gone through the immigration process, let’s say that, and those who they have found have criminal histories. But now, they’re going into African American communities, pulling people as well.
This is out of control, but you said something so poignant and so real. You said Trump’s gang. I’ve always called him the gangster that went political, but Trump’s gang, ICE is Trump’s gang. You hit the nail on the head. Let’s go back to the school part, and thank you for giving us the lay of the land. It sounds like something you would see in a movie, right? It sounds like something you would see in a movie, but it’s real. The reality is, in Chicago, it’s ground zero. It left Los Angeles, but now it’s Chicago. I don’t think… there’s a coincidence that ICE is near your home. Do you?
Arne Duncan
Yeah, I have no idea, but I’ll just say you have kids who are too scared to go to school. You have people not showing up, you have parents that can’t take their kids to school anymore, and these are people who are hardworking, they’re paying taxes, they’ve lived here all their life. They are no threat to our community. In fact, they are the fabric of our community. And to somehow depict them as the enemy is just beyond dishonest.
April Ryan
So, you said you live near a schoolhouse. Give us the scene that you see every morning near this schoolhouse.
Arne Duncan
Yeah, and I’m not out there every morning, but this is Kenwood High School. I live in Hyde Park, it’s, you know, 5 blocks from where I live, and they’ve been sort of stationed out there for the past week or so, a little pizza place where my wife and I go, pizza capri. They’ve taken out the guy who served, you know, served there forever. And these are not threats. It’s just the most heartbreaking thing. They are not threats. These are productive members of our community. Chicago’s a, you know, third white, third black, third Latino. That’s always been the beauty of our city, was the—
April Ryan
A melting pot. A melting pot.
Arne Duncan
—a total melting pot, and these guys are the opposite of threats. And I worked, as you know, to reduce gang violence every day. They’ve come a long way, have a long way to go, but this is a gang unlike anything we have ever seen in our lifetimes.
And I don’t know, April, how this movie ends. You know, it is a horror movie right now, it is despicable, it is disgusting, and I don’t know if we, you know, win or lose. We’re fighting every day, but this thing’s, you know, our future hangs in the balance here.
April Ryan
What happens when kids don’t show up to school? There’s truancy after so many days, and the school system comes after them. Is it the school system, or will it be ICE? Because they can be pulled… In any direction for anything now, because they are not showing up for school.
Arne Duncan
Yeah, I mean, the school system’s not going to come after them, but obviously, you notice, April, you have kids like that. If kids don’t go to school, they can’t learn. They have no ability to learn, and you just don’t have, you know, kids not going to school. You have people not showing up for work.
You have people not able to pay their rent now. I mean, the ripple effects of this, restaurants closing down, businesses closing down, I mean, the economic impact, you know, let alone the human impact, is horrific.
But if kids… you know, do we want kids in, you know, the shadows of our country, or do you want them educated and, you know, productive members? And we’re just… we’re just marginalizing already the most, you know, the most marginalized, the most vulnerable, and it’s to whose benefit? It’s to whose benefit. I can’t fathom that.
April Ryan
My heart is broken, and I want to almost cry, and I can’t, I cannot cry. The condition of…our country right now, is something that we never thought we’d see. And the little people, the least of these, the ones who really rely on us. They’re terrified. From the gang! From Trump’s gang. Education, again. special ed unit has been cut out of the Department of Education. Why do that when the Department of Education was really meant to help the least of these, right?
Arne Duncan
Well, I mean, they don’t do anything by accident, so, you know, for them, cruelty is always the point, and they always attack the most vulnerable. Bullies always attack the most vulnerable first, so whether it’s children with special needs, like we’re talking about, whether it’s, you know, English language learners or students who live below the poverty line, that’s who they’re always going to attack.
And this is part of a larger effort, not just to dismantle the Department of Education, but to undermine education in our country. Why? Because educated folks are a threat to an autocratic leader. This is part of a… this is much bigger than education. This is an attempt to you know, have one source of truth. And where people can think critically, when they can think for themselves, when they can discern information from misinformation. That’s a threat to an authoritarian leader. And the most heartbreaking April is, you know, we have millions of children across the country who have special needs. Some of their parents might happen to vote Republican, some of their parents might vote for, you know, a Democrat. It doesn’t matter. We gotta look out for our babies. And, you know, dismantling Department of Education as part of this larger plot to dismantle our democracy. And when you pick, which is what Trump always does, when you pick someone like Linda McMahon, who was wildly underqualified, zero qualification, she thought, you know, AI, artificial intelligence, she called it A1, she thought.
April Ryan
That’s right.
Arne Duncan
He literally had no clue on the, you know, most revolutionary thing to happen in such a long time. What he does across the board is he always picks people who are completely incompetent for their job, and they know they’re incompetent. They know that. But what it means is they have blind loyalty to him. They are only there not because of their expertise.
You know, not because of their knowledge, not because of their commitment, but because he put him there. And so that’s all he cares about is blind loyalty. And the more ignorant, you know, your cabinet members can be, the more… the more they’re going to be loyal to you, because they know they don’t belong. She’s Exhibit A for that, you know, colossal incompetence.
April Ryan
The president is mediocre. As you said, Linda McMahon, thought AI, artificial intelligence, was A1 learning. And they are attacking critical thinking, as you said. Being able to think for yourself and not having to rely on a mediocre person who talked about putting a flashlight in your body and drinking some kind of liquid to eradicate COVID,
That’s who we’re talking about, the President of the United States and his attack on education. And going back to something that you said, I can’t help but think about what Brian Gumbel, the interview Brian Gumbel did in 1989, I don’t know if you saw that, I don’t know if you saw that interview. But the interview with Bryant Gumbel where he said, the interview where he said… Trump said that Black men and women that are highly educated are more of a problem for him because they get jobs over the white men and women who are highly educated. So, education has been his issue with this country for a long time.
Arne Duncan
No, that’s exactly right. Obviously, you know, Trump has been a racist forever, his daddy was a racist, and that, you know, this white nationalist agenda is part of it, but people, you know this, you know, knowledge is power. There’s a reason that slaves were killed or threatened with death if they learned to read. There’s a reason why across the globe, you know, girls are denied access to education. It terrifies those who are authoritarian leaders, because people who can seek their own truth don’t rely on a dictator, an authoritarian leader, to tell them their version of the truth. And so Trump is not original, there’s nothing new in this playbook. We’ve seen it for centuries in our country, we see it across the globe now.
But what is obviously extraordinarily scary is that he’s executing this playbook really, really well, and we have to push back, we have to resist. We were out there, you know, Sunday at the Saturday at the No Kings rally, that was amazing. Chicago, we had 100,000 strong, over 7 million.
April Ryan
Were you out there?
Arne Duncan
We are… I was out there, you know, my wife, you know, our friends, but this… I keep telling folks, like, well, this is not a drill, this is not practice, this is reality. And we’re either gonna face this, and resist it, and sacrifice for our democracy, and sacrifice for education, and sacrifice for children, and sacrifice for our special needs kids or we’re gonna have a country that is truly unrecognizable for a long time. And that’s… that’s the battle we’re in right now. I wish that wasn’t true, but I’m always just gonna be honest, that’s exactly where we are as a nation.
April Ryan
We have a president that’s vulgar and ignorant, let’s just say that. He was very upset by the numbers in Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia. He watched. And then after that, he was piloting a jet in an AI… an A1 video. He was piloting… I know what Linda McMahon calls A1. I need to let people know I know what AI means. He was piloting a jet with an AI video with King Trump on the side. He had a crown, he was piloting a jet, and it was going over a crowd of people, including a Democratic, strategist, or, somebody who’s really high on social media, and he let feces—excrement go on the crowd. That’s ignorant, that’s vulgar from a president of the United States. That’s mediocre thinking, no critical thinking, someone who’s insecure, narcissistic, racist, all of that.
Arne Duncan
You know, we’ll never see anything like it, and hopefully won’t again, but, you know, whether it’s that, whether it’s, you know, the press secretary getting a question and asking, you know, where the idea came from, and she answers, your mama. I mean, it’s just… it’s insane.
And that gets, you know, parroted, and I just think, April, like, you know, we’re all imperfect, but I can say, we tried our best to be good role models for kids, and to, you know, be people that, you know, kids can look up to and aspire to be and want to be like. And the fact that, you know, does anyone want their child learning from this kind of behavior, speaking like this, it’s unfathomable to me.
And it’s… it’s, you know, the only explanation is it’s a cult-like mentality, where it doesn’t matter what the cult leader does, you know, we will follow him without question. This is not people who are thinking for themselves, which again goes back to… takes our conversation full circle. They can no longer think for themselves because they just follow the cult leader wherever he takes them, and wherever his team takes them. But all of this is, you know, we’ve never seen it ever in our nation’s history, and I pray we never see it again.
April Ryan
You know, your mama used to be a thing that you did with the dozens, right? And we’ve learned to stop that, you know, don’t do that. I mean, that was Black exploitative television, your mama, you know, they tell a joke. Put this white woman, who has a wealthy husband, standing at the podium, the mouthpiece of the President of the United States, behind a podium that’s supposed to give the world information about what the president is thinking. And you say, your mama, because you cannot come up with the words.
To finish a statement That is critical to America. Your mama.
Arne Duncan
I think… I actually think it’s worse than that.
April Ryan
Oh my god.
Arne Duncan
These are not people who are going to give up power. And what they’re demonstrating is they could, you know, care less about norms, about, you know, being role models. All they care about is pure, raw power, and they just feel that power, and they feel they’re untouchable. That power right now is seductive, it’s addictive, cruelty is always the point. They know that… they know that was exploitative, they know exactly what they’re doing. That was not a lack of things to say, that was, let’s just do something to throw it in.
April Ryan
That’s a street fight. That’s a street fight back in the day. That’s a street fight.
Arne Duncan
So, we are in a street fight for our democracy, and we’re gonna come together, and win together, or they’re gonna pick us up, you know, one by one. And so, it is uncomfortable, it is scary, and I, you know, I deal with, as you know. Gang Violence Chicago, and I’m not one of those guys, I’m honestly, April, I’m scared every day. I’ll be real honest. I’m trying to make sure I get home every night, and I’m scared now, but you either let that fear paralyze you, or you push through it, and we have to get to overcome our fear, and use it to motivate us. Say we want something better for our kids, you know, for our country, for our families, for our community, and this is the ultimate test. I wish you weren’t here, April, but here we are, and we gotta handle it.
April Ryan
I’m gonna tell you this, and I’mma share this, I’m scared too, but it’s fight or flight, and I think you’re fighting, and I thank you for your fight. And I’m fighting in the way, the best way I can, by telling the truth and shaming the devil with people like you here on the T. And the last thing, your fight. You’re fighting with a new documentary. Talk to me about this documentary. It starts off with you doing something you love in the silhouette of you. Shooting basketball, and then you’re talking to people who are trying to help Stop the killing, stop the crime. Talk to me about this documentary.
Arne Duncan
Yeah, I’ve run a small nonprofit called Chicago CRED for the past 9 years, and it’s amazing this group found out about us. They have a series called How to Change the World that I think is focused on 8 or 9 different groups across the globe, and they happen to, you know, get interested in our work and come fill. They did a remarkable job. And it’s actually, you know, we have so far to go, April, but our violence is down. This summer, we had our safest summer in 60 years. We may have our safest year in 60 years. It makes it all the more important and ironic that Trump is running around saying how violent Chicago is. We have never been safer in 6 decades.
So we’re not done yet, this is not mission accomplished, but what we do at Chicago CRED is we work with the young men and women most at risk of shooting or being shot. We give them a pathway out of that. We have life coaching, we have clinical help. Helping high school, you know, get their high school degrees, high school diplomas, some going to college, and then we have a job training program. What I always say is, you know, people say it’s nice to give people a second chance. I think in many cases, we’re actually giving it first chance that every institution, their lives failed them, families, you know, community, church, schools, whatever, and we’re giving them a chance, an off-ramp, to those cycles of violence. And it’s extraordinary to see the leadership they’re providing.
And our work is hard, honestly, it’s traumatic, it’s very difficult, but the joy of my job, the unbelievable joy, is watching this transformation, not overnight, but over time with our participants, and they are leaving Chicago to a safer place. What’s most important to me, April, is not just that violence is down. But arrests are also down. So it’s not like we’re arresting our way out, we’re not incarcerating our way out of it. Basically, we have a lot fewer people shooting, and that’s where you want to be. And so we’re not done yet, but we’re so incredibly proud of the collective progress and the choices our young men are making.
April Ryan
Yeah, and… and you, you nailed, you nailed it when you said crime is down in Chicago. Crime is down in a lot of these major cities. But President Trump wanted to send the military, and he wants to show… he wants to be a dictator. He wants to follow that old European rule that has been overturned. He wants to… to make people fearful of him. You can’t be fearful of somebody who’s mediocre that you see on the street. Game peeps game.
You know, but here’s the bottom line, you’re right. Donald Trump used the… he wanted to get in… he wanted to bring the troops in, the National Guard troops in, on crime. He couldn’t do that, so guess what? He came in the other way, through immigration, and now trying to topple with… crime that’s not there. So, it’s bait and switch, it’s smoke and mirrors. It’s Donald Trump, golden era.
Thank you, Arne Duncan. Thank you so much, and keep fighting the fight. You’re amazing. Still appreciate your leadership, and your purpose. Appreciate you, but you know what? One thing? If we would have gotten the word out like we had planned a couple of years ago, because we kept saying we needed civics back in the schools, so people could understand this is not how government works. During the first term, Arnie Duncan and I were talking about that, and we kept talking about civics is important. And I said civics was important because of freedom of the press.
Because how I was being attacked, the First Amendment has freedom of the press, right? And if we would have learned the truth about how government is, and what democracy is like you would understand what a patriarch… a patriot is, because a patriot actually reveres and looks at the Constitution, not something else called Project 2025. They… they don’t, police American citizens, because they know that’s posse comitatus and that’s illegal. If people understood how the government worked. That’s one of my regrets. That’s one of my regrets, that we didn’t have that chance to really do that.
Arne Duncan
We have to keep pushing, but obviously he’s controlling the education system in so many states now, but all we can do is, you know, keep working, and that civics education, as you know so well, is so critically important, and the ability to think, you know, critically, to think for yourself, to understand our democracy, understand the Founding Fathers, understanding, you know, checks and balances, and what that it’s supposed to be. It’s, it’s, we have to educate, we have to fight our way out of this, we have to, you know, non-violently fight on the clear, non-violently resist. But ultimately, we have to way increase the level of education and the range of things we’re teaching. The civic education has to be part of this, and this is a dark, dark time in our history. You know, history will not treat us kindly, but we have to learn from it, and the only way to do that is through education.
April Ryan
Arne Duncan, thank you so much. Former Obama Education Secretary Arnie Duncan, he’s the man. He’s the man. He’s still playing basketball, working nonprofits, and trying to find peace in the midst of the storm to fight for us in education and your city of Chicago. Thank you, Arne Duncan.
Arne Duncan
Thank you so much, April. Have a great day. Appreciate.
April Ryan
You too, be well.
