Missing from all the news stories about Obama’s pick for education secretary, Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan, is any mention of the fact that several dozen children in Duncan’s school system have been murdered or injured in each of the past few years, largely due to gun violence. In fact, the toll (more than three dozen) eclipses that of the Virginia Tech shootings in the spring of 2007.

Duncan proponents hail him as a visionary who’ll make a great education secretary. Maybe so. A fair argument can be made that since most of the violence occurred outside of school property, and since it doesn’t have much to do with education policy, he doesn’t deserve all (or any) of the blame.

Still, the mainstream national media’s downplaying of the killings — with a few notable exceptions — has always irked me. None of the murdered children were white or wealthy; if they were, we might have paid more attention, as we did with the Virginia Tech massacre. If the killings had been more sensational, or had they been less related to gang incidents in an inner city, they might have actually registered on a national level.

Whether or not Duncan deserves blame for the disturbing spate of violence against schoolchildren, they’re a part of his legacy as Chicago’s public schools chief, and they ought to be included in any news article about his nomination. Senators would be wise to address the issue in confirmation hearings as well.

Further reading: The Chicago Tribune published an interactive map chronicling the killings of the 07-08 school year. And a year and a half ago, I wrote about this issue for my school newspaper and interviewed a sociology professor about possible causes of the violence.

(Cross-posted at Pushback.org)