A reader writes to offer some corrections of a minor sort to the interview with Secretary Duncan:

“When I was in high school in the South Side of Chicago, my friends could drop out and get a decent job in the stockyards or steel mills, and own their own home and support a family.”For the sake of accuracy, I would like to point out that the stockyards in Chicago were closed in 1971, just before Duncan turned 7 years old. Also, by the time he was in high school, the US Steel Southworks plant was actively slashing jobs and had already cut it’s employees by half. So, actually, even when I was in high school in the late 60s, it was apparent that neither of these employers would be providing lasting careers.

Also, while Duncan seems to want people to think he’s a South Sider from the hood, very few students drop out of U-High, the progressive secondary school at the University of Chicago Lab School that he attended (and where Obama sent his daughters). Maybe he’s referring to kids at his mom’s after-school program where he grew up in the evenings, but I would have thought he’d know that we typically say “on the South Side” here, not “in the South Side”. He sounds more like someone who visited the hood, not someone who lived in it –which he didn’t, since he grew up in the mostly upper-middle income, intellectually oriented neighborhood of Hyde Park. (My Dad also lived in Hyde Park, so I spent a lot of time there and knew many U-High students. They were very different from the students who were in gangs and those who bullied me and beat me up at my South Side high school.)