EduShyster visited the University of Chicago Lab School, where Arne Duncan was a student from K-12, thirteen years.
She met his favorite teacher, who has been teaching for 49 years.
She searched for the secret sauce that makes him tick.
She would have been better off searching for whatever ingredient led him to look upon public schools with such disdain.
Perhaps she found it. It is just a stone’s throw away.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Secretary of the Department for the Privatization of U.S. Education, formerly the USDE, went to a school for educating the children of future oligarchs. Not for a school for training the children of proles to be gritful. So, it’s an unfair comparison. The schools Arne “Dunkin” Duncan is overseeing are meant to be repositories for left-over prole children who are booted out of charters.
A stop on the path to the for-profit prison.
cx: the Secretary of the Department for the Privatization of U.S. Education, formerly the USDE, went to a school for educating the children of would-be oligarchs to be actual oligarchs in the future. Not a school for training the children of proles to be gritful
You have nailed it. I would also say that Peter Greene’s recent post speaks to the “proleness” of these reforms.
He said: ” This crowd will gain credibility with me the first time I pick up the paper and read about them marching into the main office of their child’s exclusive private school and saying, “I pay good money to you guys in tuition and endowments, and I want YOU to become a pilot program for my school reforms. We’re going to put all of these in place, here, where my child goes to school, so that I can show everybody else how great they will be.”
When Arne’s kids are “standardized” I’ll give him some partial credit. But we know these “reforms” are not for our elite.
not at all. this is a program of prole training. good enough training for other people’s children
You have nailed it. I would also say that Peter Greene’s recent post speaks to the “proleness” of these reforms.
He said: ” This crowd will gain credibility with me the first time I pick up the paper and read about them marching into the main office of their child’s exclusive private school and saying, “I pay good money to you guys in tuition and endowments, and I want YOU to become a pilot program for my school reforms. We’re going to put all of these in place, here, where my child goes to school, so that I can show everybody else how great they will be.”
When Arne’s kids are “standardized” I’ll give him some partial credit. But we know these “reforms” are not for our elite.
Arne ‘Duh’ can’t.
I must be dense. What is your point re Arne Duncan and the Lab School?
The deformers want these bullet-lists of standards and scripted lessons and bubble tests for the children of ordinary people, not for their own children, for the children of the elite, who will go to elite schools where intrinsic motivation is built by autonomous teachers using innovative methods and offering a well-rounded education in music, the arts, history, literature, mathematics and the sciences rather than workforce training to the bullet list
It appears that there ain’t no special sauce at the Lab School, merely sound, valid educational principals served on bone china to a pretty much homogeneous student population. If the Dunkin Man’s disdain for public school education captures the spirit of the Lab School, one can only assume that the Lab School has failed miserably in inculcating progressive principles in the hearts of its students. It would appear that Lab students were ‘born’ to rule; the school has done admirably well at fulfilling that mission. Nothing like self perpetuation…no matter what the cost and who foots the bill.
I’m glad she did that tour and study. I am a big believer in understanding the source from which frustrations arise, rather than just calling all things that don’t fit our own visions “evil.” So yay Edushyster.
I think the elixir is not the presence of something, but the absence of something. And that something is a predetermined outcome which often swallows up public schools if they are not on guard to it. When I taught in the inner city of Kansas City, MO students gave the fact that they lived in the “hood” a life of its own. Too often problems become the identity of an institution and that identity becomes a cancer. Arne’s perpetuation (with the help of Rhee and others shouting the party line “failing failing failing” have led to a predetermined outcome. At his lab school this outcome does not likely exist. It was set up to succeed.
In my public school where I teach I have every intention of distancing myself from any teacher who wants to breathe life into a cloud of gloom so that it will rain on everyone (and I don’t mean in the positive rain maker sense). They are out there. They are afraid of reform, but helping it along by being negative.
Now is the time to have a predetermined outcome of success! While navigating through the set-backs. (Forget GAGA and all of those easy explanations; parent instinct, teacher instinct, community wisdom will get things to settle out the way they need to be. I see the austerity of the right and the love of standardizing from the left to be cumbersome, but not the end. This story is not over. . .America is about second acts. We have to make the second act the better of the two in the post-NCLB decades.
There’s a reason why Milton Friedman felt so at home at the University of Chicago.
Long before it was associated with Monetarism and Neoliberal economics, it was known as The University of Standard Oil, because of its founding by John D. Rockefeller and the American Baptist Education Society in 1890.
Rockefeller once said the University was “the best investment I ever made.”
I don’t believe Duncan has the intelligence to understand how his progressive and well rounded K-12 education led to his successful career in basketball.
Yes, in fact, we should demand that the Lab School be targeted as “Failing,” since only “bad teachers”could have produced such a human nullity.
I prefer to think that Arne is an example of outside factors having a more significant impact on his life than his teachers.
No Excuses, 2old2teach !
I wonder if Arne views this teacher of his as someone who wasn’t the best and brightest? He says that education only attracts below average candidates after all.
I just want Arne Duncan to take all the standardized tests he feels appropriate for others and then publish his scores.
What hypocrites. I really find it disgusting that these filthy rich hypocrites send their child to a school like this while they want everyone else’s child to have school on the cheap.
Dee Dee: what you said!
And if I may quote from a keen observer of human nature:
“Have they no shame?????”
None. Absolutely, positively, none at all.
¿? Even an old dead Greek guy couldn’t have put it better than you did!
😎
Joseph Welch, speaking directly to Senator Joe McCarthy: “At long last, have you no shame”. Of course, The senator had no shame. Your paraphrase works quite nicely.
You have nailed it. I would also say that Peter Green’s recent post speaks to the “proleness” of these reforms.
He said: ” This crowd will gain credibility with me the first time I pick up the paper and read about them marching into the main office of their child’s exclusive private school and saying, “I pay good money to you guys in tuition and endowments, and I want YOU to become a pilot program for my school reforms. We’re going to put all of these in place, here, where my child goes to school, so that I can show everybody else how great they will be.”
When Arne’s kids are “standardized” I’ll give him some partial credit. But we know these “reforms” are not for our elite.