CF: So you have an issue with [Secretary of Education, former CPS CEO] Arne Duncan?
KL: Yeah, because he has a bachelor’s in sociology from Harvard and played basketball [he’s an education expert]? I think he’s completely and totally unqualified to do this job. And to me, it’s sort of indicative of how education is such a political tool now, as opposed to [his] having a real bent toward education. I think this is a way for Obama to try to make an olive branch with Republicans. There’s this mentality that outsiders and people with no education background are the… experts…. They want to privatize public education…. Arne’s policies here were a disaster.
CF: Give me a couple of examples.
KL: The whole idea of school closings and turnarounds and charter schools…. [When they closed a school] children were not going to other schools, especially in high school. They were choosing not to go to school…. They had never thought about the ramifications of what a school closing means. So if I close a school here, now this means that my children have to walk through gang territory…. There was just no understanding of community…. There was somebody sitting with a spreadsheet and making decisions without having any experience in that community.
CF: So Arne Duncan becomes Secretary of Education because he has the ties to the Obamas through the University of Chicago Lab School?
KL: Yes.... From what we understood—and I wasn’t in the room, so who knows—there was a choice between [Stanford Professor] Linda Darling Hammond—who is a respected researcher, has a PhD—and Arne Duncan, and you pick Arne? …. To me this would be like having a custodian in a hospital be the Surgeon General. He has worked in the hospital. He’s had some experience, but now you’re going to put him in charge?
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Eli Broad has the same mentality. He thinks school principals should have MBAs--not teaching degrees. This is illustrative of how clueless and destructive the privatizers are.
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