Duncan Wields $100 Billion to Make U.S. Schools Like Chicago’s

Bloomberg reports:

Sue Duncan has taught poor kids at her after-school center on Chicago’s South Side for 48 years. She says her son Arne spent seven days a week there as he was growing up.

“It was absolutely formative,” Arne Duncan, 44, said of working with his mother. He learned that “kids from totally dysfunctional home situations, total poverty, can do extraordinarily well if we give them a chance.”

What he absorbed matters because Duncan is now U.S. education secretary, in charge of improving a public school system that ranks below those of other developed nations in some studies. He’s armed with $100 billion in stimulus money from his friend, President Barack Obama, more than twice the budget of any of his predecessors.

“We want to put unprecedented resources out there, but the tradeoff is unprecedented reform,” said Duncan, who ran Chicago’s public schools before taking on the U.S. job in January. He said in an interview he wants to “fundamentally change the status quo” by raising academic standards, holding states and schools more accountable, and luring “the best and the brightest” into teaching.

Chicago a role model? As we've written, when you losing public school students in mass quantities: you probably aren't a role model. Even Barack Obama didn't want to send his kids to the Chicago Public Schools. They know how to rule an alley though, in Chicago.