The news tells us this week that Arne Duncan's family is moving back to Chicago and his children are enrolling at the University of Chicago Lab School in the fall.

There, they'll join the mayor's children.

Lab is an excellent, well-resourced private school with a rich arts curriculum, small classes, entire rooms devoted to holding musical instruments, a unionized teaching staff that you pretty much never hear anyone suggesting should be replaced by untrained temp workers, and not one single standardized test until students reach age 14.

In other words, Lab School has to date experienced not one ounce of influence from Arne Duncan's Department of Ed. Not one ounce of impact from his policies.

Not.

One.

He's choosing to keep his kids out of the system that requires nearly continuous standardized testing each year: three iterations of the PARCC, three of the NWEA MAP, the REACH Performance Tasks; the NAEP, TRC + DIBELS, mClass Math, and IDEL specially for littles; and EXPLORE, PLAN, COMPASS, and STAR for bigs.

I know, he's told us, like a father, it's okay. Our kids can do this. It's what's best. It's challenging. What kind of message does it send our children if we object to a challenge? He's gotten this narrative out far and wide, so that folks who don't have kids in school now can often be seen saying things in newspaper comments sections like, "Why can't these whiners just shut up and take the test?" or "What a bunch of weaklings! These kids and parents don't have any spines anymore if they don't want to take the test!"

Peter Gray has studied how learning happens without any academic requirements at a democratic school. The Boston College research professor also wrote about the long history and benefits of age-mixed, self-directed education in his book Free to Learn. Over the years, as he encountered more and more families who had adopted this approach at home (these so-called "unschoolers" are estimated to represent about 10 percent of the more than two million homeschooled children), he began to wonder about its outcomes in that setting. Finding no academic studies that adequately answered his question, he decided to conduct his own.

In 2011, he and colleague Gina Riley surveyed 232 parents who unschool their children, which they defined as not following any curriculum, instead letting the children take charge of their own education. The respondents were overwhelmingly positive about their unschooling experience, saying it improved their children's general well-being as well as their learning, and also enhanced family harmony. Their challenges primarily stemmed from feeling a need to defend their practices to family and friends, and overcoming their own deeply ingrained ways of thinking about education.  

By James Meikle  

Teachers in England are seeing unprecedented levels of school-related anxiety, stress and mental health problems among pupils of all age groups and abilities, particularly around test or exam time, according to a new report.

Children aged 10 or 11 are said to be "in complete meltdown", in tears, or feeling sick during tests, and problems can be made worse by their competitive parents, according to the Exam Factories? report commissioned by the National Union of Teachers and conducted independently by Merryn Hutchings, emeritus professor at London Metropolitan University.

Teachers complain that low achievement at tests or exams is resulting in low motivation and low self-esteem. One secondary school teacher at an unnamed school said "self-harming is rife" at key stage 4 (14- to 16-year-olds) and reported that a pupil was hospitalised for three months in a psychiatric ward following a suicide attempt, another nearly starved herself to death and numerous other students "suffered from symptoms that are on the questionnaires that the NHS uses to diagnose depression".

The report looks at how tests, exams, Ofsted inspections and other "accountability measures" are affecting schools. It includes responses from a survey of nearly 8,000 teachers, case studies of heads, other teachers (not all NUT members) and children, and a review of research and other literature.