Anyone who has read Tinkering toward Utopia may recall Cuban's language in today's blog entry as familiar from the prefatory material in Tinkering. David Tyack retired a number of years ago, as did Cuban, and he was honored at last fall's History of Education Society meeting at the end of the presidential address by Jon Zimmerman.
I am not very close with Tyack–I've only talked with him for more than a few words a few times in my career. But he is well-known as a generous mentor and scholar, and I'm glad Cuban wrote today about his onetime mentor and close friend. Historians are generally solitary writers, and the collaboration between the two ended up in one of the most well-known, accessible histories of school reform.