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The Chicago Sun-Times editorial page greets President Bush with this raspberry on the occasion of his arrival in the city this morning (Welcome to the city of Chicago): "We thought the president should meet some of the children in Chicago who are left behind every day, especially in our high schools."
Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy tries to get some control over the NCLB debate in this Washington Post oped (How To Fix 'No Child'). Lamenting NCLB's use as a political football(!), Kennedy outlines pros and cons of the current law -- you know this already -- and then slams the Bush administration for not funding the law enough.
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Mon Jan 7, 2008 at 10:42 AM
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When Kozol was in town he said he was not happy with Kennedy: who wanted to push NCLB thru be cause it was something he created -- no matter what was happening in the schools due to the law.
Kozol went on to say he would fight against NCLB until his last dying breath.
Kozol went on to say he would fight against NCLB until his last dying breath.
Mon Jan 7, 2008 at 3:29 PM
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I wrote about today's SunTimes editorial on my own blog and posted links to some other web sites with reading and research that readers of the SunTimes might visit to learn more about the problems the SunTimes was referring to. The link is http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/2008/01/welcome-to-chicago-mr-president-here.html
Mon Jan 7, 2008 at 5:22 PM
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There was no need to put that student from Kelly High School. Don't blame the U.S. Dept of Ed or the president on the overcrowding or no NCLB accomplishments at Kelly.
If the City of Chicago, Dept of Buildings under Mayor Daley would have prevented the problems of illegal conversions in the 12th, 14th Wards, then their would be no 35 plus students in a class at kelly. Blame the city on this.
If the City of Chicago, Dept of Buildings under Mayor Daley would have prevented the problems of illegal conversions in the 12th, 14th Wards, then their would be no 35 plus students in a class at kelly. Blame the city on this.
Mon Jan 7, 2008 at 10:02 PM
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The Sun Times piece was very poorly done. The struggles of the students featured have nothing to do with NCLB. It was sad to see such a poor piece of journalism not only in one of our leading papers, but on the front page! It seemed like the three students chosen were completely random. The student from Austin isn't struggling at Loyola because of NCLB, he is likely struggling because Austin High School has been struggling for decades--it has more to do with the low-quality of the teachers and administrators who were there AND the fact that there was no accountability. Thankfully it has been shut down. I hope that it is replaced with programs that recruit and train strong teachers.
NCLB has made all educators be more mindful of the performance of all students. As a principal, I know that our lowest achievers get more attention at our school as a result of this law. It think that it is a good thing and I only hope it outlives the Bush term.
NCLB has made all educators be more mindful of the performance of all students. As a principal, I know that our lowest achievers get more attention at our school as a result of this law. It think that it is a good thing and I only hope it outlives the Bush term.
Mon Jan 7, 2008 at 10:30 PM
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Dear Citizen -
your posts are beside the point. The students who attend Kelly didn't move to the neighborhood, their families did. Unless you want to go back and arrest the other ethnic groups who built the illegal conversions now being occupied by families on the Southwest side, you will not get at the original perpetrators.
And neither punishing them or the current occupants will educate the students who currently live in that area, whether YOU like how they got there or not.
And NCLB or not, those children have a right to be educated...
When families moving into the South Loop and to Sandberg village brought more children than planners anticipated, no one sat around asking who was to blame for that. They went out and built more infrastructure, even if it meant purchasing homes to make room for the needed classrooms.
Stop being such a hater; it is not productive. It is hurtful to the search for answers to support schoolchildren in Chicago.
your posts are beside the point. The students who attend Kelly didn't move to the neighborhood, their families did. Unless you want to go back and arrest the other ethnic groups who built the illegal conversions now being occupied by families on the Southwest side, you will not get at the original perpetrators.
And neither punishing them or the current occupants will educate the students who currently live in that area, whether YOU like how they got there or not.
And NCLB or not, those children have a right to be educated...
When families moving into the South Loop and to Sandberg village brought more children than planners anticipated, no one sat around asking who was to blame for that. They went out and built more infrastructure, even if it meant purchasing homes to make room for the needed classrooms.
Stop being such a hater; it is not productive. It is hurtful to the search for answers to support schoolchildren in Chicago.
Mon Jan 7, 2008 at 11:40 PM
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Having just returned from a day partly inside that crazed bubble President Bush and Mayor Daley try to create around their carefully scripted media events, let me assure you that the Sun-Times did the world a major service today by having that story jumping off page one in Bush's and Daley's faces.
And as most people know, I can be as critical of the Sun-Times as anyone.
The level of paranoid pseudo-"security" that Bush and Daley surround themselves with has to be experienced from the inside and the outside to be believed. Because those of us who covered today for Substance we not allowed to splash around in the "press pool", we got an insider outsider view. Here is how it worked:
In the morning, the touchdown of Air Force One at O'Hare and Bush's arrival were "Open Press" meaning anyone with valid credentials (you had to have been cleared already by CPD) would cover it -- from a distance of 150 yards standing on top of a flat bed trailer that looked like it's last cargo had been cows or horses. It was a message (if the pat downs and the sniffer dogs hadn't already been) that the media were not going to be treated with respect this day. It didn't matter whether you were Tribune, CBS, or Substance -- anyone who might dare to ask a question off script was going to be muzzled (or worse, given the heavy handed security).
No local reporter got within 150 yards of Bush at O'Hare. Then he was whisked into the city by helicopter. I don't know what they "Washington Pool" people do, but reading their coverage (such as it has been so far), it's hard to tell what.
Next Stop: Wrigleyville, and the dog-and-pony show at Greeley Elementary. There were a number of telling moments for the three of us who were covering the No Child Left Behind anniversary speech from two blocks away and outside the building within which Daley, Bush, Spellings, and Rahm Emmanuel were doing photo ops with little kids.
My two favorites were the cavalry keeping the public a block away from a public school while two of the most powerful elected public officials in the USA were giving speeches on behalf of the most important public education law in a half century -- just so long as the public was kept out. There were snipers visible on the roofs around Greeley, according to several people I talked with outside, and everyone was certain that the "public" would have faced something very nasty if anyone from the public had tried to enter that public school during those public hours when President Bush and Mayor Daley were discussing the public's business.
One member of the public I talked to briefly was a mother who had come by to pick up her child, who was inside that public school. She was being told, by a very polite but very large and unyielding Chicago cop that she could not go any farther. She was about a block east of her child while our public officials had their security people deployed to block her from entering the public schools her child attends.
At least one child left behind that day.
The Union League Club was equally crazed with security. They had the "free press" bunched in the back of a fancy ballroom waiting for Mayor Daley and Bush. Daley and Bush came in, delivered their remarks, praised one another, and left.
Not once during the day did I see anyone from the press allowed to ask one question about Chicago's public schools, No Child Left Behind, or for that matter the "Economy Speech" Bush delivered at the Union League Club (after opening with an attack on schools that had been "failing" until NCLB created miracles like Greeley supposedly is).
We'll be blogging and reporting several pieces of this story over the next week or so.
But nobody is going to get away with criticizing the Sun-Times on January 7, 2008, because no matter how many disagreements we may have had in the past or will have in the future, today the Sun-Times did a job for a free press that would have made the original owner of the old Chicago Times very proud.
And as most people know, I can be as critical of the Sun-Times as anyone.
The level of paranoid pseudo-"security" that Bush and Daley surround themselves with has to be experienced from the inside and the outside to be believed. Because those of us who covered today for Substance we not allowed to splash around in the "press pool", we got an insider outsider view. Here is how it worked:
In the morning, the touchdown of Air Force One at O'Hare and Bush's arrival were "Open Press" meaning anyone with valid credentials (you had to have been cleared already by CPD) would cover it -- from a distance of 150 yards standing on top of a flat bed trailer that looked like it's last cargo had been cows or horses. It was a message (if the pat downs and the sniffer dogs hadn't already been) that the media were not going to be treated with respect this day. It didn't matter whether you were Tribune, CBS, or Substance -- anyone who might dare to ask a question off script was going to be muzzled (or worse, given the heavy handed security).
No local reporter got within 150 yards of Bush at O'Hare. Then he was whisked into the city by helicopter. I don't know what they "Washington Pool" people do, but reading their coverage (such as it has been so far), it's hard to tell what.
Next Stop: Wrigleyville, and the dog-and-pony show at Greeley Elementary. There were a number of telling moments for the three of us who were covering the No Child Left Behind anniversary speech from two blocks away and outside the building within which Daley, Bush, Spellings, and Rahm Emmanuel were doing photo ops with little kids.
My two favorites were the cavalry keeping the public a block away from a public school while two of the most powerful elected public officials in the USA were giving speeches on behalf of the most important public education law in a half century -- just so long as the public was kept out. There were snipers visible on the roofs around Greeley, according to several people I talked with outside, and everyone was certain that the "public" would have faced something very nasty if anyone from the public had tried to enter that public school during those public hours when President Bush and Mayor Daley were discussing the public's business.
One member of the public I talked to briefly was a mother who had come by to pick up her child, who was inside that public school. She was being told, by a very polite but very large and unyielding Chicago cop that she could not go any farther. She was about a block east of her child while our public officials had their security people deployed to block her from entering the public schools her child attends.
At least one child left behind that day.
The Union League Club was equally crazed with security. They had the "free press" bunched in the back of a fancy ballroom waiting for Mayor Daley and Bush. Daley and Bush came in, delivered their remarks, praised one another, and left.
Not once during the day did I see anyone from the press allowed to ask one question about Chicago's public schools, No Child Left Behind, or for that matter the "Economy Speech" Bush delivered at the Union League Club (after opening with an attack on schools that had been "failing" until NCLB created miracles like Greeley supposedly is).
We'll be blogging and reporting several pieces of this story over the next week or so.
But nobody is going to get away with criticizing the Sun-Times on January 7, 2008, because no matter how many disagreements we may have had in the past or will have in the future, today the Sun-Times did a job for a free press that would have made the original owner of the old Chicago Times very proud.
Tue Jan 8, 2008 at 1:32 PM
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Have to agree (mostly) with George. The Sun-Times stepped out in a big way and at an important time. We might not be able to blame the all of the ways Chicago education's system has failed those children on NCLB, but what we can say is that is certainly didn't help them, nor did it ever try to. That is the more important point, that those of you who commented negatively about the editorial missed.
Sometimes legislation is not necessarily faulty for what it does, but for what it fails to do.
Sometimes legislation is not necessarily faulty for what it does, but for what it fails to do.
Tue Jan 8, 2008 at 8:29 PM
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I did my student teaching at Kelly HS and I have to say that not much has changed at that school in the 30 yrs since. The students are nice enough but it is a working class neighborhood where kids are disadvantaged from the get-go. All the reconstitution and reshuffling schemes will not make that much of a difference until the real problem is addressed. Poverty is the 800 pound gorilla in the room that no one seems to want to talk about anymore.
Tue Jan 8, 2008 at 9:06 PM
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I think that waiting for poverty to be addressed gives us too much of an out. We need to provide top schools to kids regardless of their familes economic level--and we need to do it now. There are many great schools in Chicago that serve a high population of low income students and get great results. We should look to the Dodge, LEARN, the U of C Charters as schools that are providing a great education while the rest of us figure out how to raise income levels.
Wed Jan 9, 2008 at 8:52 AM
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Please. If every real public school had the resopurces of UC behind it, then they would do well too. UC picks the teachers, trains the teachers, does the currirulum, then gets lots of consultant $ from CPS and even gets schools to use their poverty $ to pay them! Be real.
Wed Jan 9, 2008 at 8:54 AM
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Then maybe every public school should have access to similar resources...Unlikely? Yes. But at least a discussion that might get us closer to potential solutions.
Wed Jan 9, 2008 at 9:08 PM
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How do you explain Dodge's success then. They don't have any special partnerships with CPS. It seems like Dodge's success is about getting great admin and teachers and working your tail off. Maybe we could all do that.
Wed Jan 9, 2008 at 9:27 PM
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The main thing that NCLB has done as far as I can tell is make education be all about teaching to tests. Accountability is 90% test scores. For high school these test scores are the ACT and the Prairie State. The ACT was never a test meant to make teachers or school accountable, the ACT is for colleges and students use. Plenty of students get a decent education from "failing" schools and maybe their tests scores weren't the best. But no one is really willing to put the time, energy and resource into really evaluating schools and seeing what the schools are doing so instead we just give a big test and if most of the students do poorly the school is failing. Of course that 17% that are successful and achieving (imagine that in a failing school) are not important to the public. Who is teaching and educating this 17% at these failing schools? Maybe we should get these gurus from the charter schools and the UC school to come to one of our neighborhood schools and take over. Don't train the teachers already there just trade places with us and see if you can do the same job at the public schools that you do with you supposedly non selective charter schools.
What teacher assesses students solely on one test per semester? Yet that is what our schools are assessed on. Yes attendance is looked at, and of course if we give teachers enough professional development maybe we can teach students even when they are absent. So a student with an 80% attendance will do just as well as the ones with 95% attendance. The irony with attendance is the schools that spend more money on attendance have the worse attendance rates yet get less money because of the poor attendance.
What teacher assesses students solely on one test per semester? Yet that is what our schools are assessed on. Yes attendance is looked at, and of course if we give teachers enough professional development maybe we can teach students even when they are absent. So a student with an 80% attendance will do just as well as the ones with 95% attendance. The irony with attendance is the schools that spend more money on attendance have the worse attendance rates yet get less money because of the poor attendance.
Thu Jan 10, 2008 at 8:54 PM
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An artifact of good teaching is higher test scores.
Thu Jan 10, 2008 at 9:51 PM
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Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Dodge is an AUSL training school with mentor teachers assigned to work with the regular classroom teacher in each room. I wish CPS would provide two adults for my classroom, but I doubt the resources are available for such a staffing arrangement on a larger scale. So, the Dodge model is not really something "we could all do."
Fri Jan 11, 2008 at 5:34 AM
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"An artifact of good teaching is higher test scores..." (by blank yesterday evening).
No always, if by "artifact" you mean "result."
One of the reasons I outed the CASE tests nine years ago this month was that the CASE English tests (which I had been shown in draft by a source six months earlier) could have been "passed" by any child who had seen "the movie" and not even read the book. This was true of both the "Romeo and Juliet" and the "To Kill a Mockingbird" materials.
One of the things I had done during my previous quarter century of teaching, for the sake of the kids' learning, was always write lessons and tests that could not be "passed" if you had only watched the movie. If my job were to teach reading and writing, it was, concurrently, not to teach how to watch a movie and cop an "A" on a dumb test.
At one point, when I was hired by CPS to help write "Advanced Placement" (English) curriculum, I pointed out that this was one of our main objectives. We had to work to help the students master the text narratives, not Cliffs Notes or the Hollywood version. It's easy enough once the kids have learned to follow the text, not someone's rewrite.
One of the things I discovered we had to do in order to get kids in a general high school to challenge the text was to utilize books for which there was no movie or Cliffs Notes. Once that was combined with movie-proofing the instructional materials for the books that had been pre-digested by Hollywood and Cliffs, eventually the kids would spend their time (gladly, after the initial trauma) actually reading the books. Our favorite (over years) was when we'd get to "Anna Karenina". Reading Tolstoy's masterpiece is quite amazing in contrast to "reading" any of the Hollywood (or foreign) film versions, or any of the summaries or abridgments. But in order for even our "best" students to know how to read the entire work, they had to be trained in that kind of reading while simultaneously being untrained in the short cuts they'd been allowed to get away with.
The same is even more tragically true of children who become proficient at "multiple choice math", but that's another story for another night.
That's also why every test that has high stakes (that includes teacher made tests that lead to classroom grades) must be shared after it's given. Secret tests are as bad as secret "investment instruments" (the recent Wall Street debacle). "Transparency" (in investment come-ones; in testing) is not only ethically proper, it's pedagogically and socially necessary.
In two weeks we'll be celebrating the 9th anniversary of the day two Chicago daily newspapers called on CPS to fire a teacher (me) for the crime of outing some of the dumbest tests in world history (and that's a mouthful). The fact that CASE couldn't be summarized, but had to be fully appreciated, was obvious to anyone who actually read them.
And the same thing is true -- now more than ever -- about every computer scored multiple choice so-called "standardized" test currently used to maintain the insanity of "standards and accountability."
The truth hasn't changed in the past nine years. The absurdity of so-called "standardized" testing has just become more obvious to millions more people than it was in January 1999, when Substance challenged CASE, Mayor Daley, and Paul Vallas.
The lies have been proliferating since, to the detriment of a generation of public school children and their families, as this insanity went from pockets of infection, like Chicago, to national via No Child Left Behind.
if the tests are well done (by all professional standards), they modestly measure a few things. As most of the research on testing has shown, however, knowing something doesn't necessarily translate into "higher test scores." It depends on the quality of the test, and how the results of the test is to be used.
Sadly, we are now more than a decade into Chicago's insane fetish with so-called "standardized" testing, and the seventh year of our national monstrosity.
At the least, before people quote the abstraction that the "data" from a testing program gives, they could demand to see the actual questions that were asked, and everything else about the actual tests the children have been subjected to.
Only then can you say for sure that good teaching will "yield" higher test scores. In fact, very bad teaching may yield high scores, too. As may cheating. Or, as most research has shown, coming from an affluent home.
No always, if by "artifact" you mean "result."
One of the reasons I outed the CASE tests nine years ago this month was that the CASE English tests (which I had been shown in draft by a source six months earlier) could have been "passed" by any child who had seen "the movie" and not even read the book. This was true of both the "Romeo and Juliet" and the "To Kill a Mockingbird" materials.
One of the things I had done during my previous quarter century of teaching, for the sake of the kids' learning, was always write lessons and tests that could not be "passed" if you had only watched the movie. If my job were to teach reading and writing, it was, concurrently, not to teach how to watch a movie and cop an "A" on a dumb test.
At one point, when I was hired by CPS to help write "Advanced Placement" (English) curriculum, I pointed out that this was one of our main objectives. We had to work to help the students master the text narratives, not Cliffs Notes or the Hollywood version. It's easy enough once the kids have learned to follow the text, not someone's rewrite.
One of the things I discovered we had to do in order to get kids in a general high school to challenge the text was to utilize books for which there was no movie or Cliffs Notes. Once that was combined with movie-proofing the instructional materials for the books that had been pre-digested by Hollywood and Cliffs, eventually the kids would spend their time (gladly, after the initial trauma) actually reading the books. Our favorite (over years) was when we'd get to "Anna Karenina". Reading Tolstoy's masterpiece is quite amazing in contrast to "reading" any of the Hollywood (or foreign) film versions, or any of the summaries or abridgments. But in order for even our "best" students to know how to read the entire work, they had to be trained in that kind of reading while simultaneously being untrained in the short cuts they'd been allowed to get away with.
The same is even more tragically true of children who become proficient at "multiple choice math", but that's another story for another night.
That's also why every test that has high stakes (that includes teacher made tests that lead to classroom grades) must be shared after it's given. Secret tests are as bad as secret "investment instruments" (the recent Wall Street debacle). "Transparency" (in investment come-ones; in testing) is not only ethically proper, it's pedagogically and socially necessary.
In two weeks we'll be celebrating the 9th anniversary of the day two Chicago daily newspapers called on CPS to fire a teacher (me) for the crime of outing some of the dumbest tests in world history (and that's a mouthful). The fact that CASE couldn't be summarized, but had to be fully appreciated, was obvious to anyone who actually read them.
And the same thing is true -- now more than ever -- about every computer scored multiple choice so-called "standardized" test currently used to maintain the insanity of "standards and accountability."
The truth hasn't changed in the past nine years. The absurdity of so-called "standardized" testing has just become more obvious to millions more people than it was in January 1999, when Substance challenged CASE, Mayor Daley, and Paul Vallas.
The lies have been proliferating since, to the detriment of a generation of public school children and their families, as this insanity went from pockets of infection, like Chicago, to national via No Child Left Behind.
if the tests are well done (by all professional standards), they modestly measure a few things. As most of the research on testing has shown, however, knowing something doesn't necessarily translate into "higher test scores." It depends on the quality of the test, and how the results of the test is to be used.
Sadly, we are now more than a decade into Chicago's insane fetish with so-called "standardized" testing, and the seventh year of our national monstrosity.
At the least, before people quote the abstraction that the "data" from a testing program gives, they could demand to see the actual questions that were asked, and everything else about the actual tests the children have been subjected to.
Only then can you say for sure that good teaching will "yield" higher test scores. In fact, very bad teaching may yield high scores, too. As may cheating. Or, as most research has shown, coming from an affluent home.
