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Adolescent Literacy

A raft of past programs have failed to substantially improve the reading skills of middle grade and high school students. CPS is trying once again, as part of a federal project that aims to help teens learn how to analyze complex non-fiction.

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Lisa Lewis

DePriest a battleground over longtime principal
December 27, 2005
By: Lisa Lewis

On Jan. 22, the local school council at DePriest Elementary School in Austin voted 5 to 4 not to renew the contract of Principal Ruth Lewis Knight, capping two years of disagreement over the school's academic direction. Since then, a large section of the community has been up in arms, refusing to take "no" for an answer.

"It's not about academics, it's not about her being a good principal," teacher Joyce Randall declared at a particularly raucous meeting. "We're talking about a power play here, about who's got the power and who's going to run it."

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Lessons from Kentucky
September 16, 2005
By: Lisa Lewis

The Kentucky Department of Education has been training and sending out its own kind of "probation manager" since 1994. Called Distinguished Educators, or DEs, they are experienced teachers and administrators who leave their jobs for two years to work as consultants at struggling schools, modeling ways to boost student performance.In Kentucky, every school is given an improvement target every two years; schools that fall short are assigned DEs and get a share of a special $5 million state grant, which must be used for academic improvements.

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Constraints on LSCs' power
September 15, 2005
By: Lisa Lewis

Remediation, probation, reconstitution. The 1995 amendment to the Reform Act gave the school system's CEO the power to place a school on remediation based on a failure to "develop or implement a school improvement plan;" in practice, the administration has used test-score trends. A remediation school is visited by a board "intervention team," which designs a plan and arranges for "external partners" to work with the school.Under the law, a school that does not improve under remediation is put on probation; again, the board has used test scores as the main criterion.

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Five other cities
September 14, 2005
By: Lisa Lewis

Every major school district in the country is engaged in some sort of school reform. Efforts range from primarily pedagogical to primarily political.

Below are sketches of five districts. We included New York and Los Angeles because they come closest to Chicago in size. We selected the others by asking five well-informed observers to name districts with the most promising efforts. Memphis came out on top; finalists Boston and Charlotte-Mecklenburg were selected for geographic diversity.

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