Current Issue

School closings

As CPS prepares to close a record number of schools, the fate of students and communities is in question.

Rebecca Harris

May 17, 2013

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis has announced that she won a second term in Friday's election, garnering 80 percent of the votes in preliminary results.

The election was a referendum on how well Lewis' leadership and the Caucus of Rank and File Educators handled the fall's teacher strike and contract negotiations.

The opposition caucus, Coalition to Save Our Union, charged that Lewis put style and big-picture promises over substance and results.

May 17, 2013

Almost buried in the whirlwind of news on school closings is the Chicago Teachers Union election, in which challenger Tanya Saunders-Wolffe is seeking to oust current President Karen Lewis.

May 06, 2013

Dumas Elementary teacher Nadjea Butler-Wilson leads her 3rd-grade students in a lesson on reading a persuasive paragraph. The author believes his town needs a new library. Butler-Wilson wants her students to analyze his argument.

 “The reason he’s giving you is that the library is too small. How can you prove that? What is some fact about the library that will show it’s too small?” she prompts the class.

 “Some people think it’s too small,” one boy says.

May 01, 2013

UPDATED: Teachers at UNO charter schools have voted 87 percent in favor of joining a union, an Illinois Federation of Teachers spokeswoman said.

The announcement comes just days after scandal prompted the state to cut off capital funding to UNO charter schools, and it means the city's charter teachers union will roughly double in size. According to the Illinois Federation of Teachers, more than 20 percent of charter teachers in Chicago will now be union members.

April 25, 2013

Amid an escalating battle over standardized testing that included a “play-in” protest at CPS headquarters last week and a student boycott of the Prairie State Achievement Exam on Wednesday, CPS officials are undertaking a broad review of testing in the

April 17, 2013

CPS faces more intensive state monitoring following a ruling that the district isn’t doing a good enough job helping students transition from Early Intervention services into preschool special education.

April 10, 2013

As the city shifts preschool seats to better programs in needier areas, at least nine community agencies that are losing their funding say they will likely be forced to replace their state-certified preschool teachers with child care staff who hold lesser credentials--associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees without teaching licenses, or no degrees at all.

April 05, 2013

STORY CORRECTED TO REFLECT UPDATED INFORMATION--More than 40 community-based preschool providers around the city will lose preschool funding under the city’s “Ready to Learn” preschool competition, an effort to shift preschool seats to high-quality programs in neighborhoods where they are needed.

April 03, 2013

CPS hasn’t announced yet which schools will be able to keep offering preschool programs in the fall. But the announcement is likely coming soon, because the district has launched a new centralized enrollment process that will ask families who want their children to attend preschool programs in CPS schools to apply by May 3. 

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