Rebecca Harris | catalyst-chicago.org

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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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Rebecca Harris

Classroom ratings shed light on preschool quality March 28, 2011 By: Rebecca Harris Data from observations of 700 Chicago pre-kindergarten classrooms shows that just 17 percent of the classrooms were rated as highly effective for supporting student growth. Read More \| (4) Comments	Community group accuses Orr High of pushing out students March 21, 2011 By: Rebecca Harris In the month that Tyese Sims has been principal of Orr High, she has dropped 44 students from the rolls, she acknowledges. But one community group is accusing her of turning away as many as 150. Read More \| (16) Comments
U.S. Senate rejects budget cuts March 09, 2011 By: Rebecca Harris On Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. Senate voted 56 to 44 against billions of dollars in federal cuts that would have decimated Head Start enrollment and eliminated a number of other programs. Read More \| (1) Comments	Facing reality March 09, 2011 By: Rebecca Harris It’s the end of August 2010. A group of Illinois State University teacher candidates has just been transplanted to Chicago for a program that will put them in Little Village and Auburn Gresham schools for an entire school year. Read More \| (0) Comments
Beyond the classroom March 09, 2011 By: Rebecca Harris On a hot summer night in July, 20 Illinois State University students who are preparing to be teachers have gathered for class. The location: a multi-purpose room in a Salvation Army building a few blocks from the Pink Line. The subject: the culture and demographics of specific Chicago communities. Both are unexpected. But to Illinois State University education professor Robert Lee, the class represents the future of teacher education. Read More \| (0) Comments	Learning the catch-22's March 09, 2011 By: Rebecca Harris John Waters had only been a student teacher at Manierre Elementary for a couple of weeks when he began to worry the school might close. Waters recalls that a CPS official came to a staff meeting at the start of the school year and warned of potential school closings in the community, especially if test scores didn’t go up. About half of the students at Manierre met state achievement standards last year, far fewer than the district average. (At press time, the district had not yet released a list of schools slated for closure, and it was not clear whether any would close.) Read More \| (0) Comments
Learning the language of connection March 09, 2011 By: Rebecca Harris At Cárdenas Elementary, a year-round school in Little Village, Rachel Bujalski is about to teach an art lesson to a kindergarten class. The challenge: They have just begun to learn English, and Bujalski is still learning Spanish.Bujalski holds up a poster of Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” an abstract painting of yellow lines broken up by white, blue and red squares. Read More \| (0) Comments	STEP-UP set to expand March 09, 2011 By: Rebecca Harris STEP-UP is an offshoot of the Chicago Teacher Education Pipeline, which began in the Latino community of Little Village in fall 2004. As of spring 2010, nearly 140 teacher candidates had completed student teaching in the Pipeline’s partner schools. Read More \| (0) Comments
Budget, bureaucracy hamper hiring March 09, 2011 By: Rebecca Harris The federal government has spent millions of dollars to help local universities prepare teacher candidates for Chicago Public Schools. But this year’s budget crisis has meant that far fewer new graduates ended up in Chicago’s neediest neighborhood schools. “The significant budget cuts this last year deeply impacted our graduates’ capacity to find work,” notes Kavita Kapadia Matsko, director of the University of Chicago’s Urban Teacher Education Program, which includes a year of education coursework plus a year-long paid residency in a school. Read More \| (0) Comments