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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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Catalyst In Brief

Absenteeism
December 01, 2011

Truancy has always been recognized as a risk factor for dropping out of high school. In the battle to prevent it, some educators and experts are shifting their attention to chronic absenteeism in younger students. Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing at least 10 percent of school days. Preschool and the primary grades lay the educational foundation for children, but missing too much school in these critical early grades can easily crack that foundation—especially among children in poverty.

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Teacher evaluation
November 01, 2010

Everyone has agreed for a long time that the kinds of checklists used throughout the country for teacher evaluation accomplish nothing. Teachers get a questionable rating—in Chicago, 91 percent were rated superior or excellent in 2007-08—and no information to help them improve their craft. In some cases, they don't even get observed. In the mid-1990s, the Chicago Teachers Union and Board of Education agreed to explore a reform, called peer review, then being used in Rochester, N.Y., and Cincinnati and Toledo, Ohio.

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Reaching Black Boys
September 01, 2010

On virtually every measure of educational success, African-American male students trail behind their peers in Chicago Public Schools. Black boys score lowest on state achievement tests, are more likely than their peers to drop out of high school and are less likely to go on to post-secondary education. A significant factor behind these troubling statistics is harsh discipline imposed by schools.

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Chicago’s charter schools
February 01, 2010

Charter schools have been one of the most hotly debated school issues in Illinois since they emerged in the mid-1990s. President Barack Obama's support of them has raised the temperature even more. There are more questions than answers about charter schools, but here are highlights of what we know about charters in Chicago.

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