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School closings

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

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In Focus

Will recession hinder long-term gains? April 15, 2012 By: Andrew Bronstein For the casual visitor, it’s easy to miss that Southeast High School in rural Kansas—once among the lowest academic performers in the state—is in the midst of a profound transformation. Like so many other Kansas schools, the building in Cherokee (population: 722) shows the telltale signs of a suffering economy. Bus routes have been cut, as have supplies. Custodians, secretaries and cafeteria workers took an eight-day pay cut. During the harsh winters, students bundle up to make it through classes where the temperature hovers at an uncomfortable, but cost-saving 68 degrees. Read More \| (0) Comments	Federal program a work-in-progress April 15, 2012 By: Alyson Klein, Education Week After two years, the federal program providing billions of dollars to help states and districts close or remake some of their worst-performing schools remains an ambitious work in progress, with roughly 1,200 turnaround efforts under way but still no verdict on its effectiveness. Read More \| (0) Comments
Ed Week: Access to Teacher Evaluations Divides Advocates March 29, 2012 By: Stephen Sawchuk / Education Week As the movement to overhaul teacher evaluation marches onward, an emerging question is splitting the swath of advocates who support the new tools used to gauge teacher performance: Who should get access to the resulting information? Read More \| (0) Comments	For the Record: Selective admissions March 08, 2012 By: Sarah Karp When acceptance letters went out last week to students who had applied to selective enrollment high schools, much of the buzz was about how hard it was for the students in the highest income tier, Tier 4, to win spots. Although CPS received the fewest applications from students in this tier, they mostly sought spots in the most selective schools in the city—Northside and Payton. As a result, students in Tier 4 would need a near-perfect score to get in. Read More \| (4) Comments
At AUSL, progress but ‘this is not magic’ February 03, 2012 By: Sarah Karp If ever there was a superstar principal, it’s Angel Turner. When Turner took over Morton Elementary School as an Academy for Urban School Leadership turnaround principal, it was one of the worst schools in the district. Now, three years later, it is in the middle of the pack: The percentage of students meeting or exceeding state standards has increased by more than 30 points. Read More \| (15) Comments	Youth advocates want more data on school arrests January 25, 2012 By: Sarah Karp A youth advocacy group is calling on Chicago aldermen to pass a student safety act similar to one in New York City that forces the school district to reveal the number of arrests, suspensions and expulsions per school every quarter. Read More \| (10) Comments
U.S. Education Pressured by International Comparisons January 12, 2012 By: Sean Cavanagh, Education Week Americans learn a bit more every year about the strengths and shortcomings of the education systems in other countries, thanks to a steady raft of international test data, academic scholarship, and analysis arriving from home and abroad. Today, elected officials of all political stripes and advocates for a range of school policies scrutinize the results from international exams and comparisons with the intensity that, a decade ago, would have been reserved for state and local test scores. Read More \| (2) Comments	Neighborhood high schools losing students December 20, 2011 By: Sarah Karp One of the justifications given for phasing out the West Side’s Crane High School is that most students in the attendance boundary are “voting with their feet” to go elsewhere. Only 17 percent of the students living in the neighborhood this year attend Crane, notes Chief Portfolio Officer Oliver Sicat. But Crane’s situation is far from unique. In just the last five years, the percentage of students attending their neighborhood high school fell by 10 percent, from nearly half in 2006-2007 to about 37 percent in 2010-2011, according to a Catalyst Chicago analysis of CPS data. Read More \| (16) Comments
Civil Rights Office Expands Its Reach Into Schools December 19, 2011 By: Lesli A. Maxwell In the 21 months since U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stood on an iconic bridge in Selma, Ala., and pledged to aggressively combat discrimination in the nation's schools, federal education officials have launched dozens of new probes in school districts and states that reach into civil rights issues that previously received little, if any, scrutiny. Read More \| (2) Comments