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Letter From the Editor

Charting a course to create preschool for all in Illinois October 13, 2005 By: Veronica Anderson For two years, members of the Illinois Early Learning Council deliberated the best strategies for creating a statewide system of high-quality preschools for 3- and 4-year-olds. What they came up with is a list of recommendations that lay the foundation for a two-year program to serve poor families and children who are otherwise at-risk of failure in school. Read More \| (0) Comments	Mentor, principal support are keys to keeping new teachers August 03, 2005 By: Veronica Anderson, Editor Kelly McNamee, a recent college graduate, landed a teaching job this fall at May Elementary in Austin. A native of downstate Belleville, Kelly was nervous about moving to Chicago and, being white, about teaching in an inner-city public school. But McNamee was determined to make a go of it—even when friends wondered why she took such a job at all. Read More \| (0) Comments
Contract politics cast shadow over teacher evaluation reforms August 03, 2005 By: Veronica Anderson, Editor A few weeks ago, a collective sigh of relief rose up from the city when the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union reached a last-minute agreement that averted a teacher strike. Both sides scored important wins: Teachers got their best contract in years, and the School Board got four years of labor peace without sacrificing reform programs. Yet the settlement left a sense of foreboding in its wake. Given the politics that preceded approval, the board and the union may have taken a big step backward in their budding collaboration on school improvement. Read More \| (0) Comments	NAEP test shines light on racial gap August 03, 2005 By: Linda Lenz, publisher Late last year, a federal testing agency released yet another set of scores for Chicago—those on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP for short. They didn't get the media attention that the "Iowa's" or the ISAT do. The Chicago Tribune ran a report on the front page of its Metro section, and the Sun-Times buried a short on page 12. That's too bad because NAEP provides the best measure of how Chicago's over-all reform efforts are doing. Read More \| (0) Comments
Welcome to an improved Catalyst August 03, 2005 By: Linda Lenz, publisher For 14 years, Catalyst has given you insightful articles and data about school reform in Chicago. With this redesign, you will now get them in a format that makes them even more useful. We know that you all are very busy people. So in several ways, we have made it easier for you to quickly grasp what our articles are about and why they are important. Read More \| (0) Comments	Bring back the assessment center August 03, 2005 By: Linda Lenz, publisher The Chicago Board of Education has a spotty history for crafting new programs. In the late1990s, it rushed into a high school reconstitution program that chased away good faculty members as well as dismissed presumably bad ones. It wrote its own set of end-of-course exams for high schools, winning praise for some and ridicule for others. It gathered teachers to write daily lesson plans for every core subject at every grade level—a total of 9,360—again getting mixed reviews. By 2003, all three programs had been abandoned. Read More \| (0) Comments
Early detection of disability can make or break a child's future August 03, 2005 By: Veronica Anderson Nicole Roberts graduated from Hyde Park Academy this month. She plans to enroll in college and begin preparing for a career in television. Fairly routine aspirations for an everyday teenager, but Nicole had to overcome a fairly sizable hurdle to get there: a learning disability that made it difficult for her to concentrate and follow directions. Read More \| (0) Comments	Living up to Brown v. Board August 03, 2005 By: Veronica Anderson, Editor This month, as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision on racially separate schools, you have to wonder what Justice Thurgood Marshall would say about student retention if he were alive today. Read More \| (0) Comments
Extreme makeover: school edition August 03, 2005 By: Veronica Anderson An unprecedented experiment in school reform is underway here. Piggybacking on the city's plan to tear down a glut of high-rise public housing and replace them with mixed-income communities, Chicago Public Schools has committed to remaking the schools in one area. Read More \| (0) Comments

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