Obviously, Marshall’s long-standing academic failings weren’t lost on Tamoura, who went on to say that she “wasn’t even supposed to be here.” Marshall was her last option. Her family couldn’t afford the private school that was her first choice, and she wasn’t offered a slot at Raby, one of the newer high schools sprouting up on the West Side.  

Tamoura was one of the Marshall freshmen profiled in “Class of 2011,” the award-winning issue of Catalyst In Depth that examined the challenges of High School Transformation. (The issue was published in February 2008 and is available online at www.catalyst-chicago.org.) As Tamoura entered 9th grade, Marshall had just begun the initiative. The goal was to make rigorous coursework the foundation of high school improvement—an idea tailor-made to suit studious teenagers like Tamoura.

Discussions about the many academic and social ills of urban high schools tend to give scant attention to the Tamouras at these schools. In other words, the kids who don’t get into trouble, who show up to school regularly, whose parents support their education but lack financial resources. These teens, like Tamoura, are savvy enough to know that their best option for getting into a good college is to bypass the neighborhood high school.

As one researcher said, “What are you doing about all the smart kids?”

Last year, the district embarked on a turnaround at Marshall, sinking millions into campus renovations and bringing in a new principal and mostly new teachers and staff. The success of turnarounds, at Marshall and other struggling high schools, is of national as well as local importance: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made the strategy a key part of federal education efforts.

For this issue of Catalyst In Depth, Deputy Editor Sarah Karp visited Marshall regularly during its first year in the turnaround program. From her reporting, it’s clear that the school is making progress. The climate is calmer, the special education department no longer faces state sanctions, and teachers have begun to collaborate regularly and focus on good instruction.

Marshall, of course, still faces big hurdles. For one, school leaders must balance the need to keep enrollment up—or face losing staff, as Marshall did eventually—with the challenge to improve academics. Nationally, other urban districts are in similar straits, trying to figure out how to handle the challenge of reforming large, failing neighborhood high schools. That’s a very tough job when a school is expected to take virtually any student who walks through the door, from the one who is ready for accelerated classes to the student who wants to transfer in but has a transcript filled with F’s—and a bad attitude to boot.  

Part of the answer is to focus on serving the good students, the Tamouras of the world, first.

That idea will undoubtedly anger some reformers, who will view it as a call to abandon at-risk teens. It’s not. Society—not just schools—has to figure out how to help youth who are on the road to dropping out.  When students like Tamoura show up, they’ve already made a critical leap. They’re motivated to learn, and they need the adults around them to respond to that motivation.

For the neighborhood high school to survive, individually and as a larger concept, academics have to improve. Schools have to offer honors and Advanced Placement classes, for one. And teachers need students who, even if they aren’t quite ready for it, are at least motivated to tackle high school-level work.

Donald Fraynd, a former principal of Jones College Prep who now heads the CPS turnaround initiative, says that big neighborhood high schools still have a role to play in the district. The turnaround high schools are “getting better and better at catching students up,” with more students achieving higher-than-average growth in reading skills and recovering credits toward graduation.

These accomplishments are heartening signs that the turnaround program may, finally, put long-failing neighborhood high schools back on track. And they’re a sign that, while poverty and social ills can be significant barriers to learning, they are not insurmountable.

Chicago’s high schools still have a long way to go, although at Catalyst press time, a new report from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research showed that high schools are, in fact, doing better academically than many observers believed to be the case.

At Marshall, there’s another small but encouraging sign that academics are on an upward trajectory.

In her senior year, Tamoura finally started getting more than 15 minutes’ worth of daily homework.

The only visible signs of change were the front lawns in the neighborhood, now less well-kept than in the past.  Drive through the neighborhood today and you will see men standing on the corner of my block, where they have stood for years. But what you will not see is the blood that has been shed on that same corner, of men and women, young people to old.  Yet the men continue to stand on that corner, where some of their own friends have lost their lives over the years. 

I started searching for answers to these killings in 2008 when my neighbor’s son was killed on that very corner.  My search led me to discover the concept of social-emotional learning and I am eternally grateful. I believe with all of my being that it gives hope to my community and can help stem the tide of violence in my neighborhood and others. 

When my neighbor knocked on my door that fateful morning to let me know that her son had been killed, gunned down one block from our homes, it is hard to explain the depth of my feelings.  When I finally could breathe, what I did was to evaluate myself and how I may have contributed to the senseless killing. I realized that not only didn’t I know my neighbor’s son, who had been killed--but I really didn’t know her or the other eight children she was raising as a single mother. 

Yes, I had spoken to her and her children in passing, but that was on the surface. Why hadn’t I gotten to know them beneath the surface?  I had been too busy with my own family, work, friends, etc., to get to know my neighbors.  How did my block become a killing field, nicknamed ‘Beirut,’ I later learned--and how do we work to stop it?  How did we get here? 

In a sense, I had been asleep.

Now that I was awake, I had to decide what to do next.  All this personal reflection was taking place around the same time our new president, Barack Obama, was elected.  On January 19, 2009 he asked all of us to volunteer for a day.  So I decided to look for an agency or organization my family could spend the day volunteering with, in my community or somewhere on the Southeast Side of Chicago. 

When I checked the website the president’s group had published, not one Southeast Side organization was listed. I cried, because it seemed nobody cared about the children in my neighborhood.  I called up my local park district and asked if I could volunteer. I started going to meetings

Fast-forward to the fall of 2013, when I was introduced to the concept of social-emotional learning and, for the first time, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.  CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, defines the concept as a process through which children and adults learn how to effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.  In an ideal world, social-emotional learning would be a part of every school curriculum in the nation. 

In the quest to stop the killings in our community, my neighbors and I started a movement to have social-emotional learning whole-heartedly implemented in the schools in our community.  In our research, we found that no elementary school in our area teaches social-emotional skills in any measurable way. 

We believe that if children are taught sound decision-making, relationship-building, conflict management and other valuable life skills from pre-school through 12^th grade, more of them will choose to go to college or the work force instead of joining gangs and participating in negative activity that will only land them in jail before they begin their lives. 

Like President Obama has said, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time.  We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for.  We are the change we seek.” 

When I woke up, I realized that I had to actively participate in leading my community out of Beirut. 

Laura Rabb Morgan

Founder and servant leader, South Chicago Block Club Coalition SEL Grassroots Movement

The switch happened not just to me, but to 67 other juniors in my school who were told we did not have enough credits. However, in my case and many others, we had between 11 and 14.5 credits, which is enough to be a junior and qualify to take the test. Some students did not have enough credits to be juniors in the first place, but that still does not explain why they were promoted to junior year in the fall and then demoted to sophomore status right before the Prairie State test.

Under so much pressure to raise its Prairie State test scores, the administration tried to take advantage of the promotion policy and demote a third of the junior class, just to keep us from taking the test and bringing down the school’s scores. I was having challenges at school but the last thing I would have expected is that my school system would demote me instead of supporting me.

This is not what school systems are supposed to do to students. They are supposed to provide extra support to students like me who don’t do well on tests or who might fall behind. But instead, they tried to make us disappear.

I care about my education. I want to go to college and to study music engineering. But when the future of a school rests on its test scores, students like me get demoted or pushed out. That’s why I joined the more than 100 juniors who boycotted the second day of the PSAE. We boycotted school, and the test, to send a message to Mayor Rahm Emanuel: School closings and student push-out, driven by high-stakes testing, must end.

Many adults disagreed with us, including CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett. Byrd-Bennett even tried to threaten and intimidate us, sending out a parent letter that insinuated that students who didn’t take the test on Wednesday would not be promoted to senior year.

This was a scare tactic that seemed designed to mislead parents. It did not give any information about the state-required make-up test in May or the established CPS practice of promoting juniors who sit for just one of the two days of the test. And what CPS didn’t realize was that these threats had actually already happened to me. CPS was threatening to withhold our promotion to senior year, but I had already been demoted in March as a direct result of Mayor Emanuel’s pressure on schools to raise test scores or face closure.

When these scare tactics did not prevent us from boycotting, CEO Byrd-Bennett scolded us, saying that “the only place that students should be during the school day is in the classroom with their teachers getting the education they need to be successful in life.” I agree with this statement, but does Mayor Emanuel? CPS pressure on schools to raise test scores actually leads to students getting pushed out of school. Many of the juniors who were demoted at my school started talking about dropping out because it was such a discouraging experience.

If CEO Byrd-Bennett and her boss, Mayor Emanuel, actually want every student to receive a good education every day, they should limit high-stakes tests, not use them to justify school closings in mainly African-American communities. The announcement that they are ending just one of a number of CPS tests given to kindergarteners is like the promise to give air-conditioning to students whose schools get closed. It’s a token effort given to us in the hopes that we will go away.

We want our boycott to be a wake-up call to Mayor Emanuel and CPS. We demand and end to testing-driven school closings, under-resourced schools, and student push-out. And we’re not going away.

Timothy Anderson is a student leader with Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools (CSOSOS) and Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE).

We find that capital costs used to justify closing North Lawndale schools have been inflated up to 3 times. Moreover, no capital projects are now in progress at the schools slated to be closed, and they are in excellent condition. We have also found, consistently, that CPS has misrepresented the amenities of the closing schools. In most instances, the closing schools have greater amenities than the receiving schools. For example, CPS has said that Pope and Henson don't have computer labs. Yet Henson has two technology labs, a library and a computer in every classroom, and Pope has a technology lab and a media center.

(Catalyst Chicago reported on the impact of closings in North Lawndale in the spring issue of Catalyst In Depth. Independent hearing officers have recommended against closing about a dozen schools, but none of those targeted in North Lawndale.)

Community residents have questioned whether the proposed school closings are providing cover for the Academy for Urban School Leadership, which operates turnaround schools, to consolidate its interests in North Lawndale. Bethune, an AUSL school, will close before being completely turned around. This will free capacity for AUSL to take over Chalmers, situated across the street from the northeast corner of Douglas Park. Pope, situated across the street from the southwest corner of Douglas Park, will close, and Johnson, which is an AUSL school, will assume its attendance boundaries. Johnson is situated across the street from Douglas Park on 14th Street. AUSL controls Collins High School, situated inside the park. After the dust settles, AUSL will control essentially every school in or around Douglas Park.

In addition, while Henson’s receiving school is Hughes, the new attendance boundaries are drawn such that the lion's share of Henson students will go to Herzl, another AUSL school. There are also connections to the current CPS leadership. Board President Vitale is the former board president of AUSL. CPS’ Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley is a former managing director of AUSL.

While we believe schools should be improved rather than closed, it should be noted that AUSL schools do not necessarily present better options. AUSL schools in North Lawndale have historically under-performed the North Lawndale Average.

More segregation?

School closings will also “re-segregate” the African American and Latino communities around Paderewski, and will not provide better opportunities for African American students. Currently, Paderewski is the only North Lawndale school whose attendance boundaries include North Lawndale and Little Village. Paderewski’s student population is 82% African American and 18% Latino. African American students generally live in Lawndale, north of Cermak Road, while the Latino students generally live in Little Village, south of Cermak Road.

Even though CPS has designated Cardenas and Castellanos as receiving schools for Paderewski, the new attendance boundaries for Cardenas and Castellanos are drawn such that the northern boundary is Cermak Road. Likewise, the southern boundary for Penn and Crown is Cermak. Effectively, Latino students will be sent to Cardenas or Castellanos, which are higher-performing, while African American students will go to Penn or Crown, both lower-achieving. Cardenas is Level 1 and Castellanos is Level 2, and both are nearly filled to capacity. Paderewski, Crown and Penn are all Level 3 schools, and Paderewski is the strongest of the three.

We ask that CPS put a moratorium on school closures until they can complete their master facilities planning process, mitigate any conflicts of interest and change any plans that could compound segregation.

Valerie F. Leonard

Co-Founder, Lawndale Alliance

 “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.

But this is not the answer Butler-Wilson is looking for. She pushes the students to give facts to prove their point.  A girl suggests one, saying, “More people keep coming in [the library] and there’s not enough room.”

Learning how to construct written arguments, the goal of this lesson, is an important element of the new Common Core State Standards, set to begin phasing in next year. Last year, Dumas was one of 35 schools that became “early adopters” of the standards and were given money to pay for substitutes while teachers worked on model lesson plans aligned to the standards. The lesson plans became the basis for curriculum guides.

(Dumas and two other early adopter schools, Canter and Armstrong, are closing. The Dumas building in Woodlawn will stay open as children from nearby Wadsworth transfer over and the school is renamed Wadsworth.)

As CPS begins to phase in the standards, one group of teachers will have a particularly tough task. Teachers of young children will have to expose students to high-level ideas without relying on strategies that are not geared toward young children; for example, too much desk work that could easily frustrate them and, in turn, make learning more difficult.

In fact, many early childhood teachers have long resisted efforts to impose academic expectations on young children. The Common Core standards have re-ignited the debate, and the fear that tasks meant for older students will be “pushed down” to younger children.

But educators say that, with careful work, teachers can learn to adapt. At Dumas and other early adopter schools, preschool and primary teachers are striking a delicate balance, slowly incorporating lessons that teach Common Core concepts and skills to young children at a level and pace that are developmentally appropriate.

Principals also say young students can handle the Common Core, if teachers give them the right support.

When very young students respond to a topic by talking about their likes and dislikes, Dumas Principal Macquline King says, teachers refer them back to the text they have read. “We understand what you like, but what does it say in the text?” she explains.

Nancy Hanks, the principal at Melody Elementary, says that a lesson in which students look for details in a text can be made accessible to those who don’t write yet: Some students may write the details, some may draw them, and others may dictate them to the teacher, she explained at a Chicago Principals and Administrators Association panel.

“In raising the bar, [students] jump right up to it,” Hanks believes.

Hanks once saw students drawing pictures of dolphins after reading a book about dolphins, but realized that the pictures didn’t have specific details in them. So she told them to re-do the pictures. Some of the details the new pictures showed included dolphins’ spouts and dolphins coming up for air.

Rhonda Atkins, a preschool teacher at Dumas, says that meeting with kindergarten teachers and learning about the standards helped her align lessons with the expectations her students will face when they leave preschool.

Teaching students about counting money entailed getting a book about money that was appropriate for preschoolers, Atkins explains. “You talk about something preschoolers understand--has anybody ever gotten money for [their] birthday or for Christmas? Did you get coins? Did you get dollars?”

She also asked parents to count loose change with their children to reinforce the concept at home.

Other concepts Atkins introduces include shapes, ordinal numbers (first, second, third and so on) and writing.

“Children have been working on how to write sentences. My very high-level students are able to write paragraphs,” she says. “There’s only a few, but you try to push them further.”

Breaking down complex texts

Cardenas Elementary Principal Jeremy Feiwell says that having students read more complex material has paid off with higher test scores on the NWEA MAP assessment, which measures the ability to understand complex texts and is given to children as young as 3^rd grade. The ability has “skyrocketed” among Cardenas students, Feiwell says.

Referring to evidence from the text is an important part of the Common Core, and Feiwell says even children as young as 1^st grade can do it. Proof hangs on the wall of Maricela Aguirre’s 1^st-grade classroom, where a collection of student work shows answers to questions about a story featuring animals, with evidence to back up students’ thoughts. “How did the pig outsmart the wolf? How do you know?” reads one prompt.

In a pre-K classroom, teacher Maria Morin reads the story “Thinking One Can,” an earlier version of the story that became the classic children’s book “The Little Engine That Could.”

But this story is read aloud from a teacher’s guide, with only one picture.  Morin tells her students it will be more challenging to listen to the story without looking at pictures to tell what is going on.

At the end, Morin asks students what lesson the story is trying to teach. After some discussion, she re-reads the sentence where the story sums up its moral.

Feiwell explains that Morin’s teaching shows two shifts spurred by the Common Core. First, Morin is showing students how to summarize main ideas using evidence from the text. Second, by exposing children to a story without pictures, she is helping them get ready to understand higher-level books down the road.

In Elizabeth Rickey’s 3^rd grade class, students work through a play about the Greek mythological character Medusa, who was transformed into a monster when a goddess turned her hair into snakes.

“We were doing a shared reading of a play about Medusa, and we were looking at it through her perspective,” Rickey explains. She asked students taking on Medusa’s role to answer questions like “What do you think about the way Athena treated you?” and “Why do you think she changed your hair into snakes?”

“It’s a really challenging thing to put themselves in the character’s shoes,” Rickey says.  At the same time, they are talking about how to differentiate their own point of view from that of the author.

From basic arithmetic to understanding concepts

In 2^nd-grade teacher Eva Verta’s room at Columbia Explorers Elementary, students practice counting, using math worksheets with pictures of manipulatives.

“Remember, I should be able to follow how you’re counting by checking your labels,” Verta reminds the students. She speaks directly to one boy: “You know what, Emilio? I cannot read your mind when I look at these labels. I can’t see how you counted. I look at yours and I say, ‘Hmm, how did you get 501?’”

With the Common Core, math must go beyond just getting the right answer. Students must be able to explain their thinking and demonstrate understanding—in this case, by labeling each item in the drawings.

Columbia Explorers is not an early adopter school, but has been incorporating the English standards for a couple years. This year, the school began to implement the math standards.

Principal Jose Barrera says that based on the school’s experience, redesigning lessons will be hard work.

“Nothing’s going to happen with CPS giving you this magic kit,” he says. “You have to take ownership, 1,000 percent.”

In 3^rd-grade teacher Jennifer Ford’s room, some students practice multiplication tables on worksheets. Other children, working in groups, say them out loud using flashcards.

Before long, Ford gathers the whole class in a circle. Picking one number at a time, she has students surround her for an exercise. The first number she gives out is five.

One by one, each student in the circle reels off a math fact of his or her choosing that involves five:

“Five times one is five.”

“Six times five is 30.”

“You got it,” Ford says.

“Five times six is 30.”

“Five times ten is 50.”

Curriculum coordinator Beth West explains that one Common Core goal is to make sure students master skills “fluently” so they can use them with ease. In the earlier grades, this includes a sizable dose of mental math.

Terry Carter, who is leading Common Core implementation at the Academy for Urban School Leadership, says schools run by AUSL are focusing mostly on math in grades pre-K to 3. AUSL manages 25 schools and is slated to take on six more with this year’s school actions.

The schools are working with the Erikson Institute’s Early Mathematics Education Project on ways to make math concepts accessible and appropriate for youngsters.

As part of the Common Core, Carter says, students must be able to explain and demonstrate their thinking using manipulatives and visual models.

Children should also learn to persevere in solving tough math problems.

“The Common Core likes to see the endurance and stamina of children to be inquiry-based. Children are allowed to struggle with a problem rather than being told or funneled [to an answer with] teachers breaking down every step,” Carter says.

To learn how to make those changes, AUSL teachers are working in groups to practice lessons.

One teacher teaches a lesson in another teacher’s classroom while colleagues observe. Then, they analyze what went well and what went poorly, and teach a revised version of the lesson to a different class.

Not necessarily a disconnect

Sandra Alberti, director of state and district partnerships and professional development for the nonprofit Student Achievement Partners, is hopeful about what the Common Core could mean for early childhood teachers.

“What the standards do is signal to early childhood educators and everyone in the system that… these are a list of things kids need time to develop, play with, and explore,” Alberti says.

In math, Alberti says, giving students more time with the material can slow down instruction and allow time for deeper conceptual understanding.

Currently, most math teachers teach strategies and tricks students can use to get the right answer.  “That’s not math,” she says.  Some curricula focus on concepts but fall short at having students actually practice enough problems. But, Alberti says, “We shouldn’t make a choice between having kids get the answer right and having them explain their thinking.” 

With reading, she says, the most important piece of the standards is to challenge students to engage with material above their level because that’s how they will grow as readers.

“It’s very hard for (students) to catch up to grade-level peers when everything we give them has been scaffolded,” Alberti says. “If they’re not given a more complex text, they’re not going to develop a more complex understanding.”

At Dumas, Butler-Wilson says that the Common Core can be a good fit for early childhood because the standards ask students to use their imagination and ideas. 

Students can master the standards, she believes, “but it requires everyone to change the way they think about teaching and learning. It requires the teacher to be more of a facilitator in the classroom as opposed to being at the front [teaching] one lesson the same way to all the students. The standards can’t be reached that way.”

Butler-Wilson recalls a math lesson that required students to do a scavenger hunt for items of a certain length –a foot, an inch or a yard – and made posters of the results. The goal was to help strengthen their understanding of the concept.

“When they would think about an inch, they would think about the things they discovered in the classroom,” she says.

Elizabeth Najera, principal of Velma Thomas Early Childhood Center, also doesn’t necessarily see a mismatch between Common Core expectations and what students should be learning in preschool.

A team of teacher leaders in the school has identified what they want children to know in order to be ready for kindergarten. One thing that’s key, she says, is making sure teachers intentionally design instruction to build on children’s knowledge.

Teachers at Velma Thomas try to use open-ended questions to develop higher-level thinking skills, even in very young students, and Najera sees that as a good fit. 

“Some of the things that are in the Common Core, I think they are not too different from what we are doing already,” she says.  But a lot will depend on how the district changes its expectations for preschool teachers, she adds. “I guess we kind of have to wait on that.”

Early Childhood Resource Page: http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/early-childhood

Common Core Resource Page: http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/common-core