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 efforts they underwrite run from the mundane—translating school district materials into Spanish, for instance—to activities deeply intertwined with policy, such as providing information to parents on topics like teacher evaluation and school choice.

Since 2005, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has donated or pledged some $5.2 million in grants to Stand for Children's Leadership Center, including a two-year, $3.5 million grant in 2010 focused primarily on its teacher-quality work. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation provided $500,000 in startup costs to StudentsFirst and has funded Education Reform Now to the tune of $2 million since 2008.

And beginning in 2010, the Walton Family Foundation has supported all three of those advocacy organizations, including $2.5 million for Stand for Children, $1 million to StudentsFirst, and $2.4 million to Education Reform Now, which is associated with the political action committee Democrats for Education Reform.

(The Gates and Walton foundations also provide grant support to Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit corporation that publishes Education Week.)

'Echo Chamber'

The confluence of foundation funding to those education advocacy groups has raised concerns among critics, who ask whether such donations amount to working in lockstep to influence policy. The groups have similar positions on some key policy issues, such as the expansion of charter schools and the development of teacher evaluations based in part on student test scores."Because of the amount of money that is available, each of these funded groups wields this ability to speak very, very loudly," said Kevin G. Welner, a professor in the school of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "And because of the sheer number of aligned and interlocking groups, they form a strong network and echo chamber."

For their part, foundation officials say they are trying to seize a critical moment of national interest in education policy.

"Stand for Children has deep reach that really lines up with some of the foundation's other significant investments," said Debbie Veney Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Seattle-based Gates Foundation. "What they do are things that we don't do as an organization—galvanizing parents and educating parents about education issues, working with community groups."

In addition, the groups "are bringing more horsepower to education reform advocacy, especially through outreach efforts—recruiting, acclimating, motivating more advocates," said Ed Kirby, a senior program officer for the Walton Family Foundation, in Bentonville, Ark. "Our view is that we've got great advocates doing strong work, but it is still a very undeveloped movement, relative to where it could be and should be."

The Walton Family Foundation's primary goal through its grantmaking is to promote policy attention to school choice, from charters to vouchers to tax credits, Mr. Kirby said. Both StudentsFirst and Education Reform Now support private school choice to a degree.

The Gates Foundation's most recent grant to Stand for Children, meanwhile, focuses on developing tools to increase teacher effectiveness, a topic that parallels its own research work on that subject.

The grants also come with specific deliverables, though as Mr. Kirby pointed out, it's often hard to trace an investment directly to specific policy outcomes.

The deliverables for Gates' support are often tied to such aspects as technical assistance. For instance, Ms. Robinson said, Stand for Children has used its funding to inform parents about the Memphis, Tenn., district's inclusion of student feedback as one of several measures in a new teacher-evaluation system.

A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles-based Broad Foundation said that it expects its grantees to "strengthen public schools by developing and sharing new research, data, best practices, and perspectives with policymakers, practitioners, and parents so that they can make informed decisions."

Stance on Lobbying

The question of lobbying is a trickier one. Though they cannot themselves lobby or earmark grants for that purpose, private foundations, including corporate and family foundations, can support charities that do a small amount of lobbying, said Melissa Mikesell, the director of the West Coast office of Alliance for Justice, an organization that provides help on the legal framework for nonprofit and foundation advocacy efforts.

Some private foundations choose to restrict any part of their grant funds from being used to lobby, even though such restrictions are not legally required, she said. For instance, they can specify that their funds support a specific project rather than general operating expenses.

The Gates Foundation is one such foundation that sets those stricter parameters on its grants. "It's not like we're pushing our 'agenda' on people," Ms. Robinson said. "It's a really important distinction."

Regardless of the legal arrangements, however, grantees are generally aware of a particular philanthropy's philosophical bent.

"Foundations increasingly have their own theory of change about how they see the world," Ms. Mikesell said, "and it's common for grantees to be attuned to that."

But in digging deeper, there are significant security and privacy concerns that this decision raises that present real and potential dangers to the students, teachers and administrators in CPS.

Consider just two examples among many:

You are a student using the school-provided email service. Without logging off of your email account, you decide to click on a web browser to conduct research for a school report on birth control in developing countries. Without your express consent, the commercial provider of the email service collects and stores your search history and the content of your emails. Later, you are surprised - and mortified - when you receive a targeted pop-up advertisement for reproductive services.

Or consider a student who suddenly finds himself inundated with foreign-language emails and social media messages – some harmless, but some loaded with viruses that can destroy his computer – all because of a data breach on a server in a country temporarily storing that student’s supposedly secure data.

These scenarios aren’t far-fetched. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff recently warned of the threat of off-shore cloud data breaches that poorly-secured cloud hosting can make more likely. Breaches like this can happen when school districts outsource their data and related services to cloud computing companies, particularly cloud companies that focus on monetizing user data for advertising purposes.

Cloud vendors need tough vetting

There are tremendous benefits to cloud computing, not the least of which is that it promises significant savings to cash-strapped districts by allowing them to outsource their email services, data storage and collaboration technologies. Doing this cuts district costs for servers, hardware, software and technology support and permits them to invest more in key priorities like teacher salaries.

But districts moving to the cloud, like CPS, must insist on the proven security and privacy provisions that most private-sector cloud customers demand. Security risks, already visible in an Internet-connected world, are magnified in the cloud. One issue is that school employees – hired and overseen by school administrators – will no longer control school data. Cloud computing vendor employees will have access to children’s field trip photos, parent-teacher email exchanges, student and teacher dates of birth and social security numbers, and on and on. And sometimes, these employees may make use of sensitive data for their own purposes, as occurred in 2010 when a Google employee was reportedly fired for accessing a minor’s call logs, chat transcripts and contact lists.

While employee malfeasance is also a risk with school-based databases, the loss of control over those who manage school data in the cloud is a security wrinkle that schools must address. Before moving to the cloud, districts should ask cloud vendors several questions, including: Will student data be stored in countries with lower privacy requirements than the U.S.? What information is mined by advertisers? How are employees of cloud vendors with access to student data vetted and supervised? Will all information that a student flows through a third-party vendor’s platform be unavailable to advertisers? Hopefully, CPS asked these questions when choosing their cloud vendor. If they were not asked, we have to ask ourselves, why not? Our children’s privacy and data is at stake.

Privacy issues that do not arise in school-based server environments can quickly become apparent when schools resort to the cloud. In particular, cloud vendors’ mining of school data for commercial purposes can be a very unwelcome intrusion for students, parents and educators alike. Schools should demand assurances from cloud vendors that school information stored in the cloud will not be data-mined, used for targeted advertising or sold to third parties. While schools can never be sheltered entirely from commercial ads, they should not become marketing free-fire zones simply because they have opted to embrace cloud computing technology.

There are clear advantages when districts migrate to the cloud, with cost savings being a significant impetus. However, schools should not ignore new and more complicated data security and privacy issues presented by this appealing data management option. When making vendor choices, however, there is no free lunch. What is not paid for in dollars is instead paid for using the currency of our children's private information. Do we really want to trade our children's private lives for cheap email?  

Jon Bernstein is the president and founder of The Bernstein Strategy Group, a Washington, D.C.-based education technology consultancy.

Why did America initially decide to stay neutral, he asks?

“Because they didn’t want to get involved in what wasn’t their business,” one boy says.

“Because they were supplying both sides,” says another.

Staying out of the war was the plan, Vargas says. “We’re going to find out about why that didn’t work very well.” He points out parallels between the presidents then and now: Woodrow Wilson’s re-election slogan was “He kept us out of the war,” President Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to end the war in Iraq. Geography played a role, too. Americans didn’t want to get involved in a war across the Atlantic Ocean in Europe.

But America was pulled into the conflict anyway, leading eventually to the law that created the draft for the first time. “So that’s like the jury duty of war, I guess,” one boy says.

Vargas draws another parallel to current events. A draft wasn’t necessary after the attacks of September 11, 2001, because so many Americans signed up for the now-voluntary Armed Services, including three of his friends.

Outside of class, Vargas explains that his goal as a teacher is to establish a dialogue with students and encourage them to use critical thinking skills to apply, analyze and evaluate information. He also wants them to understand history from the perspectives of different ethnic groups that are sometimes overlooked in the history books.

“When we are talking about the pioneers and the West, I make it a point to have them see it from the perspective of the pioneers as well as the Native Americans who already occupied the land,” Vargas says. “It’s more about the how and the why [of history] than the what.”

At 33, the tall, former school security guard is at ease in front of students and about a decade older than the typical student teacher about to graduate from college. Vargas is also Latino, the most under-represented group among CPS teachers. As more young white teachers flood into the district, Latinos are still just under 15 percent of the teaching force. Yet Latinos are now the largest group of CPS students, at 44 percent of the student population.

At Talman last year, only seven of 19 teachers were Latino and just one was male, according to state teacher service records for the 2010-2011 school year. Enrollment at Talman, a small, high-achieving neighborhood elementary school in Gage Park on the Southwest Side, is 96 percent Latino.

Delia Rico, education director at the Latino Policy Forum, notes that statewide, just 5 percent of teachers and school administrators are Latino. The shortage, she says, is partly due to a spiral effect: Latino students often fall off-track academically in middle school, then end up dropping out of high school or college. Some students attend community college, but never transfer to 4-year schools.

Many schools of education aren’t doing enough when it comes to preparing teacher candidates to work with minority students, Rico adds.

“Where they are falling short is in addressing the understanding of culture, the value of language, the understanding of [the] life experiences that children bring with them to the classroom,” Rico says. Student teaching is a particular concern, since placements are not necessarily in communities where teacher candidates could practice these skills.

Teachers who don’t understand children’s cultural background may not recognize the importance of having books in their students’ native language, or materials that reflect that culture, Rico says.

The Latino Policy Forum plans to work with teacher preparation programs to increase awareness of the importance of cultural competency in the teaching force, and to incorporate more coursework on English language learners for all teachers.

*          *          *

Grow Your Own Teachers, the program that Vargas joined, was created in 2005 to bring more diversity to the teaching profession by supporting candidates—including parents—who live in and have ties to communities of color. In fiscal year 2012, the program received $2.5 million to fund 15 partnerships between community groups and universities to recruit and train teacher candidates. Gov. Pat Quinn recommended no increase in funding for the 2013 fiscal year.

The ability to relate to students and to draw on community resources to help them, are important components of teaching success. A strong relationship between communities and schools, which Grow Your Own aims to foster, is one of the five “essential supports” for school improvement identified by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.

Universities, which are generally responsible for assigning student teachers to schools, make sure the Grow Your Own candidates get assignments in their own neighborhoods.

In a small-scale evaluation of the program—covering six Grow Your Own graduates—principals reported that they performed as well as other beginning teachers in the classroom, with classroom management and teaching content knowledge emerging as strong points. The study, which was done by education research firm OER Associates, will be updated soon with data from the current school year.

The Grow Your Own teachers told evaluators that their background and life experiences help them to understand and respect students. They also reported that, as parents themselves, they value family involvement in schools.

Candidates typically take three to seven years to complete Grow Your Own, since the program targets adults—most from ages 30 to 50—who are working full-time and have families. Half of candidates have household incomes under $30,000. Given these challenges, nearly half the candidates drop out. Some are counseled out.

“We have recognized that for some candidates, Grow Your Own will not work out because they are juggling so many responsibilities and don’t have a lot of financial leeway,” notes Anne Hallett, director of Grow Your Own Illinois.

Since its launch in 2005, only 54 candidates have graduated. But by December, that number is expected to almost double, to about 100.

*          *          *

Vargas grew up around 53rd and Wolcott in New City, near Gage Park. At school, his teachers were mostly white and from upper-middle class backgrounds. “They never knew where I was coming from,” he says.

His teachers talked about spending summer vacations at family cabins. Vargas’ family “was eating” but had almost no extra money.

 “I have known what it is like to live in a small apartment with 10 people,” Vargas says. “My goal is to push that these are not excuses, they are tools--reasons [to] put effort in to greater understanding and using different perspectives.”

Vargas’ family later moved—his brother had been beaten up by African-American boys in the neighborhood who mistook him for white, he says—to “a cruddy house” at 54^th and Lawndale. Vargas was enrolled at Peck Elementary. Again, the teachers were mostly white, with a student body that was a mix of 2^nd- and 3^rd-generation Latinos who did not speak Spanish, plus African-American children who were bused into the neighborhood.

When Vargas was 20, his first child was born. He had to work, but attended Daley College, a community college that is part of City Colleges of Chicago, on and off. When he found out about Grow Your Own, he re-committed himself to his goal of becoming a teacher. Eventually, he transferred to Northeastern Illinois University and enrolled full-time.

Getting his degree was no picnic. Vargas worked full-time as a school security guard, and had to hold down a second part-time job to make ends meet. Sometimes, he worked part-time at a third job in an after-school program.

The schedule was grueling. Often, Vargas would arrive home from Northeastern at midnight four or five days a week, then have to wake up at 5 a.m. to get his three kids ready for school and go to work.

“I tell my students, I didn’t do [college] when I was supposed to, so this is the price I have to pay,” he says. “If I really want it, I have to go after it.”

Vargas credits support from his wife, who is also studying to become a teacher, and from his parents and in-laws, with helping him to get through the program.

His supervising teacher at Talman, Theresa O’Rourke, notes that Vargas’ background is an asset.

“Because of his age and experience of having worked in a Chicago public school, he’s familiar with that, as opposed to just coming in from a university,” O’Rourke says. “He has a pretty good understanding of some of the social and economic needs of the student population.”

*          *          *

Vargas says he’s pleased at how much latitude O’Rourke has given him to try out his own style of teaching.

“I am basically occupying space in someone else’s room. It’s like the equivalent of sleeping on someone’s couch,” he notes. “She kind of allows me to do my own thing.”

Not everything has been easy, though. Vargas’ biggest challenge has been figuring out how to handle students who just don’t speak up in class.

“I forced them,” he says. “I told them I want to hear from someone I haven’t heard from yet. They did it in the beginning out of the need to participate. They did it later because they are starting to understand what this means.”

One way Vargas builds understanding is by helping students see the connection between the Spanish and English versions of vocabulary words. “When it derives from the same root, you’ll see the ‘Aha,’ ” he says.

Vargas’ presence has already sparked a small ripple effect. Margarita Ortiz, a parent worker in Vargas’ class, says that his example has sparked thoughts of becoming a teacher herself. (Ortiz participates in a program that provides small stipends and training for parents to work in schools.)

Ortiz rarely speaks in class, mostly assisting with paperwork and helping students who need it.

“I am scared of speaking in front of a lot of people,” she says. “[Vargas] is just starting, but he has that confidence in him. Seeing him is great motivation.”

The problem is this: Somewhere in the process of maintaining “balance” and instituting the “Census Tract/Tier System” based on neighborhood economics, higher-achieving, lower-income minorities like my daughter are being shortchanged.

We are not a family of means, but instead live in affordable housing. We are, however, a family who values academics and a family in which all three minority children are excellent standardized test-takers. Our oldest has been on the honor roll for eight years. For this, we have been shown the door by CPS’ new policies and the Office of Access and Enrollment.

We applied only to the top four selective enrollment schools--Northside, Payton, Young, and Jones--because the academic and social climate in these schools is more in line with what my daughter’s needs are.  We chose not to apply to other selective enrollment, magnet and charter high schools for a number of reasons. Some schools have a plethora of social issues we would rather avoid. Other schools have lower test scores, or embellished standardized test rankings. In addition, most of the other schools are not in a reasonable travel distance from our home.

Because we live in a higher-income census tract, my daughter would have had to score a perfect 900 to even be considered at Whitney Young, Walter Payton or Northside Prep. She scored an 857, so her only option was to apply for principal discretion--and be rejected again.

Our neighborhood high school is Wells. There have been issues with violence, gangs, drugs and academics at the school, well before we were even aware of its existence. My belief is that schools should be safe and conducive to learning. I don’t want to do a disservice to my daughter by putting her life and/or safety at-risk in an underperforming school. She is a fan of musician Yann Tiersen, classical piano and literature, and is an Asian culture enthusiast. She’s also a bit immature for 13. Wells High School would literally eat her alive!

I think the use of a single application would definitely streamline the application process--for central office application processors and not necessarily families. For instance, will a second or third choice rank-ordered school reject qualified students who didn’t select them as top choice?

Also, students now can only apply to one school for principal discretion—what happens with that process? There is supposed to be “transparency,” but there are just too many question marks.

I do not believe there is anything equitable about a process that drives students like test-taking workhorses. My daughter rose to the challenge, performed well and helped to boost CPS’ test scores during her years in elementary school. She now happens to live in Tier 4, but also be a minority from a family of very modest means. For this, she’s been shown the door.

Zarinah Ali