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Farragut High in Little Village, a large, low-income neighborhood school that has seen tough times, has one of the best attendance records among Chicago's neighborhood high schools.

Three years ago, CPS began a crackdown on parents of chronically truant kids, threatening up to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine. But the get-tough approach has not worked.

The system's chronic truancy rate has remained between 3 and 4 percent, or about 16,000 students in 2004-05, according to preliminary data. Students are considered chronically truant when they rack up more than 18 unexcused absences in a school year.

Jerry Mandujano, a.k.a. the tracker, strides up the front staircase at Gage Park High. He holds a clipboard with computer printouts that display student photo IDs and class schedules.

The front line of a new strategy to curb class cutting, Mandujano is out to find these students. Although the school year is only three weeks old, each already has skipped class repeatedly.

It's a Tuesday afternoon, and a group of 8th-graders loosely file into John Yolich's social studies class at Uplift Community School.

"Let's get comfortable," Yolich tells the kids draped in loose-fitting T-shirts who slowly break away from private conversations and find their seats.

Shiva Singh Khalsa and his wife, Shabad Kaur Khalsa, went through more than a dozen schools before they found the perfect fit for their son, Amar Dev.

The Khalsas are Sikhs and Amar, 6, wears his long hair tied in a ball and practices a vegetarian diet. They finally decided on Passages Charter, an elementary school founded to serve a diverse immigrant student population.

"My wife looked at 13 schools—the best schools in the city—and nothing held a candle to Passages," Khalsa says.

Per-pupil funding can bring greater transparency and more equity to the budgeting process, but at a price.

"When you move to per-pupil funding, the idea is to put more accountability [in schools]," says funding consultant Karen Hawley Miles, who was hired to advise Chicago Public Schools.

Student counts count When money is supposed to follow students, enrollment matters—a lot.

In his best-selling book "The Shame of the Nation: The Return of Apartheid Schooling in America," Jonathan Kozol argues that public schools are further away than ever from the goal of equal, integrated education set in the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. Kozol, a former teacher, spoke with Contributing Editor Alexander Russo about the mainstream media's education reporting, the pitfalls of education reforms and what it will take to achieve the goals of Brown.

Tell me about the name of the book.

CHARTER GROUP Leadership for Quality Education, the education arm of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, has merged with the Illinois Network of Charter Schools. INCS Executive Director Elizabeth Evans will head the merged group. Pamela Clarke, executive director of LQE, will become deputy director of INCS. Other LQE staff will also join INCS. LQE had long been a strong backer of the charter movement.

Under the 10-year leadership of Supt. Thomas Payzant, the Boston Public Schools has focused on improving instruction and in some ways has been a model for the current Chicago school administration.

For example, the district was one of the first to use instructional coaches and to give high-performing schools more authority.

Gage Park

A Anita Andrews, asistente principal en la Escuela Gage Park, le gusta contar esta historia sobre su jefe, Principal Wilfredo Ortiz: