catalyst-chicago.org

The Chicago Reporter—Illinois lost nearly $10 billion in 2005 from the "social costs" of high school dropouts. Some argue that it makes more sense to invest in intervention while children are still in school, rather than paying many times more in social programs and diminished tax dollars after they have dropped out. But others are not convinced. Full text

Ninth-grade biology teacher Brent Hanchey loves the challenge of working at Jefferson Alternative High inside Cook County's Juvenile Detention Center. Hanchey previously taught young adults at York Alternative High inside Cook County Jail and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the academic and social needs of incarcerated youth. Hanchey recently won the U.S. Dept. of Education's American Star of Teaching Award for using innovative instruction to raise student achievement. He talked with writer Tiffany Forte about the needs of incarcerated students and how schools can meet those needs.

Which teacher credentials make a difference in the classroom? It's a research question with significance for districts who recruit teachers, for the principals who hire them and for a public concerned with teacher quality.

Unequal distribution of the teachers with the best credentials became a contentious issue in Chicago earlier this year. The Education Trust released a study that found that Chicago teachers who were rated lowest in experience, education and academic aptitude were concentrated in low-income, minority neighborhoods.

Chicago Public Schools snared its biggest federal grant to date when it won $27.5 million to pilot a merit pay initiative for teachers, making Chicago the largest district in the country to experiment with performance-based pay.

Chicago Public Schools is not the only district that is converting to a new student information system. Districts across the country are dumping outdated systems and adopting software better suited to collecting and analyzing data required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law requires districts to report data such as race and special education status for individual students.

Each morning, Shamile Harris takes her 4-year-old daughter, Nakariel, to a home day-care center about a 5-minute car ride away.

But Nakariel won't be there all day. Soon after arriving, she and five other children in the sitter's care will be whisked away by a van to It Takes a Village, an accredited day-care center in Austin, for a couple hours of educational activities—learning basics such as numbers and colors, practicing the alphabet, developing social skills by interacting with other children and exercising by performing jumping jacks and toe-touches.

The article "Lower scores, more dropouts" confirmed what we teachers at the elementary level have observed—that our "special" students are not given a special education. In fact, they are at the bottom of the education barrel.

The Board of Education—despite lawsuits, articles and exposés such as your own—seems totally unconcerned about the plight of the learning disabled.

Thank you for your article.

Reuven A. Robinson

The Chicago Reporter—The Chicago Public Schools administer federal and state grants for several preschool programs. Serving just 1,000 children, the child-parent centers are the smallest but most expensive of these programs. Although they have been proven to make a significant difference, a number of them have closed in recent years. Full text