catalyst-chicago.org

The first round of student report card pick up begins Wednesday and Thursday for CPS Track E schools, where parents also will receive a report card on the progress of their child’s school and give them a level of transparency and detail on school performance intended to empower them to have meaningful dialogues with principals and teachers about their child’s performance, according to a CPS press release.

From the Tribune: In Chicago Public Schools' efforts to educate parents about the state of their child's school, district officials will be sending home more detailed progress reports than previous years.

The number of truancy cases has grown steadily in Illinois’s public schools, but the issue is most pressing in Chicago, where 7.4 percent of students, some 30,000, were classified as chronically truant in 2010-11, having missed nearly one month of school. (Tribune)

The Chicago Teachers Union has filed an unfair labor practice complaint against Chicago Public Schools for implementing a controversial online survey last summer that effectively banned low-performing applicants from teaching in CPS. (Tribune)

The union's challenge CPS' teacher screening test faces hurdles. (Catalyst)

Some Chicago Public School cafeterias began serving antibitotic-free chicken Tuesday, in an effort to improve lunchtime nutrition.  (Medill Reports)

Also: Chicago Public Schools have begun serving local chicken raised without antibiotics to students in 473 schools. The district's new scratch-cooked chicken program includes about 1.2 million pounds from Amish farms that do not use antibiotics. Students will be offered bone-in chicken two to three times each month. CPS' purchase of chicken grown without antibiotics is the first of its kind. No other district in the nation is serving this kind of poultry regularly at such a scale. (PR Newswire)

The Tribune has a video on Miller Amish Country Poultry, the Indiana farm that is supplying the chickens.

IN THE NATION

A group of parents and education advocates is preparing to sue the Los Angeles school district, demanding that it follow an arcane 40-year-old law that requires all California school systems to link teacher and principal evaluations to student performance. (Los Angeles Times)

Non-teaching employees have ratified an agreement that restores well over 200 jobs at Los Angeles-area schools, but hundreds of others will remain without a job or will continue to work at reduced pay. (Los Angeles Times)

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools has removed the Atlanta Public Schools from probation. (Patch.com)

In the past 20 years of nationwide testing of pupils in the fourth and eighth grades, students have made big gains in math, but only modest ones in reading. (The New York Times)