As CPS prepares to close a record number of schools, the fate of students and communities is in question.
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In the News: CPS announces new ethics training
By: Cassandra West / March 20, 2012
In the wake of a gifts scandal inside the Chicago Public Schools food services department, official said Monday that employees who oversee vendor contracts will begin a new round of training to reaffirm the district's code of ethics, according the Tribune.
As the complaints from the public and especially parents get louder over CPS' longer school day plan, a Sun-Times editorial says the plan "has too many holes."
Members of the Advance Illinois Educator Advisory Council met with a federal “teacher ambassador” on Tuesday to give feedback on a 12-page draft proposal for the RESPECT Project, a proposed $5 billion grant program for states and districts that aims to sever the links between teacher pay and years of service and broadly restructure the teaching profession. (Catalyst)
NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is pushing students on Chicago's South Side to become scientists and engineers while perfecting their jump shots. Abdul-Jabbar joined Gov. Pat Quinn at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School on Sunday to encourage more students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. (WBEZ)
IN THE STATE
The Elgin Area School District U-46 board on Monday approved layoffs of 178 employees, including 77 teachers. (Daily Herald)
A sixth-grade social science and language arts teacher at Naperville’s Lincoln Junior High School was named the Illinois Education Association’s Teacher of the Year this week in Chicago. Josh Stumpenhorst already had been named the Illinois State Board of Education’s Teacher of the Year last fall. (Daily Herald)
IN THE NATION
According to a study released Monday, 1 in 4 Americans don't complete high school. The national graduation rate increased by 3.5 percentage points between 2001 and 2009, the report found. Only one state, Wisconsin, has reached the 90 percent plateau. If every state had a graduation rate of 90 percent or better, 580,000 additional students would have graduated in the class of 2011, increasing the gross domestic product by $6.6 billion and generating $1.8 billion in additional revenue as a result of increased economic activity, the report estimates. (Tribune)
A bill passed by the Wisconsin Legislature would require the state Department of Public Instruction to make “teacher performance and the evaluation of teacher education programs” available to the public beginning in the 2013-14 school year. And for 2014-15, teacher and principal evaluations would be based 50 percent on student performance and 50 percent on standards in areas like planning and classroom environment. (Journal Times)
AT&T announced Monday it will pour $250 million into programs to promote high school graduation and career readiness over the next five years. (Education Week)
The nation’s security and economic prosperity are at risk if schools do not improve, warns a report by a panel led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Joel I. Klein, a former chancellor of New York City’s school system. The report also recommends more charter schools, something Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a member of the panel, said have not proved to be sustainable or to improve schools. (The New York Times)
Can't Make This Stuff Up
Raise your hand if you work for the Chicago Public Schools in any capacity—top to bottom—and you didn’t know it was wrong to accept gifts and dinners from vendors. So now “employees who oversee vendor contracts will begin a new round of training to reaffirm the district's code of ethics, officials announced Monday.” Death by a 1000 memos continues at the Board of Education.
Why aren’t these employees already gone? As if the mayor isn’t the man behind the curtain making all CPS decisions. They’re going to wait for the Board of Ed to take it up?
The offending food vendors should be cancelled immediately also. Nobody does business this way. If the CPS employees and the vendors need to meet because they don’t have email, telephones, or paper and envelopes, let them sit in one of the CPS lunchrooms and see what that looks like.
what wrong with this? CPS food service employees do the
toughest and hottest jobs for little pay. The breakfast program only made much more work for these same low pay hard working employees--no breaks, just more sweat and job cuts! CPS Breakfast costs schools more money--more bug spray, more plastic bags, more clean-up, more garbage, with class time taken away. Bribes allow for substandard vendor service and food quality. Where are the stock holders of Chatwells? This was wrong on all sides.
Starts at the top Rahm--you allow Crawley to live outside of
Chicago--where is your ethics and moral class?
conflicts of interest galore
Ha ha ha! There's Cawley getting a waiver to stay in his Northshore suburb because he's the "only" parent whose child would suffer hardships if he moved into the city. Then Cawley and Vitale sat on the board of AUSL, and now AUSL gets millions from CPS for turnarounds. And then there's Rahmbo's buddy who lobbies for the speed cameras and will make millions from the city contracts. And Rahmbo is "shocked , just shocked" because of bribery and a "lack of ethics" in CPS food services.
We Need to Keep a Running List of Emanuel's Comments
Great reminders! One's eyes usually cross from the blatant audacity of remarks coming out of CPS and the Mayor's Office, so it's easy to forget all the offenses that need to be listed.
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