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: A distaste for making teacher ratings public
By: Cassandra West / May 31, 2012
The Obama administration's push to make student test scores a bigger part of teacher evaluations may be having an unintended side effect: It's cooling officials' appetite for making the data public.
Teachers' unions have always opposed publishing individual public school teachers' class results in newspapers or online. Now even education reformers — and reform-minded public officials — are having second thoughts about releasing the data. (USA Today)
Matt Farmer, a trial lawyer, CPS parent and LSC member who writes regularly about school policy, puts CPS Board of Education member Penny Pritzker on trial, so to speak, in a six-minute speech he gave at the Chicago Teachers Union rally last week. Watch the video here.
Teachers and staff at Youth Connection Leadership Academy, an alternative charter school in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, have filed an unfair labor complaint that claims the network that runs the school announced plans to close it a day after teachers voted to form a union. (Tribune) Here's Catalyst's story.
The unionizing teachers at the Youth Connection Leadership Academy and Chicago ACTS (Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff) will hold a press conference before the Youth Connection Leadership Academy board meeting today at 4:30 p.m. outside of the Youth Connection Charter School offices at 10 W. 35th Street, according to a news release.
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has joined counterparts from 20 other states in pressing Congress to stop what they say is the exploitation of military veterans by for-profit colleges. (WBEZ)
IN THE NATION
Miami-Dade County Public Schools is facing a $90 million budget shortfall for the 2012-13 school year. But Superintendent Alberto Carvalho pledged Wednesday not to lay off full-time teachers or cut arts, languages or PE programs to solve the budget problem. (Miami Herald)
The Gary Community Schools District is getting ready to lay off 169 teachers, nearly a quarter of the total. Gary is expected to lose 600-700 students this year, about 7 percent of the current student enrollment. (CBS Chicago)
Authorities in a number of states are split over who should have the final say on allowing charter schools within a particular district’s boundaries. (Education Week)
States face key spending decisions as they implement the Common Core State Standards, and a new study finds that they could save about $927 million—or spend as much as $8.3 billion—depending on the approaches they choose in three vital areas: curriculum materials, tests, and professional development. (Education Week)
"Amid the ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation," writes David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives and America’s Future.” (NYT)
watch Matt Farmer's speech.
CPS parent Matt Farmer's presentation is outstanding.
He expertly dissects the hypocrisy of so many of the wealthy policy makers who believe their own children deserve one type of education while the poor children of Chicago deserve another - a type of education to which these powerful elites would never, ever subject their own children.
It does not matter where the children of Penny Pritzker, Mayor Emanuel, or other education power brokers go to school or whether those schools are public or private. But the *type* of educational experience these policy makers prioritize for their own children does matter when they, in their official capacities, foist a far inferior experience upon everyone else.
Watch the 6 minute video, one of the most powerful speeches I have ever seen. It is worth every second of your time.
For the elites: a
For the elites:
a whole-child, student-centered, curricula rich in the arts, sciences, culture, wellness, creativity, discovery, and critical thinking that is designed to meet the full human development needs of young people.
For the rest:
test-centered, rote-learning, compliance based fill-in-the-bubble factories.
Matt Farmer is correct but its called a class society
Matt was without question correct in pointing out that the wealthy want a different type of education for their own children than they ideologically impose on the children of the poor. This has not just started, it's been going on for more than a century since state governments began to mandate students to attend school. Early on progressive educators like Ella Flagg Young who became superintendent of schools in Chicago in 1887 fought this same fight. It is ironic also that there is a CPS school named after this great educator given how far away from her vision the school district has drifted.
Fundamentally Ella Flagg Young, John Dewey, and F.W. Parker lost their ideological war against the corporate/wealthy proponents of exactly the type of education Matt denounced in his speech in the very early part of this century. What is even more ironic is that the two great progressives Dewey and Parker started schools in Chicago based on progressive principles that are today largely bastions of the children of the wealthy, one of those wealthy families is of course that of Mayor Emanuel. Matt's vision of an education is one bathed in the light from the great progressives of the past.
Rod Estvan
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