Byrd-Bennett went so far as to predict an end to an often-contentious relationship with the teachers union. Lewis offered a more stark assessment, saying she feared the layoffs of 850 CPS teachers and workers announced last week were "just the tip of the iceberg" for a system facing a $1 billion deficit.

CHARTER GAINS: Illinois elementary charter school students made more academic gains than students in comparable district-run schools, according to a new report from Stanford University. Latino charter students posted the most impressive results, in math. Yet there are plenty of caveats to be gleaned from the report’s other findings, especially for African American students, who continued to fare worst academically in both traditional schools and charters. To download a copy of the state report, click here. (Catalyst)

MONEY FOR EARLY EDUCATION: The Robert R. McCormick Foundation will be awarding nearly $6 million in grants over two years to 19 nonprofit organizations to support a quality system of early care and education in Illinois. The Foundation will be awarding Illinois Action for Children a $250,000 grant to support improvements in Chicago’s early education programs. Action will collaborate with Chicago Public Schools and the Department of Family Support Services, which together operate more than 700 early-learning programs, to help align standards and advance a more unified early childhood system. The grant will help identify early education programs with high needs and will create group trainings and learning communities to support quality improvement. (Press release)

TEACHER PREP UNDER FIRE: An effort to rate the quality of teacher preparation programs around the country is drawing fire from local colleges of education. The National Council on Teacher Quality, which released a similar report on Illinois universities in fall 2010, panned a majority of the 1,100 programs it reviewed, saying they lacked important elements needed to train high-quality teachers. (Catalyst)

IN THE NATION
To help schools meet the new requirement to evaluate teachers based on student achievement, Virginia officials created a method for calculating how much students learned in a year. By extension, they believe that the same method can show how well teachers are doing their jobs. (The Washington Post)

“The results were dismal,” said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The review centered on criteria like course content and length, selectivity, and the quality of the student teaching experience.

“The quality of training in the U.S. for elementary math… is so far below international standards for training teachers as to be a grave, grave concern,” Walsh added.

Overall, not one elementary education program in the U.S. earned the highest-possible rating of four stars, and just 20 earned at least three stars. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education issued a statement blasting the report, saying it is "based on a review of documents with such inconsistent participation and fragmented inputs that it would not be published by a credible, professional research organization."

Yet the review also raises concerns about whether teachers have enough content knowledge to teach to the Common Core State Standards. Using measures like the number of subject matter courses students are required to take and their incoming standardized test scores, the review asserts that just one in nine elementary education programs ensure that students know the material they’ll need to teach.

Another issue it found was a lack of safeguards to ensure the teachers who work with student-teachers are master practitioners. “When a student teacher has a great experience, it’s primarily because they lucked out,” Walsh said. Schools “simply say we’ll take anyone a school district might offer, as long as they have three years of experience.”

Illinois’ schools of education did better in some areas and worse in others. Three-fourths of the state’s programs were as selective as the review’s standards called for.

But just 6 percent of Illinois programs, versus 19 percent nationwide, had strong elementary math components. Just 8 percent of the state’s programs were met criteria for classroom management, compared to 23 percent nationwide.

And just 4 percent met NCTQ’s standards for secondary content-area preparation, compared with 35 percent nationwide – likely because of differences in state requirements.

Programs not happy

Vicki Chou, dean of the University of Illinois-Chicago’s College of Education, said that “the whole exercise was an enormous waste of money, time, (and) resources.”

She added: “The universities are doing excellent work trying to prepare good teachers. It’s discouraging that these distractions come up.”

Southern Illinois University’s Acting Director of Teacher Education, Kelly Glassett, notes that a number of schools of education decided not to participate in the review.

As a result, the findings note that some of the ratings are based on information that NCTQ collected in 2010, and may be out of date. In other cases, “they counted zeroes because we didn’t give them any data,” Glassett says.

And, he points out, schools of education are now in the middle of revamping their curricula to meet new state requirements – among them, including more emphasis on reading instruction, an area where many programs nationwide lost points.

He was also concerned about the ratings’ focus on just five elements of effective reading instruction, saying it could lead to prospective missing out on the larger context of how, for instance, a child’s exposure to language at home affects their reading development.

Perry Schoon, dean of Illinois State University’s College of Education, says that his school sent NCTQ the information they asked for.

“Their approach was very thin, with sweeping conclusions,” he said. “We completely disagree with the inaccurate assessment and the rankings. We don’t believe they can draw the conclusion they did from the information they had.”

Illinois universities were rated as “not applicable” for program effectiveness because the state doesn’t yet publish data on ties between teacher preparation programs and student achievement. But, he noted, many universities keep their own data on effectiveness and improvement.

Rationale for ratings

Walsh, on the other hand, said that schools of education “believe that their charge is to prepare a teacher who will have the professional disposition, the confidence…. to come up with their own system for teaching children, for managing children.”

This, she asserted, leads to too little “imparting specific knowledge and skills that will allow a teacher to be ready to teach on day one.”

She also blamed academic freedom, the tradition of professors being allowed to choose their own course content, for teacher preparation’s challenges.

“There were 866 textbooks that were used to teach readers how to teach reading. You wouldn’t find that in any other field,” Walsh said.

She admitted that the ratings were “not a deep review.”

“There’s a lot of really great teachers who come out of weak programs. The wrong message for you to get today is that an institution is turning out bad teachers if it gets low rankings from us,” Walsh said.

The study expands on a previous, much-cited 2009 report that looked at Chicago charter schools--the vast majority of those in Illinois--as well as charters in another 16 states and found that the city’s charters performed better overall. Both reports are part of ongoing research on charter school effectiveness at CREDO, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which plans to publish a full study covering 26 states next week. (The reports can be found at CREDO’s website.)

The gains touted in the latest report, which covers 2008 through 2012, are statistically significant in research terms, albeit modest in the real world. On average, Illinois elementary charter school students gained two additional weeks of learning in reading and one additional month of learning in math over the course of the school year, according to the study. And only about one in five charters performed significantly better in reading than traditional schools.

Those findings might not be striking, especially to charter critics. Andrew Broy of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools acknowledges that. “One thing revealed by this report is that we don’t have enough high-performing schools of any type in Chicago," he says. "We view charters much more as part of the solution [than critics do]. But that doesn’t hide the fact that we all have to do better by our students.”

Chicago’s older charter schools drove much of the improvement. Newer charters have a positive effect, but less than in the 2009 study, according to Dev Davis, research manager at CREDO. However, the new report does not provide breakdowns for the two groups.

The study used the same methodology as the 2009 report, comparing reading and math scores for Illinois elementary charter school students, in grades 3 through 8, with a “virtual twin”--a demographically similar student from a traditional district-run school that the charter student would have attended. (The report included 65 charter campuses and 18,689 students.)

Other findings:

-- In reading, 21 percent of charters performed worse than traditional schools, while 20 percent did better and 59 percent showed no difference. In math, 21 percent of charters did worse, 37 percent performed better and 42 percent showed no difference.

-- Black and Hispanic students continued to lag behind white students in reading, and received “no significant benefit or loss from charter school attendance” compared to students in traditional schools

-- Latinos in charter schools made far more significant gains in math than in traditional schools, even when compared to white students, effectively erasing the achievement gap in the subject.

-- Low-income charter students made slightly more gains in reading than low-income students in traditional schools, but had similar performance in math.

“Clearly, there is room to grow,” says Broy. “We have substantial achievement gaps, especially with black students, poor students. The same challenges as faced by public schools are faced by charters.”

The study also found that students in their second and third years at a charter performed better than new, first-year charter students. English-language learners in charter and traditional schools had similar performance.

The study found evidence that charter students were more likely to hold students back, and retained students made stronger gains in charters than in traditional schools. Still, the study says that the difference can’t be considered significant, since retained students are a small group whose academic performance varied widely.

EXACERBATING INEQUALITY: CPS released next year’s individual school budgets to principals last week and, according to the CTU, schools across the city are seeing 10 percent to 25 percent cuts in funding. The union and education experts predict these cuts will lead to eliminated positions and more split-level classes, among other negative outcomes. “What we’re going to see is a degradation of education in neighborhood public schools, which is likely to result in even a widening of the inequalities that we already have in CPS,” said Pauline Lipman, professor of educational policy studies and director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (Progress Illinois)

IN THE NATION
INDUSTRY OF MEDIOCRITY: The U.S. teacher training system is badly broken, turning out rookie educators who have little hands-on experience running classrooms and are quickly overwhelmed by the job, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality. The review found "an industry of mediocrity," with the vast majority of programs earning fewer than three stars on a four-star rating scale - and many earning no stars at all. (Reuters)

CUT TO THE BONE: Under a draconian budget passed by the Philadelphia School District last month, many who play supporting roles — aide, counselor, secretary, security monitor — will be gone  by September, nor will there be money for books, paper, a nurse or the school’s locally celebrated rock band.

Touting their progress so far, Jadine Chou, CPS officer of safety and security, said parents at 42 of the schools receiving children from closed schools have seen their proposed “safe passage” routes and given their feedback. (Sun-Times)

SPENDING AND CUTTING: As Mayor Emanuel took another bold step toward spending $55 million for a DePaul basketball arena and a hotel, public school principals throughout the system were telling their staff what to expect in next year's budgets. As in—cuts, cuts, and more cuts, writes Ben Joravsky in the Chicago Reader.

IT'S HISTORY NOW: Peabody Elementary School, one of nearly 50 Chicago Public Schools slated for closure, commemorated 118 years of education before its doors close for good this summer. (ABC7 News)

IN THE NATION
ANOTHER EARLY CHILDHOOD INITIATIVE: Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation are partnering with Next Generation, a non-partisan strategic policy and communications organization, to launch “Too Small To Fail,” a new initiative to improve the health and well-being of children ages zero to five. Too Small to Fail will promote scientific research about early childhood development with the goal of reaching as many American parents and business leaders as possible and motivating them to act.  Click here to watch the Too Small To Fail video.  (Press release)

A CONTRACT, FINALLY: After five years of bitter bargaining, Oakland teachers and district officials have ratified a one-year agreement that gives teachers an immediate 1.5 percent raise and a one-time bonus. That raise will grow to 2 percent if, as expected, the governor signs the new state budget that has an extra $7 million for Oakland schools. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Still more such teacher layoffs as a result of school actions are likely going to happen in about a month.

In May, the Board of Education approved the closing of 49 elementary schools and one tiny high school, and the turnaround of five schools.

According to CPS, 1,005 teachers worked in the closing schools. Of those, 420 were laid off on Friday.  The 420 were either probationary teachers or teachers with satisfactory or unsatisfactory performance reviews.

Teachers with excellent or superior reviews are eligible to follow their students if the “welcoming” schools have  positions for them. These teachers will learn in mid-July whether there are available positions.

Many welcoming school principals say they will be able to work small groups of new students into existing classes without exceeding  CPS class-size limits.  and, therefore, won’t need additional teachers. For example, Principal Minnie Watson at DePriest Elementary expects to get 135 students from Emmet School’s closing but will need only three of their four teachers.

One way she will limit the number of new teachers is by letting her small primary-grade classes grow a bit. For example, DePriest  now has 18 students in 2nd grade. Next year, it will have 24.

“It is still below average,” she notes. “I believe in smaller class sizes. I use my discretionary money for it.”

Teachers who do not follow their students, as well as others  who got pink slips today, will have two choices. They can work as substitute teachers for up to a year, receiving their previous pay and benefits for the first five months. Or, they can resign and receive three months’ salary.

The 124 teachers and 67 clerks, bus aides and paraprofessionals being laid off at turnaround schools can reapply for their jobs. According to the teacher’s contract, the teachers will be allowed to go into the reassigned teacher pool.  

Also on Friday, CPS reported on what city agencies are doing to prepare for the transition of more than 13,000 students to new schools next year. Among other things, city departments are doing massive cleanups along routes that students are expected to walk. This is what they said they have done: towed more than 200 abandoned vehicles, removed 1,100 graffiti posts; trimmed 1,300 trees; mowed 1,400 lots; repaired 101 broken alley lights; fixed 722 street lights; completed more than 2,100 rodent abatements;  identified 478 vacant buildings and "addressed" more than half of those vacant buildings.

Chicago’s J.B. Pritzker announced a $20 million commitment to launch the Early Childhood Innovation Accelerator, an initiative that will rely on social impact bonds—bond investors receive a return based on goals met by social programs—to pay for early childhood programs for disadvantaged children. (The first project, with United Way of Salt Lake City, will provide preschool for 450 youngsters.) And at a panel moderated by former President Bill Clinton, a Target Corp. official announced that Target would donate $1 billion to K-12 education in the coming year, with a focus on early literacy, while Sara Martinez Tucker of the National Math and Science Initiative cited statistics on math and science education and plugged the Common Core State Standards as a needed step toward better STEM learning. The conference continues Friday. (Catalyst)

LITERACY COURSES FOR TEACHERS: As the state changes its system of tracking teacher licensing, new teacher candidates will have to take more reading coursework – including classes in reading methods, reading in content areas, and serving special education students. Also, substitute teachers will have to pass a basic skills test for the first time, in order to renew their licenses. The summer issue of Catalyst In Depth tackled the topic of literacy in the middle grades and high school, when content-area reading becomes particularly critical.

BUDGET BATTLE: As principals got a better sense this week of their school's budget for the coming year, officials with the Chicago Teachers Union and privately run charter schools — which rarely agree on anything — both sounded an alarm over the effects of potential funding cuts. (Tribune)

CTU WARNING: As Chicago Public Schools principals sort out their new student-based budgets for the 2013-14 school year, the Chicago Teachers Union on Thursday reported deep cuts in the budgets of many schools.  (Sun-Times)

UNION PREDICTS CUTS: The Chicago Teachers Union charged Thursday that school budgets for the coming school year are down between 10 percent and 25 percent compared to this year, and that new positions provided as part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s signature longer school day initiative will likely be the first to be cut. (Catalyst)

IN THE NATION
VIRTUAL SCHOOLING: The Philadelphia school system will open a new, full-time online school this coming fall, a program that the district promises will offer the academic flexibility and customized learning that many students and families demand. In creating its online program, Philadelphia joins a number of other big-city school districts that have founded virtual schools as a way to either add to the list of school choices available to parents or persuade families that have already chosen alternative online programs outside their systems to come back. (Education Week)

THE RETURN OF TRACKING: It was once common for elementary-school teachers to arrange their classrooms by ability, placing the highest-achieving students in one cluster, the lowest in another. But ability grouping and its close cousin, tracking, in which children take different classes based on their proficiency levels, fell out of favor in the late 1980s and the 1990s as critics charged that they perpetuated inequality by trapping poor and minority students in low-level groups. Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country — a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry had all but ended its use. (The New York Times)

Teachers and other workers paid for with the “college-ready fund”—the name CPS gave to the pot of money designated for the extended school day—are especially vulnerable as principals make budget decisions. About $100 million was doled out to schools through the college-ready fund, and schools could use it for a host of improvements, from buying computers to hiring an art teacher. Some schools used the money to hire parents or community residents to monitor recess, which became mandatory when Emanuel lengthened the school day.

But rather than protecting the money--as CPS is doing with the extra money it provides for magnet and selective schools, for instance--the college-ready fund was incorporated into the CPS budget for basic instruction. The basic instruction money is being distributed on a per-pupil basis for the first time.  

One principal said he will no longer have the money for recess workers. “We will have minimal coverage for recess, so I anticipate injuries and lawsuits,” he said.

According to principals, schools with special programs fared better than neighborhood schools under the new budget plan. A power point obtained by Catalyst Chicago explains how the budgeting system works.

Union leader Jackson Potter said it is hard to get a handle on how many layoffs could result from budget cuts, especially because principals have been told not to talk about their budgets. But the number could be significant.

Potter said he’s heard that librarians and counselors are slated to be laid off, as well as numerous teachers.

“It is going to be pretty devastating,” he said. “We are hearing these doomsday scenarios everywhere.”

Board president David Vitale has acknowledged that school budgets are less than last year, but said the decrease was only a few percentage points on average. But CPS officials have so far declined to provide any specific information about how the budgets for the coming school year compare to this year.

In a statement, CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said the union's allegations are disappointing and not accurate.

"CPS has cut more than $600 million from the central office, so we can preserve every precious dollar in the classroom for our children," she said in the statement. "It is my hope that as we finish this school year and prepare to begin another that the CTU will work with us and can contribute to real solutions to the financial crisis facing our schools. Our students deserve no less."

Most of the $600 million in cuts in central office predated the Rahm Emanuel administration and, in fact, the amount spent on central office staff increased this year.

CPS spokeswoman Kelley Quinn said the school-level budgets are preliminary and the district doesn’t want to share any specifics until budgets are final. Yet, technically the budgets won't be final until the board approves the entire district budget in late August. Well before then, CPS must publish budget information and hold hearings.

Quinn downplayed the decreases. “Every year there are increases and decreases in school budgets due to things like enrollment, number of students that are under the poverty line, etc.,” she said in an e-mail.

But principals say they were told at meetings led by top officials that their budgets are shrinking due to the district’s $600 million pension bill, which is driving a projected $1 billion budget deficit.

Plus, changes in enrollment or the number of poor students would not cause drastic shifts in school budgets. In fact, one North Side principal said that he is projected to get 40 more students, yet his budget did not increase at all.

Because veteran teachers eat up more of a school’s budget, one fear is that principals will have an incentive to lay them off to save money. With the new budgets, CPS is providing some additional money for 300 schools with a lot of veteran teachers; the money is not promised for future years.

One principal, whose teachers average 10 years of experience, said he isn't getting any of the money--and though he values veterans, he can understand why schools might decide to hire less experienced, and thus less expensive, ones.

The principal is also thinking about taking in more students to his school, which has a waiting list of students outside the neighborhood who would like to attend.

“Other schools in my position might be tempted to cannibalize other schools,” he said.

On the 10^th day of school in the fall, CPS will look at school enrollments and adjust budgets accordingly. Schools whose enrollments are lower than projected will have money taken from them and will likely have to lay off staff. (This adjustment historically has been done on the 20^th day of school.)

Another principal said his budget is $1 million less than this year, yet he is projected to get about the same number of students.

“I’m cutting three assistants, a half-time teacher, and a full-time teacher,” he said. “I'm also increasing class sizes from 20 in primary to the max of 29.”

This year, CPS is now taking two-thirds of the payment schools receive for having cell phone towers on their property, leaving schools just a third of the money. About 99 schools have cell phone towers and, at this principal’s school, the payment previously gave him $48,000 that he could use at his discretion.

Several high schools staff have told the union that they are seeing significant decreases. For example, Taft is losing $3 million, Foreman High School $1.7 million and Kenwood $1.76 million.

Potter says these schools might be projected to get slightly fewer students, but nowhere near the level that would justify the budget cuts.

READING WOES: A raft of past programs in CPS have failed to substantially improve the reading skills of middle grade and high school students. The evidence: Only 10 high schools, all of them selective, have average reading scores for freshmen that are at a level that predicts college readiness, and 4 in 10 CPS high school graduates who go on to Illinois 4-year colleges end up in remedial courses. The summer 2013 issue of Catalyst In Depth reports on the problem of adolescent literacy and how CPS is trying once again to tackle it as part of a new federal project.

PARTNERING FOR SAFETY: Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett announced that CPS and its faith-based community partners will the expand Safe Haven program from some 60 to 100 locations across the city this summer. The program, started in 2009, is meant to keep Chicago students off the streets and engaged in educational activities during the winter, spring and summer breaks.  The program runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday through Friday starting July 1 and ending on Aug. 13. Each location will provide students free breakfast and lunch through CPS’s partnership with Catholic Charities. Throughout the day, the program will also engage students in workshops that focus on positive conflict resolutions, anger management, anti-bullying and anti-violence. (Press release)

IN THE NATION
THE NEW MAJORITY: Latinos are now the largest ethnic group in Texas public schools, surpassing non-Hispanic whites in Lone Star State enrollment for the first time in history. (Huffington Post)

SUCCESS AND FAILURE: Denver’s charter high schools are doing a better job than traditional public schools at retaining students, but are doing only slightly better than the traditional schools at graduating their students in four years. (EdNews Colorado)

COLLEGE GRADS SURGE: The number of Americans graduating from college has surged in recent years, sending the share with a college degree to a new high, federal data shows. Despite the recent improvement, higher education experts emphasized that college completion rates were still distressingly low, with only about half of first-time college freshmen who enrolled in 2006 having graduated by 2012, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. (The New York Times)

TAX OPTION: Mayor Rahm Emanuel isn't ruling out seeking a way to raise Chicago Public Schools' property tax cap to help close the $1 billion deficit the district faces. CPS is allowed to raise its property taxes annually by either the rate of inflation or 5 percent, whichever is less. Should the district want to raise its taxes by more than that, it could ask voters through a referendum, something suburban school districts have been doing for years. The district also could try an end-around through legislation in Springfield. (Tribune)

LEGAL OPENING: For now, Chicago Public Schools has legally left the door open to the possibility of halting 10 of its 50 historic school closings. Until a new judge can be assigned to a lawsuit filed by the Chicago Teachers Union and parents from 10 elementary schools, CPS attorneys agreed the district wouldn’t take any permanent actions at the schools in question. (Sun-Times)

PUSHBACK ON CHARTER PUSHOUTS: On Tuesday, student activists in the organization Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), many of whom had been pushed out of charter schools, held a press conference to protest the expulsions, fines and other push-out tactics used by charter schools to pick and choose which students are retained in these schools. The students called on legislators to demand accountability for all publicly funded schools. (http://charterpushout.tumblr.com/)

Students from George Washington High School won an honorable mention for best presentation in the “Cooking up Change” Healthy Cooking National Finals held recently at the U.S. Department of Education in Washington D.C. The students competed against seven other teams from across the county in the preparation of healthy, tasty and creative school lunches that meet the nutritional standards and cost structure of CPS school food service staff. (Press release)

IN THE NATION

ANOTHER RECONSTITUTION: D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson called it a “fresh start” and a “momentum-shifter” for Cardozo Senior High last month when administrators removed nearly half the staff at the school. Henderson had used her power to “reconstitute” the struggling school, requiring the entire staff to reapply for their positions. But the district’s efforts to remake schools this way have largely failed to produce improved test scores, suggesting that replacing staff is not by itself a reliable route to addressing the challenges of high-poverty inner-city schools. (The Washington Post)

TRUANCY COMPLAINT: Advocacy groups have filed a civil rights complaint with the Justice Department on behalf of seven students in Texas. The move was to protest policies under which students are referred to truancy court. (The New York Times)