Obviously, Marshall’s long-standing academic failings weren’t lost on Tamoura, who went on to say that she “wasn’t even supposed to be here.” Marshall was her last option. Her family couldn’t afford the private school that was her first choice, and she wasn’t offered a slot at Raby, one of the newer high schools sprouting up on the West Side.  

Tamoura was one of the Marshall freshmen profiled in “Class of 2011,” the award-winning issue of Catalyst In Depth that examined the challenges of High School Transformation. (The issue was published in February 2008 and is available online at www.catalyst-chicago.org.) As Tamoura entered 9th grade, Marshall had just begun the initiative. The goal was to make rigorous coursework the foundation of high school improvement—an idea tailor-made to suit studious teenagers like Tamoura.

Discussions about the many academic and social ills of urban high schools tend to give scant attention to the Tamouras at these schools. In other words, the kids who don’t get into trouble, who show up to school regularly, whose parents support their education but lack financial resources. These teens, like Tamoura, are savvy enough to know that their best option for getting into a good college is to bypass the neighborhood high school.

As one researcher said, “What are you doing about all the smart kids?”

Last year, the district embarked on a turnaround at Marshall, sinking millions into campus renovations and bringing in a new principal and mostly new teachers and staff. The success of turnarounds, at Marshall and other struggling high schools, is of national as well as local importance: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made the strategy a key part of federal education efforts.

For this issue of Catalyst In Depth, Deputy Editor Sarah Karp visited Marshall regularly during its first year in the turnaround program. From her reporting, it’s clear that the school is making progress. The climate is calmer, the special education department no longer faces state sanctions, and teachers have begun to collaborate regularly and focus on good instruction.

Marshall, of course, still faces big hurdles. For one, school leaders must balance the need to keep enrollment up—or face losing staff, as Marshall did eventually—with the challenge to improve academics. Nationally, other urban districts are in similar straits, trying to figure out how to handle the challenge of reforming large, failing neighborhood high schools. That’s a very tough job when a school is expected to take virtually any student who walks through the door, from the one who is ready for accelerated classes to the student who wants to transfer in but has a transcript filled with F’s—and a bad attitude to boot.  

Part of the answer is to focus on serving the good students, the Tamouras of the world, first.

That idea will undoubtedly anger some reformers, who will view it as a call to abandon at-risk teens. It’s not. Society—not just schools—has to figure out how to help youth who are on the road to dropping out.  When students like Tamoura show up, they’ve already made a critical leap. They’re motivated to learn, and they need the adults around them to respond to that motivation.

For the neighborhood high school to survive, individually and as a larger concept, academics have to improve. Schools have to offer honors and Advanced Placement classes, for one. And teachers need students who, even if they aren’t quite ready for it, are at least motivated to tackle high school-level work.

Donald Fraynd, a former principal of Jones College Prep who now heads the CPS turnaround initiative, says that big neighborhood high schools still have a role to play in the district. The turnaround high schools are “getting better and better at catching students up,” with more students achieving higher-than-average growth in reading skills and recovering credits toward graduation.

These accomplishments are heartening signs that the turnaround program may, finally, put long-failing neighborhood high schools back on track. And they’re a sign that, while poverty and social ills can be significant barriers to learning, they are not insurmountable.

Chicago’s high schools still have a long way to go, although at Catalyst press time, a new report from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research showed that high schools are, in fact, doing better academically than many observers believed to be the case.

At Marshall, there’s another small but encouraging sign that academics are on an upward trajectory.

In her senior year, Tamoura finally started getting more than 15 minutes’ worth of daily homework.

But in digging deeper, there are significant security and privacy concerns that this decision raises that present real and potential dangers to the students, teachers and administrators in CPS.

Consider just two examples among many:

You are a student using the school-provided email service. Without logging off of your email account, you decide to click on a web browser to conduct research for a school report on birth control in developing countries. Without your express consent, the commercial provider of the email service collects and stores your search history and the content of your emails. Later, you are surprised - and mortified - when you receive a targeted pop-up advertisement for reproductive services.

Or consider a student who suddenly finds himself inundated with foreign-language emails and social media messages – some harmless, but some loaded with viruses that can destroy his computer – all because of a data breach on a server in a country temporarily storing that student’s supposedly secure data.

These scenarios aren’t far-fetched. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff recently warned of the threat of off-shore cloud data breaches that poorly-secured cloud hosting can make more likely. Breaches like this can happen when school districts outsource their data and related services to cloud computing companies, particularly cloud companies that focus on monetizing user data for advertising purposes.

Cloud vendors need tough vetting

There are tremendous benefits to cloud computing, not the least of which is that it promises significant savings to cash-strapped districts by allowing them to outsource their email services, data storage and collaboration technologies. Doing this cuts district costs for servers, hardware, software and technology support and permits them to invest more in key priorities like teacher salaries.

But districts moving to the cloud, like CPS, must insist on the proven security and privacy provisions that most private-sector cloud customers demand. Security risks, already visible in an Internet-connected world, are magnified in the cloud. One issue is that school employees – hired and overseen by school administrators – will no longer control school data. Cloud computing vendor employees will have access to children’s field trip photos, parent-teacher email exchanges, student and teacher dates of birth and social security numbers, and on and on. And sometimes, these employees may make use of sensitive data for their own purposes, as occurred in 2010 when a Google employee was reportedly fired for accessing a minor’s call logs, chat transcripts and contact lists.

While employee malfeasance is also a risk with school-based databases, the loss of control over those who manage school data in the cloud is a security wrinkle that schools must address. Before moving to the cloud, districts should ask cloud vendors several questions, including: Will student data be stored in countries with lower privacy requirements than the U.S.? What information is mined by advertisers? How are employees of cloud vendors with access to student data vetted and supervised? Will all information that a student flows through a third-party vendor’s platform be unavailable to advertisers? Hopefully, CPS asked these questions when choosing their cloud vendor. If they were not asked, we have to ask ourselves, why not? Our children’s privacy and data is at stake.

Privacy issues that do not arise in school-based server environments can quickly become apparent when schools resort to the cloud. In particular, cloud vendors’ mining of school data for commercial purposes can be a very unwelcome intrusion for students, parents and educators alike. Schools should demand assurances from cloud vendors that school information stored in the cloud will not be data-mined, used for targeted advertising or sold to third parties. While schools can never be sheltered entirely from commercial ads, they should not become marketing free-fire zones simply because they have opted to embrace cloud computing technology.

There are clear advantages when districts migrate to the cloud, with cost savings being a significant impetus. However, schools should not ignore new and more complicated data security and privacy issues presented by this appealing data management option. When making vendor choices, however, there is no free lunch. What is not paid for in dollars is instead paid for using the currency of our children's private information. Do we really want to trade our children's private lives for cheap email?  

Jon Bernstein is the president and founder of The Bernstein Strategy Group, a Washington, D.C.-based education technology consultancy.

The problem is this: Somewhere in the process of maintaining “balance” and instituting the “Census Tract/Tier System” based on neighborhood economics, higher-achieving, lower-income minorities like my daughter are being shortchanged.

We are not a family of means, but instead live in affordable housing. We are, however, a family who values academics and a family in which all three minority children are excellent standardized test-takers. Our oldest has been on the honor roll for eight years. For this, we have been shown the door by CPS’ new policies and the Office of Access and Enrollment.

We applied only to the top four selective enrollment schools--Northside, Payton, Young, and Jones--because the academic and social climate in these schools is more in line with what my daughter’s needs are.  We chose not to apply to other selective enrollment, magnet and charter high schools for a number of reasons. Some schools have a plethora of social issues we would rather avoid. Other schools have lower test scores, or embellished standardized test rankings. In addition, most of the other schools are not in a reasonable travel distance from our home.

Because we live in a higher-income census tract, my daughter would have had to score a perfect 900 to even be considered at Whitney Young, Walter Payton or Northside Prep. She scored an 857, so her only option was to apply for principal discretion--and be rejected again.

Our neighborhood high school is Wells. There have been issues with violence, gangs, drugs and academics at the school, well before we were even aware of its existence. My belief is that schools should be safe and conducive to learning. I don’t want to do a disservice to my daughter by putting her life and/or safety at-risk in an underperforming school. She is a fan of musician Yann Tiersen, classical piano and literature, and is an Asian culture enthusiast. She’s also a bit immature for 13. Wells High School would literally eat her alive!

I think the use of a single application would definitely streamline the application process--for central office application processors and not necessarily families. For instance, will a second or third choice rank-ordered school reject qualified students who didn’t select them as top choice?

Also, students now can only apply to one school for principal discretion—what happens with that process? There is supposed to be “transparency,” but there are just too many question marks.

I do not believe there is anything equitable about a process that drives students like test-taking workhorses. My daughter rose to the challenge, performed well and helped to boost CPS’ test scores during her years in elementary school. She now happens to live in Tier 4, but also be a minority from a family of very modest means. For this, she’s been shown the door.

Zarinah Ali

As reporting for this issue of Catalyst In Depth unfolded, a telling statistic emerged (shown in the accompanying graphic). Its point: Racial disparity in CPS reaches down even into small-scale programs that fly under the radar.

In this case, the disparity is in the district’s program for placing children with more severe disabilities in private, therapeutic day schools, designed to provide optimal support for learning. These schools are expensive, and placements in them have plummeted from about 3,000 children in 2000 to just 850 now.

Advocates and lawyers for the disabled say that children who should be in day schools can only get placements from CPS if parents have the money to hire a lawyer to fight the battle. As the data show, white children have the best odds, Latino children the worst.

There’s another issue with placements: whether and how CPS pays for them. Part of the district’s special education block grant is meant to pay for day schools, but advocates say CPS banks part of that money. It’s easy to see why advocates are suspicious. This year, the district got $86 million for therapeutic schools, but even at the high end of the scale, $32,000 per student, that adds up to just $27 million for 850 children. CPS says part of the money is being spent on better classrooms and services inside the district for children with severe disabilities, but advocates don’t buy that either.

Finally, what about the money that is being spent? CPS pays day schools a lower per-pupil rate—$28,000 to $32,000—than the state’s rate of $38,000, which other school districts must pay.

In exchange for day schools agreeing to a lower rate, CPS pays “regardless of attendance or enrollment.” Where’s the accountability here?

There’s a fiscally responsible and credibility-enhancing solution at hand. Make CPS account for its special education spending, just as other districts do. Start with legislation proposed in Springfield to require CPS to testify every year about its budget in order to be eligible for block grants. The bill, HB3871, is now stuck in the Rules Committee, where legislation goes to die. But the concept is still alive and well in the Capitol. Stay tuned.

Charter schools have become part of the equation for special needs students. On paper, the charter philosophy of innovation and freedom seems tailor-made for creating and implementing new practices for special education students. But reality isn’t that clear-cut.

Charters usually have their own codes of conduct and place strong emphasis on discipline, and children with behavioral problems may find it hard to fit the mold. Special education advocates say that charters sometimes—subtly or not so subtly—dissuade parents from enrolling their children with special needs, or push them out when they can’t conform. At a symposium last year, CPS officials basically told charters they needed to get their act together regarding special education students.

As part of a charter-district compact now in the works, charters are seeking more money to educate children with special needs. But any change in funding should come with a new requirement to give some measure of neighborhood preference in enrollment. Community pressure has already won neighborhood preference at some charters. That should be the standard for all.

With all the angst and mistrust of charters in Chicago, what better way to reinforce the idea that they’re truly public schools, open to all—including children with special needs?

*        *        *

Catalyst Chicago has won two awards in the prestigious national contest held by the Education Writers Association. Associate Editor Rebecca Harris won for her beat reporting on early childhood education, including the Summer 2011 issue of Catalyst In Depth, “The ABCs of Kindergarten.”  Deputy Editor Sarah Karp won for the Fall 2011 issue of Catalyst In Depth, “The Right Move?” on Marshall High’s first year as a turnaround school.

Every issue takes intensive work, including data analysis and on-the-ground, inside-schools reporting. But as these awards show, the end result is high-quality reporting and stories you won’t find anywhere else. If you value our reporting, in print and online, help support us by becoming a member. To learn more, go to www.catalyst-chicago.org/membership.

 As a member of Congress, I advocated strongly for the inclusion of detailed discipline questions within the recently-released Civil Rights Data Collection, a sample of schools by the Office of Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Education.  Given the revelation of the Noble Street fees, I examined the data to better understand Noble Street's discipline policies. 

I found that in 2009:

• Noble Street suspended 51 percent of its students out of school at least once – almost 3 times the 18 percent rate of Chicago Public Schools (CPS). 

• Although Noble Street has a lower percentage of African American students than CPS – only 30 percent in the sample – 53 percent of students suspended at least once were African American.  Moreover, nearly all African American students – 88 percent– were suspended out of school at least once, compared to only about one-third of African American students in CPS.

• Noble Street suspended out of school 68 percent of its students with disabilities and 48 percent of its students without disabilities, compared to the respective CPS rates of 38 percent and 15 percent.

These statistics clearly demonstrate a striking, systemic problem with the Noble Street discipline practices. Student misbehavior cannot justify these numbers. 

Multiple studies question the effectiveness of punitive school discipline policies that mete out severe penalties for minor infractions, like Noble Street’s.  The research is clear that “get tough” approaches to discipline exacerbate academic difficulties for students, increase bad behavior, and fail to address underlying issues that lead to behavioral infractions. 

Multiple policies could help address the systemic discipline problems at Noble Street and other schools.  At the local level, CPS should closely scrutinize the discipline policies at its schools and integrate such issues into its charter renewal policies. I am pleased that Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard has affirmed his dedication to engaging students in developing positive behavior and reducing suspensions and other actions that remove students from the classroom and reduce learning. 

At the state level, the Illinois State Board of Education should include discipline within the state longitudinal data set. At the federal level, I will continue to push legislation to make schools safer, more-effective learning environments for students by promoting school-wide, evidence-based approaches to address discipline and improve school safety – approaches collectively known as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. 

I agree with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who said that education is this generation’s civil rights issue.  Understanding the nature of discipline used and whether schools disproportionately discipline certain groups of students and reduce their learning time is critical to understanding if we are providing equal access to education.  I trust that Chicago Public Schools, the mayor of Chicago, and the Illinois State Board of Education will take steps to ensure that Noble Street and all CPS schools meet this requirement.

U.S Congressman Danny K. Davis represents the 7^th District of Illinois.

The Charlotte Danielson Framework, a method now used by districts across the country and that has been piloted in CPS, provides a venue for both of those duties to be fulfilled simultaneously.  As a principal and evaluator of teacher practice for the past eight years within CPS, I have had the privilege of utilizing several methods of teacher evaluation, with a focus on improving teacher practice.  I must say that Danielson, although intricate and requiring a big time commitment, does indeed focus on improving practice through evaluation. 

The domains--Planning and Preparation, Classroom Environment, Instruction, and Professional Responsibilities--cover the vast array of components needed to ensure quality teaching and learning.  A teacher’s knowledge of instructional content, his/her ability to manage behavior and deliver instruction as well as participate as a professional with colleagues and community is addressed. 

Teachers and administrators meet together to discuss teacher practice and set goals for improvement along with plans of actions that stimulate motivation on the part of the teacher and support on the part of the administrator.  The principal creates a safe environment for the teacher that is consistent and confidential therefore building trust, this is important as most teachers view evaluation as punitive.

Collaboratively, work is done to improve and build teacher practice where needed.  The administrator shows his/her commitment to learning by working with the teacher while the teacher builds his/her practice.

The administrator makes sure that the BIG ideas are understood so that teachers fully understand the vision, goal, and work required to be successful.

Does Danielson improve all teacher practice?   Of course not, as no method does.  However, in cases where teacher practice does not improve, the administrator along with the teacher is able to see clear concise evidence of plans made and support given to assist the teacher before other measures are taken.

The Danielson method is, in my opinion, a valuable tool to use for teacher evaluation.  It has the potential to "build" teachers as well as help those who may need possible "career change" to see their way clearly to do so.

Ultimately, this will improve the lives and the education of our students.

Principal Lauren Norwood

Doolittle Elementary, CPS

The thing is, that quote doesn’t come from recent work on the Common Core.  It comes from A Nation at Risk, the document that launched the standards and accountability movement close to 30 years ago.  Thirty years earlier, the same critique launched the curricular reforms of the 1960’s and before that, spawned the Progressive Era of John Dewey.   

We’ve been agreeing about this problem for quite a while.  But we’re still not very good at teaching all or most of our students “the higher-order intellectual skills we should expect of them.”  

What are we missing?

The Common Core is all about deep understanding.  One way to think about deep understanding is that it’s mostly about adding more to what you already know. But the evidence from modern learning science points in a different direction: It says deeper understanding typically starts by letting go of something you already “know”  so you can reincorporate that knowledge into a deeper, more comprehensive system of explanation.

Consider this example.  Despite what all of us were taught in grade school, most of the American population still believes that temperatures get warmer in summer because the Earth moves closer to the sun.  That’s a good guess, but bad science.  One explanation for why we keep getting this one wrong is that most of us aren’t very smart.  A better explanation is that common sense and intuition always trump formal knowledge until there’s a compelling reason to let intuition go.

How does all this relate to the Common Core?  For generations, our intuitions have told us that “teaching the curriculum” is mostly about adding skills and information, and filling in gaps left by holes in prior experience. Over the last two decades, the standards and accountability movement has doubled down on those intuitions, first by formalizing them into massive constellations of standards and performance indicators, and second by pairing those constellations up with equally massive systems of commercially-developed assessments.  

So we trusted our intuition, we doubled down our bet, and we lost. Now we have a choice.  Do we double down again, or do we let go of some comfortable intuitions and start putting our money on a different horse? 

Rethinking our intuitions

Here are four familiar intuitions that we need to confront which are deeply reinforced by existing approaches to assessment.  If we don’t find a way to get past them, they’ll kill the Common Core.

Intuition #1:  Mastery of skills and procedures is the main show

James Stigler, James Hiebert and their international research team have spent over 15 years reviewing thousands of hours of videotaped instruction from around the world as part of the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS).  One of their most unexpected findings was that teaching is more of a “cultural activity” than an individual one. They found that underlying patterns in the way people teach are very different from one country to the next, but are remarkably similar within countries. 

The pattern that Stigler and Hiebert found in every single American classroom they studied was that teachers spent large amounts of time reviewing material and practicing mathematical procedures without expecting students to grasp the underlying concepts on which skills and procedures were based. 

By contrast, teaching strategies in every one of the world’s higher-achieving countries regularly engaged students in active struggle with core mathematics concepts and procedures.  Teachers in some high-achieving countries might lecture while teachers in others might focus more on group problem-solving.  The technique wasn’t the key.  The key was regularly engaging students in active struggle with core mathematics concepts and procedures.

Intuition #2:  Commercial test design is objective, precise and scientific

The American bias toward teaching skills and procedures in ways that are divorced from conceptual underpinnings is a familiar target of progressive reform.  A major irony of No Child Left Behind is that, far from confronting this bias, NCLB led us to write standards and report test results in ways that reinforced the bias more systematically than ever.

The process began when states and districts formalized standards by reducing them to lengthy lists of discrete skills and procedures. Then commercial publishers were contracted to produce testing systems that matched.  On its face, this approach seemed pretty straightforward. But test publishers knew they had a problem.  They knew that standardized tests are poorly designed to measure discrete skills and procedures. 

Publishers finessed this problem by sorting test questions into a small number of “content strands” that purport to measure mastery of specific standards.  They did that knowing full well that standardized test items almost always measure more than one standard at a time, and are less about specific skills than about students’ ability to handle different kinds of academic complexity. In the end, states and test publishers fulfilled their NCLB obligations by putting their stamp of approval on a deeply compromised reporting procedure that is at best ambiguous, and at worst downright misleading. So much for scientific precision.  

How this could have happened on a nationwide scale without someone blowing the whistle is not really clear.  What is clear is that both content strands on standardized tests, and the “know and be able to do” mantra from which they derive, reflect a skill-based mindset that is out of sync with modern learning science and runs contrary to the goals of the Common Core. 

An old adage in systems theory is that, “Your system, any system, is perfectly designed to produce the results you’re getting.”  In recent years, we’ve done a more perfect job of designing our system so that it reduces what we teach to discrete skills and procedures.  Without confronting that bias, we will continue to assess and report learning in ways that will doom the Common Core. 

Intuition #3:  The best way to improve assessment at scale is to do that job for teachers so that teachers have more time to “just teach”

Another powerful irony of No Child Left Behind is that the rise of outsourced assessment coincided with strong evidence from the research community that frequent, high-quality classroom assessment produces achievement gains that far exceed those of any other single intervention strategy.   “Inside the Black Box,” the now-classic study of classroom assessment practices, reported strong academic gains when frequent, high-quality classroom assessment was practiced.  At the top end of the range, these gains were roughly equivalent to the difference between overall averages on state and national tests, and the averages posted by our lowest-achieving schools.

Given what we know about the culture of American teaching and the power of high-quality classroom assessment, the troubling thing about current work on Common Core assessment is that we seem to be doubling down again on outsourcing, this time with tests that are being developed for teachers by the PARCC and SMARTER multi-state consortia.  We’re not hearing much yet about how these systems will help teachers learn more about classroom assessment practices like the ones described in “Inside the Black Box”. 

What would it take to improve local assessment at scale?   Finland confronted the problem in the 1970s and 80s by investing deeply in teacher learning. A generation later, Finland vaulted from the middle of the pack to one of the highest-achieving nations in the world.  

During the same period, American schools invested heavily in externally-developed systems and tightened administrative oversight at the school and district level. In 2006, Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves assessed the impact of this approach in an article for Education Week called, “Data Driven to Distraction.” Their conclusion was that teachers were typically left with “little chance to consider how best to respond to the figures in front of them . . .  There are few considered, professional judgments . . . just simplistic solutions driven by the scores and the political pressures behind them.”

Intuition #4:  Standardized testing is inherently sterile and inauthentic

So why not just get rid of standardized assessment altogether?  Grant Wiggins, a longtime advocate of progressive curriculum and assessment reform and a vocal critic of rote teaching and learning, offered up some solid reasons in a recent article for Education Leadership called “Why We Should Stop Bashing State Tests.” 

In it, he writes that test-prep ‘teaching’ and test bashing both have it wrong.  Why?  His analysis of released test items from Massachusetts, Florida and Ohio shows that “. . . the test items that our students do most poorly on demand interpretation and transfer, not rote learning and recall.  Better teaching and (especially) better local testing would raise state test scores.”

The surprising implication of Wiggins’ analysis is that standardized testing doesn’t have to be the Darth Vader of school reform.  Released test items and full reports of student responses can actually deepen the way we think about teaching and learning in ways that other forms of assessment cannot.  They can also give us better insights about how to improve local assessment practices in ways that directly support the goals of the Common Core. 

The Urban Education Leadership Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago has been working at this kind of reporting for a number of years now.  The result has been a growing range of protocols that are designed to help grade-, department-, and school-level learning teams get a clearer picture of where students are getting stuck and why.  Rather than producing laundry lists of discrete skills that need to be remediated, these protocols help teachers identify patterns of thinking and forms of academic complexity that stump students. 

Rather than producing pre-packaged sets of answers about who-should-be-taught-what-tomorrow-morning, the aim of these protocols is to support collective analysis and adult learning.  The purpose of that learning is to produce more thoughtful and challenging assignments  that can only be created by classroom teachers and collaborative teacher teams.

Better thinking about assessment

In School Reform from the Inside-Out, Richard Elmore writes that, “Improvement at scale is largely a property of organizations, not the pre-existing traits of the individuals who work in them.”  One key property that supports improvement at scale is information systems that foster adult collaboration and accelerate adult learning.  In most American schools, systems like that are still in short supply.   

Teachers and students both learn best when they can depend on frequent, high-quality feedback about the work they do. For the most part, the feedback we’re getting from outsourced assessment systems is poorly designed to improve either student or adult learning and does not support the goals of the Common Core.  This problem has less to do with assessments themselves than with how assessment results are reported. Reporting that emphasizes mastery of discrete skills works against Common Core goals by steering attention away from more complex aspects of teaching and learning.  Reporting that pre-packages results for teachers denies teachers access to more nuanced aspects of student thinking that hold the key to deeper learning.

Common Core standards pose the most fundamental challenge to the culture of American teaching since the Progressive Era of John Dewey.  To succeed where Dewey and others have failed, we need to build coordinated systems of local and external assessment that work together to support ambitious learning by students and adults. 

Insisting on more thoughtful reporting of state and district assessments will be an important first step toward scaling up improvement of local assessment, where the pay-offs can be huge and where the potential for improvement is enormous. 

Paul Zavitkovsky is a former CPS principal and currently works as a leadership coach and assessment specialist at UIC’s Urban Education Leadership Program.

As the principal, I’m the person teachers go to when they have a question. I’m also the person they go to when they have an idea. So when Chris Hennessy, the physical education and health teacher, told me that it was obvious I had too much to do and he was willing to take over some of my workload, I was thrilled to have the help. His leadership has proved invaluable.

We tend to think of our schools as places where roles are well defined, jobs well divided. Administrators administrate, teachers teach, students study.

That division of labor may have been good enough in decades past.

The problem is, these days, too many of our students are not learning, or at least not learning enough. And adults within our schools can no longer be content resting comfortably within their narrowly-defined titles, doing just their jobs.

In recent years, Illinois has joined a growing number of states around the country in passing strong education reforms that are intended to help administrators and teachers do their jobs better. The state is ramping up more meaningful teacher and administrator evaluations. It’s changing the way teachers are hired and fired, and the way that principals are prepared. All of these are positive changes.

But in order for these reforms to bring real-world results, we have to change how teachers work.

I’m part of a group of about 20 award-winning educators that Advance Illinois has brought together from around the state to think about that change. As a member of their Educator Advisory Council, I’ve had the chance to delve more deeply into how best to improve the teaching and learning that goes on in our classrooms.

And in our recently released report, “Transforming Teacher Work,” we talk about how to ensure we attract the best minds to teaching, and give those teachers the opportunities to use all of their talents to help our students.

We have to start by ensuring that teachers have the time and space to collaborate. One of the things I learned in my 11 years as a classroom teacher is that teachers are great hoarders. We never think there’s going to be enough, so we hoard everything – paper, dry erase markers, crayons. We also hoard ideas. We hoard experiences. But the teacher next door might benefit from hearing about, and learning from, our ideas and experiences. So we have to find a way to give teachers more time to talk to each other, and to use each other as resources.

Amanda Bernacki and Kelly Lane, my two 4^th-grade teachers, are spearheading our move to the Common Core curriculum. Their lesson plans are phenomenal. We go back and forth about what sounds right and what doesn’t, what we should do and what we shouldn’t do. And because they know that I’m committed to their work as well, they’re not afraid to take that risk.

Another teacher, Monica Sims, is so energetic, committed and decorated that her list of awards could easily fill up this entire page. My job is to find a way to allow her to remain in the classroom, while also ensuring she has opportunities for leadership.

This is what professional development should look like. Not all opportunities have to be formalized; a workshop or training is not the only way. While those opportunities can be invaluable, so is the informal give and take that happens in my school.

By transforming teacher work, we can give all teachers the green light to take initiative, and work toward making their schools better for our kids. Just like Chris Hennessy has done.

Cheryl D. Watkins is principal of Pershing West Middle School and is a member of the Advance Illinois Board of Directors.

While the candidates spar on the public stage, Chicago Public Schools students participate in their own, intense debates through the Chicago Debate League, a joint program run by CPS and its nonprofit partner, the Chicago Debate Commission. Nearly 1,500 students—most of them low-income students of color—are debating this year through the League.  The students’ contests are characterized by evidence-based argumentation, detailed policy analysis and direct refutation of their opponents’ policy positions.   To prepare, debaters spend an average of 440 hours of out-of-school time researching and reading source materials to gather evidence, using the evidence to develop cases and rebuttals, and building argumentation skills.  Their topics are complex.  This year, students are debating topics in U.S. space policy.  Next year, they’ll debate transportation infrastructure issues.  Other recent topics have included military policy, poverty and the economy. 

The interest in debate in the political sphere parallels an emerging interest within the education reform community in the very components that define competitive policy debate as practiced in the League—making arguments, engaging with other arguments, and using evidence.  Education experts increasingly acknowledge that these skills have substantial academic value, and that participating in debate motivates students to develop these academic skills. 

The Common Core State Standards, which CPS will implement in some schools next year and across the system in 2013-14, provide a striking endorsement of the educational power of debate.   Throughout the Common Core are assertions of the educational importance of argumentation, engaging multiple points of view, and the use and analysis of textual evidence.  The Common Core devotes an entire appendix to the subject—Appendix A, which is titled “The Special Place of Argument in the Standards.”  There, the authors observe that the Common Core places “particular emphasis on students’ ability to write sound arguments on substantive issues, as this ability is critical to college and career readiness.”  They quote Gerald Graff, English and Education Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an author of several influential books on argument and education, stating that “argument literacy” is fundamental to being educated.   The university is largely an ‘argument culture,’ and therefore K-12 schooling should highlight controversial issues so that students become “adept at understanding and engaging in argument (both oral and written) when they enter college.”

The education reform community’s recognition that the essential elements of academic debate should be made central throughout K-12 education is welcome news to leaders of academic debate in Chicago.  Since its inception in 1997, the Chicago Debate Commission has placed argument, engaging other views, and using and analyzing textual evidence at the center of our education reform project. 

The substantial and highly rigorous academic work in which student debaters engage results in powerful academic outcomes.  Two carefully controlled, peer-reviewed and recently published studies, in the Journal of Negro Education for October 2009 and in Educational Research and Reviews for September 5, 2011, both found that participating in the Chicago Debate League has a measurably substantial impact on students’ ACT scores, grades, and college-readiness.  The researchers note that their findings are “particularly relevant in light of the new Common Core State Standards . . . [which] focus on evidence-based argument and informational text mastery as critical language arts skills.” 

These results should inspire our city’s education leaders to replicate, expand, and indeed take to scale, the current competitive academic debate programming of the Chicago Debate League. 

But CPS could achieve even wider transformative results by incorporating many of the elements of academic debate into K-12 classrooms as part of the curricular redesign efforts currently underway to prepare CPS schools for the system-wide implementation of the Common Core.  In this approach, often called Curricular Debate, students in core subject areas (English, social science, science and even math) engage each other in evidence-based argumentation exercises in a wide range of formats. 

Curricular Debate is not simply aligned with the Common Core. It provides a direct route to moving students toward achieving the standards. Take as an example Reading Standard #1: “Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.”  In Curricular Debate units, students learn to determine what a text says, to summarize the ideas and information, to locate its main arguments and distinguish them from subordinate ones, and to support or question statements in the text while citing the text explicitly and accurately.

Speaking & Listening Standard #4 provides another apt example: “Present information, evidence, and reasoning in a clear and well-structured way appropriate to purpose and audience.” In Curricular Debate units, students learn to present information clearly and persuasively. They learn how to find information, assess and evaluate evidence and structure their analysis in the form of direct argument.   

Efforts to infuse debate into the curriculum have been underway for about five years in Chicago—with small projects pursued by the Chicago Debate Commission, and dozens of teachers from various schools conducting classroom debating units.  But now may be exactly the right time to coordinate these efforts and bring them to scale as cohesive, integrated parts of the regular Common Core aligned classroom curriculum.  The Chicago Debate Commission has developed an approach to bring the tools of debate into the classroom, leveraging a sterling track record in its work with competitive debate. We believe that wise and forward-thinking administrators will see the benefits of using debate skills as an efficient and engaging vehicle to help move teaching and learning in our public schools toward the Common Core. 

In short, then, the goal of teaching students the skills they need for college and life success  makes a strong case for expanding one of Chicago’s most performance-proven education programs. We urge CPS both to expand its support for the current competitive academic debate programming and to incorporate Curricular Debate in the curricular redesign efforts currently underway.  With resources dedicated to teaching the powerful skills of debate, CPS will be better positioned to become a national leader in successfully implementing the Common Core.   

Les Lynn is the founding director of the Chicago Debate League and of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues.  He is now the Director of Programming of the Chicago Debate Commission.

Edie Canter is the Executive Director of the Chicago Debate Commission.  Previously she was the Director of Development and Communications for Leadership Greater Chicago. 

These actions have generated a backlash among communities who feel excluded from the school action process.

We have seen this movie before. When the School Board votes on these actions at its February 22 meeting, it will only serve to highlight how much more needs to be done. That’s because any realistic appraisal of the scale of the facilities problem is lost amid the controversy over school closings. The problem will only get more difficult to solve the longer it is deferred.   

Most of Chicago’s schools were built when housing patterns and population densities were dramatically different, but the school system has never adjusted to our new reality. Unlike state and federal laws that require legislative bodies to reapportion seats and redraw districts every 10 years in response to demographic and other changes, there is no such requirement for school systems.  As a result, school districts are notoriously slow to adjust to demographic change until their balance sheets are bleeding red.  That is exactly where Chicago finds itself today, a result of compounded inaction over many, many years.   

Crucial decisions have been deferred

This challenge is the predictable result of years of policies that have never adjusted CPS’ capital inventory to the shifting reality of where students live. Consider the results from the 2010 census. Over the past decade, the city has lost more than 200,000 residents, a decline of 7% overall. This trend goes back generations and has led to a steady decline in school enrollment over that time.  Over the past 10 years, Chicago has lost approximately 40,000 students.  To put this number in context, the second-largest school district in Illinois, Elgin, has a total of 42,000 students. During this same 10-year period, Chicago has opened more than 100 new schools of various types. Many of these schools are performing admirably and serving students well, but they also serve to highlight the fact that Chicago is losing students while adding building capacity—hardly a recipe for maximizing efficiency when the district’s budget is stretched thin.

In the wake of this problem, one proposed solution is to close more buildings and consolidate enrollment among a smaller number of facilities. Given the fact that Chicago has dozens of K-8 grammar schools built for 1,000 students that currently enroll 100 or 200 or 300 students, this idea certainly seems appealing. 

But this approach ignores a basic reality: Although there are hundreds of underutilized school buildings in Chicago, they tend to be in neighborhoods where students no longer live.  A quick review of the census data reveals that population losses have been concentrated in certain areas of the city, mostly on the South and West sides, though a swath of census tracts on the far North Side also lost substantial population.  Because of these realities, CPS should adjust its facilities approach geographically so it is tailored to these changes. While closing buildings will produce some efficiency, it does nothing to relieve the overcrowding that exists in other neighborhoods.  The overcrowding problem is particularly acute in heavily Latino neighborhoods, predominantly on the Northwest and Southwest sides of our city.  These neighborhoods have too few buildings to accommodate the current student population. 

Those of us in the charter school sector frequently underestimate the scale of this challenge. While charter schools certainly have a right to advocate for access to public school buildings, something we at Illinois Network of Charter Schools have done, it is rarely that simple.  Every decision to close a school necessarily involves reassigning current students to other schools. In addition, school performance is not distributed evenly throughout the city, so even if CPS decided to be more aggressive in consolidating schools, finding better ones – the core goal of any consolidation program – would be difficult.  Meanwhile, approximately 60% of charter schools are located in private buildings, forcing them to divert scarce operational dollars to pay for facilities.

Budget doesn’t address facilities problem

Since the budget reflects the district’s priorities, it is always helpful to begin with the budget when discussing policy challenges. CPS currently spends $5.9 billion to educate the district’s 402,681 students, a figure that includes operational and capital expenses. Of this $5.9 billion, $790 million is dedicated to facilities expenses. Thus, CPS spends approximately $2,000 per pupil per year on facilities costs. The 2012 budget is notable in another respect: The FY12 budget is an overall reduction from last year, representing a departure in practice from the previous 10 years during which expenditures steadily increased (although the operating budget has increased from last year).  In 2005, the district’s operating budget, excluding facilities, was $4.2 billion.  By 2011, in an era of limited inflation, the operating budget was $5.6 billion, an increase of 25%.  During that same period, enrollment fell by more than 18,000 students.  Reflecting the same dynamic at play in the facilities arena, the district has done less with more. 

The budget takes a few tentative steps to reverse this trend, but it does little to address the core facilities problem.  A review of the district’s facilities plan reveals attempts to catch up with deferred maintenance and a footprint that is still too large for the current enrollment. To a degree unique among educational policy issues, facilities decisions are really financial decisions. By that measure, CPS’ current facilities choices merely delay the structural decisions that are ultimately needed. 

One only has to look at the current CPS facilities allocations to appreciate the challenge. The current allocation includes $96 million for Jones College Prep, an appropriation that would take the total cost of that high school to $120 million. CPS also plans to spend up to $75 million renovating Chicago Vocational and Career Academy, a high school with over 1,000 students.  Despite the substantial expenditure, CVCA is still substantially underenrolled. Given the current condition of CVCA and the fact that its roof and building envelope are apparently a safety hazard, such expenditures certainly seem necessary, but they avoid the more difficult question:  In an era of shrinking capital expenditures, where should the district spend its money for maximum benefit?  On an aging school built in 1940 that once housed more than 4,000 students but now has approximately 1,400?  Or on new facilities or strategic renovations more aligned with population density and project growth?  Add to this question the fact that CPS has 56 currently operational school buildings that were built before 1900 and it doesn’t take long to conclude that the district needs to take action on facilities sooner rather than later.

A Way Forward

In face of these challenges, what should be done?  First, the district should examine all current school facilities with three features in mind:  (1) current capacity; (2) condition of the building; and (3) academic performance. Using these three categories as a guide, it is not difficult to build a matrix to guide facilities decisions. For schools that are substantially under capacity and academically failing, the decision to consolidate, transform, or close depends substantially on the buidling’s condition.  Such a school in sound condition is an obvious target for restructuring of some sort.  Such a school in terrible condition, by contrast, would require substantial investments that might be better spent elsewhere.  Likewise, a school that is academically succeeding and underenrolled is an obvious target to accept students in a consolidation or realignment.

Second, the district should decide where new buildings need to be built to relieve overcrowding and should find efficient means to build those buildings.  The days of $120 million high schools will necessarily come to a close. School buildings are still substantially more expensive than comparable buildings in the same geographic area, suggesting inefficiencies in the building process.  There are great examples of adaptive reuse in Chicago where older buildings are renovated at a total cost of $10,000 per student.  Under that model, one can establish a 1,000 student high school with a 30+-year projected life span for a total cost of $10 million. In fact, it has already been done in Chicago.

Ultimately, a holistic school facilities solution is possible that includes consolidation, phasing in new school options, and expanding school facilities in targeted neighborhoods. This will free up additional operational dollars that can be directed to effective programs.  We should use new school options, including high-quality charter schools, co-location arrangements, and similar models to reduce overcrowding and provide an incentive to school operators to locate in areas where the need is greatest. 

Andrew Broy is president of the non-profit Illinois Network of Charter Schools.