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.

The investigation by Raise Your Hand Illinois also found that 44 percent of schools had one to two grades above the recommended limits, 21 percent had three to four grades above the recommended limits, and 11 percent had five or more grades above the recommended limits. According to a study by independent research from the Editorial Projects in Education, by 2010, all but 15 states had laws restricting the number of students that may be included in a general education classroom, in some or all grades.  Illinois was not one of the states to impose class size restrictions, however, the Apples to Apples data shows that CPS class size averages were significantly above the Illinois state average class size range of 20.9 – 22.9 students per class in grades K-8.

A chart compiled by Raise Your Hand is attached below. (Cassandra West, press release)

Attempting to quiet critics of its charter expansion plans, Chicago Public Schools officials say they will get tough with privately run charter schools that are failing academically this year and could shut down those that aren't making the grade. CPS is accused by the teachers union and others of failing to invest in those schools even as the number of charter schools grows. (Tribune)

Chicago Public Schools officials on Wednesday unanimously approved a healthier snack and beverage policy that bans the sale of items like Gatorade, energy drinks and whole milk at schools. (NBC Chicago)

Chicago Public Schools will save approximately a half-million dollars in its waste hauling contract following action taken by the Chicago Board of Education Wednesday. (Press release)

A group of parents and community leaders called on the district to offer more alternative educational options like charter campuses. About 50 parents, students and community leaders from the Austin, Lawndale, Englewood, Humboldt Park and Roseland neighborhoods huddled outside the CPS administration building Tuesday evening, bringing attention to failing Chicago schools and asking district officials to replicate the successful ones. (Medill Reports)

IN THE NATION

Admission to one Baltimore public high school depends on whether students have done something so serious a regular district school won't have them anymore: assaulting classmates or staff members, possessing or distributing drugs, or wielding weapons. (Education Week)

Las Vegas, Tampa, and Dallas showed the fastest growth among districts where charter enrollment tops 10 percent, a study says. And, New Orleans public schools still have the highest “market share” of student enrollment in charters, according to the report from the Washington-based National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. (Education Week)

New findings show that money troubles interfere with the academic performance of about one-third of all college students, who report finances as a major source of stress. (The New York Times)

 The rating system casts a much more troubling light on high schools, with half of traditional CPS high schools given the worst rating. CPS has ratings for only 14 of about 40 charter high schools, but of those, 57 percent were given the lowest rating. (CPS officials say they are still collecting data from some charters and will provide updated data once the information is complete.) 

“What happened before, that made [one of the characters] think that?” Carrillo asks. “¿Qué pasó antes en el libro?”
Carrillo, who’s teaching a lesson on inferences, has written the definition of the word on the overhead, with a formula—in English and Spanish—for drawing inferences by combining what the text states with their prior knowledge.

The class uses a mix of English and Spanish editions of the book. Carrillo explains that she needs to use both versions because her students’ literacy skills vary widely. Her biggest challenge: students who are “not literate, really, in English or Spanish.”

Carrillo’s class at Sawyer Elementary illustrates one of the challenges to educating English-language learners: ensuring that students become literate in their native language—something that experts say is important for their success in English and other subjects—and learn sufficient English skills before they enter the middle grades, a critical transition point because of the increasingly difficult academic content that students are expected to master in English.

While CPS’ bilingual programs have fallen short in quality, most English-language learners do make the leap out of bilingual education by the 3rd grade. But of the nearly 64,000 bilingual students in CPS, 12 percent—about 7,400—are in the middle grades and have been in bilingual education since their early school years. (A small number of these middle-grades students are new immigrants.)

Research shows that these long-term bilingual students are more likely to fall behind their peers in high school.
Julia Gwynne, who is working on a study of English-language learners for the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, says that Latino students who are long-term English-language learners—those who were placed in the program before 6th grade and were still in it in 9th grade—have worse odds of succeeding in high school compared to their peers who transitioned out several years earlier.

“They have the lowest course grades, highest number of course failures, the highest number of absences, and the lowest on-track rates,” Gwynne says. The absences add up to nearly two weeks of school per semester.

These students are also more likely to be in special education, according to state data. (Nationally, the Working Group on ELL Policy, a group of well-known bilingual education researchers, noted that some districts over-identify bilingual students for special education services, while others tend to under-identify them.)

Many schools nationwide lack the resources to teach these students, including teachers with the right training. In California, bilingual teachers are more likely to lack full teaching credentials, according to the WestEd report “What Are We Doing to Middle School English Learners?”

If current trends in population and achievement continue, up to one-quarter of all U.S. students  may fail to become proficient enough in English to succeed in school before they graduate—or worse, drop out—of high school, says Arizona State University bilingual education expert Eugene García, who is vice president for education partnerships at the school.

At Sawyer, a handful of students in each of Carrillo’s five 7th-grade classes are still in the bilingual program; the rest are former English learners and general education students. But Carrillo points out that her bilingual education coursework did little to help prepare her to teach them. The classes focused mostly on the philosophy and theory of bilingual education, and not enough on practical teaching strategies.

“You have so many different challenges with students—some of them coming in at different ages and with different background knowledge,” Carrillo says.

Bilingual teacher Nina Garcia says it’s a constant challenge to find Spanish-language materials that are at the appropriate level for middle-grades students. “A lot of stuff, we have to look online ourselves [to find],” she says. “More resources, listening centers—we have to write our own grants to get those things.”

Many middle-schoolers struggle because they did not develop adequate literacy skills in their primary language. This can happen when principals and administrators don’t understand language acquisition or the value of bilingual education, says Judy Yturriago, who directed Evanston’s bilingual and early childhood programs for five years and is the president of the Illinois Association for Multilingual Multicultural Education.  

One principal who swears by increased native-language instruction is Peck Elementary’s Okab Hassan, who says switching from English immersion to native language instruction has helped turn around the school’s test scores. (Peck rates at Level 1 on the CPS performance policy.)

“If we build that foundation, the learning process just gets rolling,” explains Angel Aguirre, the school’s bilingual lead teacher. “[Where] fidelity to the program is there, it’s working.”

However, a few of Peck’s middle-grades bilingual students—many of them in special education—still need extra help. But the overcrowded school, which has 1,600 students, lacks adequate space for pull-out instruction and must accommodate students in hallways and closets.

Fourth-grade teacher Christine Benson, a Chicago Teaching Fellows member who works at Patrick Henry Elementary, says that she sometimes sees her students caught between two languages—not fluent in either.
“Fourth grade is sort of their last shot at having true bilingual support,” she notes. “The problem is it’s difficult to even use Spanish instruction because a lot of them don’t have the academic language in English [and] don’t have it in Spanish either.”

For instance, during a recent lesson, not only did many students lack academic vocabulary words like “patella,” several did not even know the word “knee” in Spanish. Such a scenario can set students up for disaster as they head into the middle grades with language skills that are far below grade level.

Experts say there are two other keys: rigorous English instruction and strong academic content.

Otherwise, says Eugene García, vice president for education partnerships at Arizona State University, you end up with “students who haven’t acquired the academic content to do well in English, or even in Spanish. It’s going to take more resources.”

Summer school and extended school day opportunities, though expensive, can help such students catch up, he says. Even in these settings, challenging academics are key. “Don’t just re-do what you did in 6th grade,” he says.

García says that if students don’t become English-proficient in the middle grades, there is sometimes little that can be done to help them become proficient in academic English.

“Programs that serve the youngest kids are the most promising,” he says. “The only place we know we can eliminate the achievement gap is before kindergarten.”

Diane August, a researcher at the Center for Applied Linguistics, advocates having middle-grades teachers use both English and content area standards in their lesson designs, making sure to hit both at the same time.

For example: A lesson about the Gettysburg Address might need to include extra background knowledge on the U.S. Civil War (if students are new arrivals to the country). Students can read the address in both languages to pick out cognates, words that are similar in both English and Spanish. Margin notes can explain what the most challenging words mean. And teachers can provide students with fill-in-the-blank “sentence frames” to help them answer comprehension questions in complete sentences.

Jennifer Himmel, another researcher from the center, says that vocabulary can be a significant stumbling block in the middle grades.

Too often, teachers focus on highly technical words instead of more common academic words, the “connective tissue” of language. And once instruction has transitioned out of students’ native language, teachers may no longer point out cognates—words that are the same in Spanish and English—which are often a gateway to more advanced vocabulary.

What’s more, the level of vocabulary required increases greatly just as students hit 4th grade—which is often when instruction is transitioned from some native language and some English classes, to English only.

Cognizant of these issues, Edwards Elementary Principal Judith Sauri has embarked on an experiment: making all her school’s students, many of whom are current and former English-language learners, take Spanish foreign-language classes once they hit the middle grades.

It helps meet the requirements of the school’s International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program, and it also adds up to extra literacy time for her students.

“My kids are lost in 4th and 5th grade because there’s no Spanish,” Sauri says, including students who have tested out of the bilingual program. Bringing Spanish back in the middle grades helps them gain a foothold.

Illinois is one of only a few states to require that non-English-speaking students be taught in their native language, with an increasing percentage of instruction in English as students gain proficiency. But a proposal from a state task force would essentially ease the native-language requirement (see story on page 11).

In 2008, a state compliance audit found serious problems with CPS programs, sparking the district to push schools to incorporate more native-language instruction. (School districts are audited on a rotating basis; CPS was audited again in fall 2011 but those results are not yet available.)

Now, under the helm of CEO Jean-Claude Brizard, there are signs that the district will begin to push for a dual-language approach. It’s a strategy that is gaining traction across the country.

A dual-language program combines academic instruction in a student’s native language and in English, so students are taught in both languages, says Leo Gómez, a University of Texas-Pan American professor of bilingual-bicultural education who serves on the board of the National Association for Bilingual Education.

“Dual language eliminates debate on more English or less English with its focus on both,” Gómez explains. “That’s what’s happening more and more, as [school districts] seek answers to closing the academic gap.”

Students learn academics “and they have much more success as they continue in school,” he adds.

In California, a 1998 law that eliminated bilingual education and put the focus on English immersion has had negative results, with the achievement of English-language learners plummeting, says Gómez. Now the state is considering a dual-language strategy.

Texas has embraced it too, and now almost one of every two schools in the state has a dual-language program, he notes. Texas, along with New York and New Mexico, are leaders in adopting the model.

Many schools in Chicago are interested in dual language, according to CPS spokesman Frank Shuftan, and CPS is in the process of adopting official quality review criteria for dual-language programs, as well as a handbook, resource guides, and planning tools for new programs. “Many schools have expressed interest to explore this possibility, or have reached out to actively start the planning process,” he notes.

CPS is also encouraging schools to increase programs that help students develop their native language, because of “the positive academic, social and cultural benefits for students who maintain higher levels of language and literacy development in their first language while learning a second language,” Shuftan says.

Recent hiring is another sign of the shift. Olivia Mulcahy, previously in charge of dual-language programs, now heads the entire Department of Language and Cultural Education. And some of the 19 school networks have hired new bilingual instructional leaders, whose job is to restructure and improve programs.

High-quality dual-language programs will not spring up overnight at every school that enrolls ELL students. But the model could make headway with the biggest problem Carrillo encounters: students who are not literate in their native language or in English.

Carrillo explains that one contributing factor is the push, by some schools and teachers, to teach young children only in English before they know how to read or write in their native language—something that would not occur in a true dual-language program.

Gómez points out the social benefits of dual language. “We’re a country that values bilingualism. We just don’t know how to get there,” he says. “We require kids to take foreign language in high school, yet we have been focused on removing native language of children. As a country, we’re beginning to realize you develop a bilingual society through the educational system—and it must be an integrated process.”

Intern Lindsay Abbassian contributed to this report.

Tell us what you think. Leave a comment below, or email rharris@catalyst-chicago.org.

The map will help identify schools that lack art resources and add fuel to the argument that more resources are needed, according to organizers.

The map, known as ArtLook was released today by Ingenuity, Inc., a new organization that aims to coordinate different organizations’ arts education efforts around the city.

Among its findings: Schools with an art teacher on staff – which make up 88 percent of the district’s schools – are 12 times more likely than other schools to have ties with outside arts organizations, according to Paul Sznewajs, the group’s executive director. He also notes that schools on the city’s Near West Side and South Side have the fewest art partnerships.

With the longer school day on its way, Sznewajs’ group is collaborating with the CPS Office of Arts Education and reaching out to encourage them to set aside time for arts education, as well as discretionary money to hire arts teachers. On Tuesday, the group will participate in a webinar for principals about the longer school day. 

“What we’d like to see is a doubling of [arts] instructional minutes on a weekly basis in CPS,” Sznewajs says.

One goal of the map is to help existing organizations figure out how to work together and avoid duplicating services.

For instance, Sznewajs says, an organization providing music education for preschool through 3^rd-grade students could team up with a group in the same neighborhood that works with 4^th- through 8^th-graders.

The goal: “Fewer and fewer one-off partnerships,” he says, replaced by those that last “year in and year out.” Former Director of Arts Education David Roche noted in a 2007 Q&A with Catalyst Chicago that partnership programs have often been unstable, disappearing when principals or teachers leave a school.

The map will help arts education nonprofits figure out how to use their resources more effectively, says Jordan LaSalle, director of community programs at Urban Gateways, an arts organization whose programs serve 100,000 young people each year in the Chicago area.

“This helps show us the communities that are lacking the arts, and where other arts organizations are working,” LaSalle says. “Instead of providing redundant services, we can create partnerships with them or move to communities where we’re needed even more.”

Arts and critical thinking

Sznewajs says arts education is particularly important for developing students who can communicate, think critically, and collaborate with others.

Ingenuity, Inc.’s vision of arts education has four components: Making sure every school has at least one full-time arts instructor on staff; using the arts to connect with core subjects and deepen learning; providing students with the opportunity to learn a fine art; and offering out-of-school arts programs.

Right now, it’s not clear how many schools meet all four criteria. However, 82 percent of schools have at least one arts organization offering programs.

“We don’t know the depth of those programs,” Sznewajs says. “Arts partnership programs can come in many forms, some of those being a one-time or twice-a-year performance or field trip.”

Next, the group will analyze how many minutes of arts instruction students are getting per week, as well as what the depth of the arts programs is in each school. It will also create tools to help schools assess what their arts education needs are, and possibly connect with groups that could fill the gap.

Ingenuity Inc. formed in 2011 after 18 months of work by 400 people, including representatives of about 200 arts organizations – most of those working in the city – as well as CPS, foundations and parents. The project, known as Chicago Arts Learning Initiative, was inspired by similar efforts in Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Seattle.

That project is a continuation of efforts that began in summer 2006, when CPS – at the prompting of a collaborative of foundations, including the Chicago Community Trust – created an Office of Arts Education. Ingenuity, Inc.’s current funders include Boeing, the Chicago Community Trust, the Crown Family Philanthropies, the Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust, the Joyce Foundation, JP Morgan Chase, the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, the Milne Family Foundation, and the Polk Bros. Foundation.

But when parents trucked into the school last week to pick up first-quarter report cards, they got some sobering news from the district’s colorful new school progress report: Beidler is categorized as a mid-level school in terms of performance on state tests, but less than a quarter of students scored at or above grade level on a different, more rigorous test and only 7.5 percent of 8^th-graders met college readiness benchmarks.

For the past couple of months, the new Chicago Public Schools leadership has been doing its best to make it clear that, despite years of test score gains on the ISAT, students are far below the standards they need to reach to be ready for college and the workplace.

Now, the new school reports are giving parents their first glance at the discrepancy between the already-reported data from state tests and the newly-reported results from tougher tests that are aligned with national norms.

The new reports also give a glimpse into how schools might stack up on the new Common Core Standards and the tests that will accompany them.

The reports tell a story that observers might well expect: The really good schools still look pretty good, and the low-achieving schools still look bad.

 At schools considered the district’s “gems”-- mostly North Side magnet schools and selective enrollment elementary schools--the vast majority of students are meeting or performing well above the new standards. For example, at Sauganash Elementary School on the Far North Side, about 80 percent of students meet standards on the newly-reported tests. While that is not the 95 percent the school achieved on the ISAT, it is still notably better than other elementary schools.

In contrast, at Lawndale Elementary School, less than half of the students met standards on the ISAT and only 2 percent of 8th graders met college benchmarks on the Explore, a precursor to the ACT.    

Success stories fall short

But many schools considered success stories—those mostly low-income, mostly black and Latino schools where students are now mostly passing the ISAT—are still worlds away from preparing their students for college.

At schools where more than 80 percent of students are low-income and more than 80 percent of students met standards on the ISAT, less than half of students were at or above grade level on the new test and, on average, less than a third of eighth graders performed well on the EXPLORE. Schools with less than 40 percent low-income students who did well on the ISAT performed more than 20 percentage points better than these schools.

Beidler is one example of that. So, too, is Frazier International, a magnet school that celebrated a singular achievement: The school is 90 percent black and 90 percent low-income, and over 90 percent of its students met standards on the ISAT.

Yet only 30 percent of Frazier’s students are meeting college-readiness standards in 8^th grade.

Even elementary schools run by the Academy for Urban School Leadership, where CEO Jean-Claude Brizard went this summer to laud their improvement on the ISAT, look far different through the lens of new assessment.

At Morton School of Excellence Elementary, which posted a 25 percentage-point jump in students meeting standards, only seven percent of 8^th- graders are performing at a level that puts them on a trajectory to do well on the ACT.

Two different measures

Chief Education Officer Noemi Donoso says that the information from the ISAT and the new school progress reports are not meant to be compared. (They did not post any central database with the NWEA/Scantron scores; Catalyst manually entered them into a database.)

“They are two completely different sets of data,” she says. District officials also did not spend much time looking for any trends between the two, she adds.

However, Donoso admitted that there could be a downside to publishing different, and somewhat conflicting, performance measures on schools.

One indicator shown on the school progress report is the performance level as determined by the district, using ISAT test scores as well as other factors such as attendance.

District officials have said only schools at Level 3, the lowest level, will be considered for closing. However, some schools at Level 3 are performing better on the more rigorous test than some of those in the lower levels.

For example, Ryerson Elementary received a Level 1 designation, but only 10 percent of its 8^th-graders are meeting college readiness benchmarks on the Explore. Meanwhile, Lathop Elementary is at Level 3, yet a third of its 8^th-graders scored high enough to be considered college ready.

“It is no question that it is a challenge,” Donoso says. She hopes that parents can understand the distinction between results on the ISAT, which only measures the percentage of students who meet or exceed standards, vs. results from other tests that measure more rigorous college ready benchmarks.  

District officials have good reason for releasing the new progress reports, though. In just two years, the ISAT will disappear and be replaced with tests tied to the Common Core Standards. Most experts believe that test results will initially be noticeably worse.

Releasing test scores based on a more rigorous exam is meant to prepare parents and politicians for what is to come (and perhaps so that the new CPS leadership doesn’t get blamed for the plummet). As Donoso says, “We need a benchmark.”

Parents may overlook reports

But whether parents and others understand and heed the message of these school report cards is questionable. For one, at several elementary schools visited during Track E report card pick-up, the progress reports sat in a pile at the front desk. They were handed to parents with no explanation.

Also, there’s no comparison data anywhere on the report card, so it is difficult for parents to know where their school stands in relation to others.

Karen Smith, a grandmother who was picking up her granddaughter’s report card at Beidler, said she’s heard that neighborhood elementary schools are now performing better, but that news has never rung true for her. In her job at a nursing home, she says she runs across young people who are barely literate.

“I am telling you,” she said. “They can hardly write their name.”

But glancing at Beidler’s progress report, she shrugged at some of the low scores. What matters to her is how her granddaughter is doing, and that, she believes, is more her responsibility than the school’s. She shook her head. “It is my fault if she can’t read,” Smith said of her 5-year-old granddaughter. “She doesn’t focus as well as I would like.”

At Cather, also in East Garfield Park, the story was much the same. Cather received a Level 1 (the highest performance level possible), but on the more rigorous test, only a third of students are reading at grade level and a mere 5 percent of 8^th-graders met college readiness benchmarks.

One mother looked at the report and seemed puzzled. “Are 8^th-grade students supposed to meet college readiness benchmarks?” she asked.

Milton States, a dad who came to get his two daughters’ report cards, said he liked that CPS was trying to show parents that schools aren’t as good as they should be. “If these are the facts, then these are the facts and something has to change,” he said. “I don’t see nothing wrong with it.”

But at a Logan Square Neighborhood Association parent coordinator meeting, the organizers (all mothers) said they thought the school progress report was a poor way to communicate. Given to parents along with a stack of other information, many will overlook it at report card up time.

Further, few parents understand the distinction between the variety of tests, and many will be nonplussed at the discrepancies.

Reynalda Covarrubias, parent coordinator for Funston Elementary School in Logan Square, said teachers did take more time to talk with parents at report card pick up this year. But being told that the vast majority of students aren’t where they need to be doesn’t seem productive.

“Color ink is expensive,” she said. “Instead of spending money on printing this, why don’t they give us positions?” Covarrubias noted that Funston lost two teachers this year.

Leticia Barrera, part of the education team at LSNA, said that often CPS leaders think that publishing a school progress report such as this one is communicating effectively. But many times parents don’t understand or grasp the consequences of the information.

“They don’t know how to communicate with parents,” said Barrera. “Parents are often the last people to get the information and then they are told that they have to take responsibility for it.”     

However, the criteria – required by Illinois Senate Bill 630, which also mandates that any proposed closings be announced by Dec. 1 – do not apply to school turnarounds.

This year’s round of school actions will be the first to take place under the stringent requirements of the new facilities law. CPS is also required to draft a 10-year facilities plan and a 5-year capital improvements plan, with community input.

Any school that has been on the lowest level of the district’s performance policy (“Level 3”) for two consecutive years will be eligible, unless its graduation rate (for high schools) or percentage of students meeting state standards (for elementary schools) is above average in its geographic area. Schools that are in the top three-quarters of the district on the "trends and growth" section of the school report card will also be off the hook.

However, those that are in the process of phasing out can be targeted regardless of performance. And, any schools that are up to half a mile apart and don't offer all grades K-8 can be combined into a single school.

The guidelines are only a draft, and will be finalized after a 21-day public comment period.

The district’s actions will be guided by a “portfolio analysis” of its school seats, which has shown so far that 123,000 students attend low-performing schools.

At a presentation to the Chicago Board of Education on Wednesday, Chief Portfolio Officer Oliver Sicat argued that parents are “voting with their feet” and leaving low-performing schools, causing them to be underutilized to boot. Under-enrolled schools are an enormous resource drain at a time when the district faces projected budget deficits of $363 million next year, and $862 million in fiscal year 2014.

Officials pledge that when closings occur, receiving schools will get extra resources – such as arts and after-school programs, social-emotional learning supports, extra administrators, or school-based health clinics – to help with students' transition.

Nearly two-thirds of the children who would end up in Hamilton’s class had yet to show up for school. As they did, she quickly found herself struggling to corral about 40 kindergarteners.

When students came back from fall break on October 12 (Ashe is a Track E school and operates on a year-round calendar with frequent breaks instead of a three-month summer break), the class had been split into morning and afternoon sessions. Hamilton was frazzled. Parents who wanted a full-day kindergarten transferred their children to other schools. Other parents were left scrambling to find child care options. There were mix-ups: A couple of parents dropped off children for the wrong session at first, while others failed to pick up their children at the right time.

It was the second year in a row that this scenario had played out at Ashe, a predominantly black school in the Chatham neighborhood on the South Side. 

Two years ago, Ashe had one full-day kindergarten class, paid for with discretionary funds, and two half-day classes. But enrollment was on a downswing, and as a result, the district’s staffing formula would have required the school to create a split class in the upper grades. To avoid doing so, school administrators made a tough decision: shifting money from the full-day program to keep an extra teacher in the upper grades. 

“You are caught in between,” says Assistant Principal Jerome Ferrell Jr.

Ashe’s story illustrates one of the ways in which Chicago Public Schools falls short in providing children with a high-quality experience as they begin their first year of formal schooling: the uneven distribution of full-day kindergarten. Educators consider full-day kindergarten to be a critical piece of the puzzle in giving students a good foundation for learning. Latino students, in particular, are hard-hit by the inequity.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Unlike other big-city school districts, Chicago does not provide full-day kindergarten across the board, shortchanging some children as they make the transition to formal schooling. Latino students are most likely to be affected.
• Experts are placing more emphasis on the transition to kindergarten as a crucial point in children’s education. CPS is in the process of implementing an assessment system that provides information to kindergarten teachers about what their students know when they walk in the door.
• Developing literacy skills is a crucial goal of kindergarten, setting the foundation for children to learn to read fluently by 3rd grade. But high mobility is a problem in the district, and the wide range of literacy approaches used by schools could leave some children behind if they move from school to school.

The district does not have a policy to provide full-day kindergarten across the board, and the available data on kindergarten programs is sketchy and inaccurate. So it’s unclear exactly how many schools are in the same situation as Ashe. (CPS officials refused to provide a list showing which schools do not have full-day programs, and at press time, had not responded to Catalyst Chicago’s two-month-old Freedom of Information Act request.)

But compared to other big-city districts, it’s clear that Chicago is outside the norm: New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, among other cities, each provide full-day programs for all children. Meanwhile, advocacy organizations, such as the Foundation for Child Development, are calling for a new standard: mandatory, full-day kindergarten for all children.

The transition to kindergarten is rocky for CPS youngsters in other ways, too. The attendance rate is lower in kindergarten than in any other elementary grade, which also keeps students from realizing the full benefit of a good start to school.  Kindergarten teachers could make the transition easier, but they typically do not have critical information on children’s school readiness and family background, which would help them do so. (See stories on pages 8 and 12.)

For years, CPS has covered the cost of full-day kindergarten at 131 schools, most recently with help from federal stimulus money that will run out at the end of the fiscal year. But there is no way for schools with half-day classes, or schools that have been paying for full-day programs out of discretionary funds, to access the money.

The district’s practice dates back to two initiatives (one more than a decade old, and one from the years under former CEO Arne Duncan) that provided money to schools that, at the time, did not offer full-day or four-hour programs, says CPS kindergarten coordinator Joyce Davidson.

As a result, the kindergarten landscape is a hodgepodge. A Catalyst analysis of state and CPS data shows:

• Among the 131 schools that receive district funding for full-day programs, 18 have less than 50 percent low-income students. The list also includes 15 of the district’s 23 majority-white, higher-performing neighborhood and magnet elementary schools.
• Budget cuts and enrollment fluctuations have made it more difficult for schools that foot the bill for full-day kindergarten.
• The CPS website gives contradictory and out-of-date information about the number and school location of full-day classes in the district, according to calls by Catalyst to many of the schools.
• State data from fall 2007 for CPS show that Latino students were more than three times as likely as African-American students to be in half-day programs: 32 percent compared to 9 percent, respectively. Data for more recent years are inaccurate, indicating that every CPS student is in a full-day kindergarten program, which is not the case. (A state board spokeswoman said districts self-report the data.)

Among charter schools, full-day kindergarten is the standard, and it is a draw for parents. Outside fundraising often helps cover the cost.

“They do it because they think intervention in kindergarten is a valuable way to allocate resources and get students up to speed,” says Andrew Broy, the director of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools. “In Chicago especially, many [students] come without exposure to literacy and numeracy at least at some basic level.”

More time ensures that children get more exposure to new information, time to work with it and time to learn new strategies for applying their knowledge, says Brenda Eiland-Williford, director of program and curriculum at the Ounce of Prevention Fund’s Educare early childhood center. Educare is giving its preschool graduates who enroll as infants the opportunity to attend University of Chicago charter schools, which offer full-day kindergarten.

Research and assessment data show that, in particular, children from less affluent families “need more time to be involved in educational experiences,” Eiland-Williford says. “They don’t get it when they leave school.”

In fall 2009, administrators at Ashe initially planned to operate a full-day program. The teacher (not Hamilton) “felt like the students really needed full-day and would be cheated to have a half-day,” Ferrell notes. But the class ballooned to nearly 50 students—“It was unmanageable,” Ferrell recalls—and like this year, the school had to create two half-day sessions instead.

Pleas to central office for money to support a full-day program, from the school and from parents at School Board meetings, were unsuccessful.

Parent Paul Norman points out that children pay the price by “not getting a whole education.” Norman says the half-day class is tough on him too: He is a single father who works a night shift, and finds it impossible to sleep for more than a few hours at a stretch because he must drop off and pick up his daughter, Kahniyah, within a short time frame.

Another parent, Tiesha Walker, points out that the schedule makes it difficult to get to know other parents.  “As soon as they went to half-day, it was hard because [children have] different people picking them up and dropping them off.”

Walker lost touch with parents who stopped bringing their children to Ashe when the school went to half-day. She stayed, but had to find a child care provider who could watch her son and drop him off at school three days a week. Now she works from home, making the schedule more manageable. 

With a $700 million-plus budget deficit on the horizon and federal stimulus money running out, full-day programs paid for by the district may be in jeopardy. Among the schools that could lose out is Belding Elementary, a racially diverse school in Irving Park on the North Side.

Principal Heather Yutzy estimates that it would cost $40,000 to $45,000 a year to pick up the tab for one full-day class—and Belding has two. The money would have to come from the school’s Title I discretionary funds, which also cover teacher training and extra classroom materials. In a worst-case scenario, Yutzy says she’d try to foot the bill but is not sure she would be able cover it.

At Belding, 80 percent of children qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. While most CPS parents are lower-income or working-class and sorely in need of full-day kindergarten, Yutzy says some wealthier parents who have the option of staying home with children are less enthused about it.

The kindergarten students at Belding get plenty of literacy activity as well as time for “extras,” including Arabic instruction, art and physical education. They also have more time to develop social and emotional skills.

The daily schedule includes time for a class meeting; literacy activities focused on word structure and reading sight words; independent writing time; an hour for small-group reading instruction and reading centers, where students do small-group literacy activities like silent reading and working with magnetic letters to spell words; a read-aloud by the teacher; math and social studies; and “choose time,” when students can pick what they want to do.

On an unseasonably warm early-spring day, gym teacher Stacey Hale lets her students run wild around the playground. She explains that after the children finished a fitness walk around the block, the warm weather prompted her to give them some unstructured time outside and a break from the hula-hoop unit they’re working on in class.

“Everyone needs a breath of fresh air,” Hale says, showing the children how to use the playground’s zipline (a device that lets them zoom through the air holding on to a bar attached to a cord), offering them high-fives as they get ready to go down the slide, and hugging anyone who falls down. She gives a push to children on the swings, then responds to the cries of a scared boy who’s gotten stuck on top of the jungle gym.

One scene shows how children are developing critical social skills. A crying girl, being comforted by her friends, seeks shelter under the equipment. One boy loudly accuses another of hitting her. “You don’t hit a girl,” he says. “It was an accident,” the suspect insists.
Hale points out: “They are great listeners. They are really respectful of each other.”

Later, during Arabic instruction, the students learn an alphabet song and listen to their teacher read a folktale about Aladdin in English—in other words, extra literacy enrichment.

By later in the spring, they are following directions the teacher gives in Arabic, and they are beginning to learn to read in the language—matching characters with sounds to form words.

At Ashe Elementary, classes run just two and a half hours a day, not including time for meals. Students get an hour of gym, music and library up to three times a week, which means that on some days, there’s just 90 minutes left to cram in small-group reading instruction and math, as well as the occasional science and social studies lesson.

One fall morning a few weeks into the year, Hamilton has her students sit down for breakfast. “Quickly get a couple bites,” she tells the class. Some of the children gnaw on pears as if they are drumsticks.

“I’m going to call you by table so you can throw your trash away, whether we’re finished or not,” Hamilton says. “You have to come on time so you can get breakfast in. We have a lot to learn, and a lot to do.”

Besides time for extras, a full-day program would give Hamilton’s students more time for practice on basics such as paying attention in class. Plus, Hamilton would get more opportunity to reinforce her expectations through repetition.

“I have to put a lot of stock in my kids,” Hamilton says. “I’m not going to worry about what the parents are going to do. I’ve got to help the children help themselves. You just cannot tell them (once), and think they’re going to get it. They need a lot.”

Hamilton estimates that when breakfast, lunch and “specials” such as gym and music are taken out, her students get just seven hours a week of instruction—not more than a couple of days of teaching in a full-day class.

The lack of instruction time in a half day, coupled with weeks at the beginning of the year when the class size was too large, has put students behind where they would otherwise be, Hamilton says.

In mid-April, fewer than one-third of her students are working in the 1st-grade primer she uses to get students reading stories of four or five sentences in length. After a year of full-day kindergarten, Hamilton notes, all of them would be reading from the book.

Schools where more than 25 percent of students are English-language learners are more than three times as likely to lack a full-day kindergarten program as schools where fewer than 5 percent are English learners.

That statistic is troubling because of the proven benefit of full-day programs for these children. A study of ELL students in Los Angeles, published in March in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, found that by 2nd grade, those who attended full-day kindergarten were much less likely to be held back than those who went to half-day programs.

Reyna Hernandez, a research and policy associate at the Latino Policy Forum in Chicago, says that kindergarten—the “bridge” to the K-12 system—plays an important role for Latino students since many of them lack academic school readiness skills.

“To have such a large gap in offerings really is very troublesome,” Hernandez says. “It just compounds the problem.”

Many studies of preschool programs have found that the academic gains children make peter out by 2nd or 3rd grade. Full-day kindergarten could help prevent the loss.

“Transitioning from high-quality early childhood into high-quality K-3 really makes a difference,” Hernandez says. “If that’s not happening, we’re losing the effects we got earlier on.”

The same demographic forces that make it tough to provide enough preschool slots for Latino children are also at work when it comes to kindergarten, Hernandez says. “From 2000 to 2010, the Latino [student] population grew by 32.5 percent. It’s a question of where our schools are located,” she says.

The dearth of full-day kindergarten might even keep some families from enrolling their children at all, Hernandez theorizes—leaving children to enter 1st grade without any school experience.

One compromise is for schools to offer two four-hour kindergarten classes per day—not a full school day, but longer than a half-day program. Edwards Elementary Principal Judith Sauri says this solution has worked at her school in Archer Heights, where enrollment has ballooned to almost 1,500 students in recent years.

But many principals, according to Sauri, are reluctant to operate four-hour classes because the school building must remain open longer, incurring extra costs for administrative staff and security guards as well as longer hours for the principal.

Given the scarcity of preschool slots in Latino neighborhoods, Sauri points out that some principals already use kindergarten classrooms after the regular school day for so-called “third-shift” preschools—an option they would have to scrap.

Sauri is seeking permission from the district to use space at the mothballed Hearst Branch building for a full-day kindergarten. But she says the space may end up going to a charter school instead.

Lagging attendance is another problem in CPS kindergartens. Citywide, the kindergarten attendance rate last school year was 93.4 percent, lower than any other K-8 grade.

A number of principals contacted by Catalyst blamed half-day kindergarten programs for their attendance problems, saying a short day causes parents to devalue kindergarten and creates difficulties with transportation.

At dozens of schools, a substantial number of kindergarteners missed almost a month of school: 128 schools had at least one in five students miss 18 or more days—more than 10 percent of the year. Just 67 schools had that many 1st- graders miss that many days.

In comparison, national data show that one in 10 kindergarten and 1st-grade students are absent for at least 10 percent of the school year, says Phyllis Jordan, communications director at Attendance Works, a national advocacy organization.

The academic loss from absences is almost twice as large for low-income children compared to students from families with average incomes. One study found that high absenteeism in kindergarten can wipe out good preparation for school. Students who showed up with strong kindergarten readiness scores but then missed a lot of classes “weren’t doing much better than the kids who were not ready when they started kindergarten,” Jordan notes.

Both Ashe and Belding have struggled with attendance, with more than 40 percent of students missing 18 or more days of school in recent years.

At Track E schools like Ashe, school starts at the beginning of August—and students are far more likely to show up late and lose days, weeks or even months of time in school.

“There are many parents that, unfortunately, don’t even think about school before Labor Day,” notes Bonnie Roelle, the district’s Preschool for All coordinator. “There has to be more of a public awareness campaign.”

Kindergarten coordinator Joyce Davidson has tried to address the problem by encouraging schools to hold back-to-school registration events and put out flyers in the neighborhood.
Those efforts didn’t reach Paul Norman, whose daughter Kahniyah enrolled for the first time at Ashe in November.

“Every parent isn’t on top of things like they’re supposed to be,” says Norman, who initially planned to enroll Kahniyah at another school. “Her mom registered her late. I should have taken full responsibility, but I’m a full-time working father, and I’ve got two other kids.”
Norman says the district should do more to publicize the issue.

“You have some parents who have no money,” he said. “They’re not working, maybe they have a messed-up situation. You need to go around and tell them their child needs to go to school on such-and-such a date.”

At New Sullivan Elementary, where half of last year’s kindergarten students missed 18 or more days, Principal Kathy McCoy also points to factors outside school that affect attendance.

“You have some parents who have had some negative experiences in school, they are impacted by lack of jobs, lack of motivation,” says McCoy. “Unfortunately, [sending their children to school] was not a priority for them.”

McCoy says the situation has improved as kindergarten students moved up to 1st grade. She credits 1st-grade teachers who worked hard to connect with parents and provide an environment that children enjoy.

“Until we, as school communities, really begin to look at what’s impacting the whole child, you are going to continue to see a lot of under-performing schools,” she notes.

Sam Barnett contributed to this story.

Tell us what you think. Leave a comment below, or email rharris@catalyst-chicago.org.

“The noise level should be zero,” she says. “What does that mean?”

“Be quiet,” some students say.

“Ms. Campbell doesn’t say ‘Be quiet, no talking,’” she responds. “Rule number 6 says, ‘We will not talk when our teacher is talking.’”

Even more than academics, kindergarten is about learning the right behavior in school. For some teachers, teaching correct behavior means a heavy emphasis on strict discipline.

But the focus in the education world has shifted toward an approach similar to Campbell’s. Instead of admonishment and punishment, the emphasis is increasingly on strategies to prevent students from acting out in the first place. These strategies include teaching social and emotional skills that help children manage their emotions, make good decisions and calm themselves when they are upset.

Illinois is the only state that has comprehensive K-12 social-emotional learning standards, and experts say that it is best if students begin learning these skills early on.

In Chicago, several pilot programs have gotten off the ground. But full-scale implementation of social-emotional learning has been uneven. 

For urban teachers, it can be especially hard to make the transition away from punitive responses to unruly behavior, says Patty Horsch, a program manager at the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, known as CASEL. A Chicago-based national non-profit, the organization promotes the teaching of social and emotional skills in school to boost academic success.

Big-city schools sometimes have “a tendency to be more authoritarian about behavior,” Horsch says. “Teachers are in a very hard place. There’s such pressure to raise test scores and they have little help.”

An example that Horsch explains is counterproductive is a classroom behavior chart. Students have their names placed on cards, moving from green to yellow to red depending on how badly they behave. Horsch says the strategy is too public, embarrassing children rather than teaching them.

“I remember seeing a 3rd-grade teacher who never, at the end of the day, moved two little boys off of red because she knew they’d be [back] there by the beginning of the next day,” she says. “What does that say to a kid?”

Kindergarten is a good place to start learning self-discipline, self-awareness and how to understand others’ perspectives, Horsch says. 

At Belding, kindergarten teacher Leon Schrauben illustrates this notion. He understands that a highly regimented classroom is not always the best environment for active young children.

Teaching his students how to work and function in a group is more important, he says.

“They’re getting the idea that the world around them isn’t designed just for their needs. ‘It’s not necessarily about me, it’s about the group right now,’” Schrauben says.

One day, as other students work on a lesson, one boy makes robot-like sounds and whirls around before landing on his knees on the carpet. He does this two more times, running back and forth between the rug and his seat. Schrauben doesn’t yell at the boy or punish him. Instead, he lets him run off steam and keeps the other students on task by telling them to get to work.

But patience can be a tall order for anyone to maintain, especially an adult surrounded by more than two dozen 5-year-olds.

Campbell occasionally loses her cool, warning one boy that she’ll talk to his mother and telling a girl to close her mouth.

But even though the going is tough, she comes back to the social-emotional strategies she learned as a student teacher and from her peers. These strategies include coaching students who are fighting, instructing them to tell each other what they don’t like about a situation and working with them to understand their feelings.

On this day early in the year, Campbell sits the children down to read a poem about feelings.

She reads the poem out loud to them, then has a student read it.

Then she asks: “How do you think I feel right now?”

“Mad,” the students say. They look concerned.

“Mad and...” she prompts. The students guess “happy.”

“I’m not happy right now,” she says. “This makes me feel like the first day of school. I know we can get through this way better.”

Another practice that aims to teach social-emotional skills is a meeting at the end of each school day. Usually, it is a time for students to share “appreciations,” things others did that made them happy.

Today, Campbell uses the time to bring up the behavior issues again.

“No appreciations, because I need to talk,” she says. “Who can tell me what they think I’m talking about now?”

“Feelings,” a girl says.

“Now listen,” Campbell continues. “The morning, before you went to lunch, was fine. The afternoon, after you came back from recess, was terrible. It embarrasses me when I have to talk or yell at you. Not only was I embarrassed, I was angry.”

Campbell says that talking with students about feelings is a good way to teach them character while expanding their vocabulary. When students came in, she says, they only really used the words “happy” and “sad.” Now, they understand a much broader variety of emotions.

“If I forget to do it, at the end of the day, they will remind me to do appreciations,” she says. “They really took to that... ‘He held the door for me, he shared his crayons with me, he played outside with me, he helped me with my math.’”

By the end of the 2009-10 school year, more than 300 schools had made the switch under the Supported Core Reading Materials Adoption program.

Although it’s unclear how many more schools have chosen one of the programs since then, one fact is important to note: In a district with high student mobility, like Chicago, allowing schools wide discretion to pick their own reading programs could cause problems down the road and leave some children struggling to reach the most important goal they need to accomplish by 3rd grade: learning to read at grade level or above.

New Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard, a former teacher and principal, is keenly aware of the dilemma. In an interview with Catalyst Chicago, Brizard talked about the need to have a coordinated literacy curriculum because of high student mobility in the district.

 “When you have 15 approaches to literacy, that is when you get young people who don’t know how to read,” Brizard said. 

It’s also unclear how much children’s literacy skills are improving during kindergarten. Schools primarily measure kindergarten students’ literacy skills with the DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) assessment, which is administered several times throughout the year. But aggregate scores are not made public by the district and at press time, CPS had not responded to a two-month-old Freedom of Information Act request for school-by-school scores.

Complicating the scenario is the yearly budget crisis in CPS, which leaves an ever-dwindling pool of cash to pay for coaching to help teachers learn best practices.

Tim Shanahan, director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an architect of the Chicago Reading Initiative, downplays the danger of too many reading programs. But Shanahan notes that in some instances, students could miss important content—for instance, learning all vowel sounds. The potential minefields could derail children at a key early transition: when a student moves from kindergarten to 1st grade.

Shanahan says students learn best when teachers use a variety of reading strategies, but those strategies must incorporate several critical elements: explicit phonics instruction; teaching comprehension and critical thinking skills; and reading out loud to develop fluency, putting pauses and punctuation in the right places.

In recent years, the decline in training for reading coaches has diminished the impact of their work. And the number of coaches is small compared to the need. District-wide, 75 reading coaches paid for by the district are in place: 44 in the area offices and 31 funded by a federal research grant. (Some schools may have used their own discretionary money to hire reading coaches, but the district could not provide a count of that number.)

“Clearly, it isn’t a system priority or emphasis in the way it was,” Shanahan says.

Meanwhile, the approach that CPS has embraced, called balanced literacy, requires training and ongoing coaching. Efforts to infuse the approach into every classroom have fallen short because of the lack of resources.

Elizabeth Cardenas-Lopez, the director of the CPS Office of Reading and Language Arts, says that educators interpret the term “balanced literacy” in different ways. That, combined with school autonomy, has made it more challenging to implement on a wide scale.

The Office of Reading works to teach best practices and strategies, such as interactive read-alouds, in which the teacher models critical thinking about a story and connects it to prior knowledge; shared reading, in which the teacher helps the class as a whole read poems or short stories; and guided reading, having a teacher guide students as they reading out loud in a small group, with a focus on developing vocabulary and comprehension skills.

But area offices and schools can decide on their own whether to implement the strategies, and with too little manpower, Cardenas-Lopez’s office can’t train teachers in a large number of schools. The office is working intensively with just 20 schools, and about 100 receive some kind of support.

 “Most of us are on the same page, but it has not been a systemic approach to have that instruction going on across all schools in the district,” says Cardenas-Lopez. “We have different lenses of what best practices look like.”

She notes that the specific core reading materials used by a school are less important than incorporating the right strategies and lots of children’s literature.

 “Coaching support is needed,” Cardenas-Lopez says. “But with all the changes that have happened in our district and all the budget cuts, many of those supports have disappeared.”

On a spring morning, students are seated on the carpet in Belding Elementary kindergarten teacher Leon Schrauben’s classroom. He leads the children in a shared reading session as they read a poem out loud:

The March wind roars like a lion in the sky
And makes us shiver when he passes by.

“Jacob, why do we say March is like a lion? Is there really a lion up there?” Schrauben asks.

“’Cause when it’s March, it gets really windy out,” Jacob replies.

Schrauben has extensive training in balanced literacy. Another practice he uses often is “guided reading,” which requires that students have books to read that are exactly at their instructional level. Texts up to an 8th-grade reading level are designated “A” to “Z,” 26 different stages along the way to proficient reading.

Proponents of guided reading hold that students learn fastest by reading books that are easy enough for them to understand but challenging enough to expand their vocabulary and reading comprehension little by little.

In Schrauben’s classroom, each student has a selection of “just right” books that fit the criteria, placed in a plastic Ziploc bag. A data wall in the staff lounge, which tracks the reading level of every kindergarten student, is testimony to Schrauben’s effectiveness.

“Over half his kids are above where we need them to be,” says Belding Principal Heather Yutzy, who recruited Schrauben because of his training and experience. Students who are lagging behind get individual or small-group instruction every day in Schrauben’s full-day class.

Yutzy, a former reading coach, says one of the biggest barriers to using balanced literacy on a broad scale is training: It’s harder to train a teacher in the proper techniques than to just give them a teacher’s manual and student workbooks.

“You can’t just learn to do what Leon does in a couple of days,” says Yutzy.

In Schrauben’s class, intensive reading sessions help children to develop fluency.

“He’ll listen for errors the kid is making,” Yutzy says. “Maybe all of them need to work on stopping at the punctuation mark. He’ll say, ‘I need to teach this little lesson.’ The skill will change from day to day, and from kid to kid.” The strategy is especially effective for English as a Second Language students—16 percent of Belding’s enrollment.

Schrauben’s collection of books—which he collected, Yutzy says, by “being friends with the sales reps” and going to training sessions—is shared with the school’s other primary-grade teachers.

Schrauben, who switched careers to become a teacher, learned to use balanced literacy and guided reading in a Golden Apple alternative certification program offered through Northwestern University.The first school where he taught relied on basal readers and Schrauben got little support in using the teaching method he knew best. The next year, the school transitioned to using balanced literacy and gave teachers professional development. Eventually, Schrauben was sent to Lesley University for summer training to become a literacy coordinator.

Now he incorporates a wide range of whole-class, small group and individual activities.
During one day’s reading workshop, some children are doing literacy activities on their own at different centers in the classroom. Schrauben picks out other groups of students for specific instruction on letter sounds and reading books at carefully chosen levels.

As students read, Schrauben uses a complex array of symbols to keep a running record of their progress.  He marks down every mispronounced word that children stumble on, as well as words that they read correctly—a strategy that helps him understand if they are ready to move up to the next level.

For phonics instruction, Schrauben relies largely on call-and-response word games, known as “word study,” that are carefully designed to increase children’s awareness of letter sounds.

During one such session, Schrauben prompts students by saying, “It’s not my nears, it’s my...”

“Ears!” the students call out.

“It’s not my bankle, it’s my...”

 “Ankle!”

“It’s not my zoes, it’s my...”

 “Toes!”

Then Schrauben has the children identify the parts of word pairs that make them rhyme; put together words he has split apart into two syllables; and subtract syllables to make new words.

“Pencil. Take away ‘cil,’” he says.

“Pen,” the students respond.

To work on punctuation, Schrauben repeats sentences, varying his tone of voice, and has children identify whether the sentence uses a period, an exclamation point or a question mark.

For writing instruction, the focus is on giving children practice writing real words. To develop their understanding of phonics, students are encouraged to spell words the way they think is correct.

One fall day, the writing topic is “How do you turn a pumpkin into a jack-o-lantern?”
The responses range from “I no hwo to crv a pumpkin!” to “Pick up pumpkin take seeds out make shapes and put candles” and “you cut off the top anb take the stuf out then you cut a fas.”

Another afternoon, some students get worksheets that prompt them to write down as many words as possible from that morning’s story, “Little Red Riding Hood.” Others get worksheets where they can practice repeatedly writing out number words, one through five.

Several of those in the first group, Schrauben finds, have written “ing” down. “Is ing a word?” he asks. “Ing is a sound. What can we put in front of ing to make it a word?”

The children work independently during a short break. Then Schrauben calls the class together to discuss the story.

“What was the name of Little Red Riding Hood, before she was called Little Red Riding Hood?” he asks. “Elizabeth,” a girl recalls.

Students fill in other details: There was a wolf. A man cut Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother out of the wolf’s stomach. Schrauben notes the details on a large chart with markers.

He points out that the story is a fairy tale and can be re-told in different ways. He reads a different version, and as it unfolds, the class fills in similarities and differences that are noted on the chart. The second version does not give Little Red Riding Hood’s real name. One version describes the contents of her basket—bread, fresh butter, and a bottle of wine—while the other story just noted she was carrying “something good to eat.”

As the story continues, the students lean forward in suspense. At a key point, Schrauben takes a poll on the grandmother’s fate. “Who thinks the wolf ate her? Who thinks she ran away? Who thinks she was locked in the closet? Who thinks she’s under the bed?”

At Ashe Elementary, Monica Hamilton takes a different approach that emphasizes direct instruction, a strategy that has its share of critics but also ardent proponents, especially in some schools that serve lower-income children.

(Among the curricula that the district promotes in its reading materials adoption initiative is the direct-instruction program Open Court.)

Hamilton has two boys copy the “Good Morning Story” from a whiteboard. First, she has them sound out the word “make” and read it aloud.

“Today is Monday, February 28, 2011. I can read. I am good. I am smart. I can make all the shapes,” the story reads.

The letter “e” in the word “make” is tiny on the board because Hamilton uses SRA Reading Mastery, another direct-instruction program. The emphasis is on learning letter sounds as the building block for sounding out words. Silent letters are extra small so that students know not to pronounce them; long vowels often have lines over them.

Hamilton says Reading Mastery has consistently helped her students learn to read above grade level. She balances direct instruction with the district-promoted StoryTown curriculum, which emphasizes the use of language in its natural context.

Hamilton began using Reading Mastery at Lavizzo Elementary in Roseland. Lavizzo’s students often lagged behind in literacy skills, she says; they couldn’t catch up because of constantly switching schools.

“It just worked,” Hamilton recalls. “It got them reading faster and they seemed to enjoy it better. They didn’t have the same language [skills] as someone coming from an affluent background, with parents who were more involved.”

Hamilton’s mother, a retired veteran teacher and counselor, spent the whole year in Hamilton’s classroom, coaching her on how to teach Reading Mastery. Hamilton contrasts that intensive help with the scattershot professional development that CPS has offered.

“You can’t just spend a couple of days and go off somewhere,” she says. Instead, coaches should be “sitting with somebody, organizing the room, jumping in when you’re making mistakes, taking over the class.”

Jerome Ferrell, Ashe’s assistant principal, says Hamilton’s students have posted strong reading results on the school’s weekly assessments. Hamilton also works with special education students who are struggling with reading comprehension, he says, comparing her to a pitcher who knows how to throw a special curveball.

“Our curriculum throughout the U.S. has moved away from this traditional style of learning, but we have noted this has been successful,” he says. “The main thing is that students are engaged and are learning, even though it may not be the method that is [handed] down to us. It’s working in the building. We say, use it.”

Ferrell notes that teachers at Ashe do follow CPS guidelines to make sure children are exposed to a wealth of reading materials. Students read articles on current events, and teachers are required to incorporate reading into science and social studies.

“You need to know your students and know your standards,” Ferrell says.

On a sunny Monday at the end of February, Hamilton leads her class in repeating the whole alphabet and its sounds in order—everything from “A says aaah” to “Z says zzz.”
Then it’s time to work on the letter “E.”

“Leave your hoodies alone and look at me,” she says. “This is very important. Fold your hands and look at me.”

Popcorn-style, she asks different students to make the sound. Then, she drills them on the difference between “eeh” and “aah”.

“How do you know you’re making ‘ehhh?’” Hamilton asks. “Because your chin will go down. Your bottom chin is going down.”

Direct instruction includes specific, on-the-spot correction for struggling students, and emphasizes having them follow directions as closely as possible.

 “I want to know why you keep saying ‘a,’” Hamilton says to a boy who reads “fat” as “fate”.
“Sound it out,” she says. The boy starts to do so. Hamilton interrupts.

“I didn’t touch anything,” she says, stopping him. As she touches the line under the word as a cue, he sounds it out again. He’s still having trouble, so Hamilton urges him to pay closer attention and participate more in the group practice. The class is then instructed to help him by repeating the word.

After that lesson, Hamilton gives out a take-home worksheet, which contains practice for the sound ‘aaah’ and the sentence, “The rat ate.”  Once students know enough sounds, they move into readers that start with stories of four or five sentences in length.

 “When you get home, you’re going to read it to whoever takes care of you—your mom, your dad, your grandma, your aunt—ten times,” she says.

Another group of children comes to the reading circle, and Hamilton has them practice letter sounds.  She lets a girl lead the circle. Like Hamilton, the girl holds the oversized book and tells the students “Get ready” before placing her hand on each letter.

Hamilton talks about her approach. “The ultimate goal is to get the children to read. And once you get them ready, you can use anything you want to,” she says.

“What you do as an educator is what works for your situation. It doesn’t matter if I’m doing
StoryTown and you’re doing Reading Mastery, as long as we get to the same goal at the end.”

Tell us what you think. Leave a comment below, or email rharris@catalyst-chicago.org.

Seven of the children never went to preschool. Some attended preschool at one of a dizzying array of elementary schools—McAuliffe, Yates, Henry, Belmont-Cragin, Mozart, Cameron, Burbank and Schubert. Other children went to one of at least nine different child care centers or community-based Head Start programs.

All in all, the children’s experiences are so varied that there’s no way for Durham to become familiar with each of them. “A lot of times, I don’t really pay attention because I’m not from here, so I’m not really familiar with [the school] names,” she says.

Many kindergarten teachers face a similar conundrum each year. Faced with getting to know families and children for the first time, they have little information on children’s learning backgrounds and how well-prepared they are for the critical first year of formal schooling.

The notion that kindergarten should be better-aligned with preschool isn’t new. It was touted in a National Education Goals Panel report, among others, in the 1990s, as well as in a 1988 National Association of State Boards of Education report, “Right from the Start.” But the idea is gaining more traction with early childhood experts and policymakers, who stress the need to help children transition smoothly to kindergarten and the primary grades to set a firm foundation for success. 

Yet a number of hurdles stand in the way. As in Durham’s class, kindergarteners come from a wide variety of backgrounds—from Head Start to state-funded preschool, private preschool, child care centers or home care—and there’s no system in place to make sure that teachers and schools get information from these institutions that would help them ease the transition.

School choice has made it more challenging for some schools to know exactly who will be enrolling in kindergarten from year to year. The district has no money specifically targeted toward transition activities. And not every kindergarten teacher has training in early childhood development, although experts believe it would be helpful.

As schools and policymakers take steps to bridge the divide, their goal is to sustain the learning momentum of preschool and prevent “fade-out,” a phenomenon in which the academic advantage gained in preschool disappears after a couple of years.

“Some people have the idea that early-childhood education programs are a vaccination,” says Barbara Bowman, the head of the Office of Early Childhood Education at CPS. “[They think] if we just have this when you’re 3 and 4 years old, you need never go to a good school, you need never have a good teacher again.”

Teachers say that as students start kindergarten, many have trouble adapting to structure and meeting behavior expectations, such as the length of time they are expected to sit in one place.

Sometimes teachers’ expectations aren’t developmentally appropriate. But often the sheer newness of the environment can throw children for a loop, and the lack of continuity can cause more than disoriented students. University of Minnesota researcher Arthur Reynolds theorizes that it might contribute to fade-out.

The district’s Kindergarten Readiness Tool is designed to give kindergarten teachers information about children’s preschool learning and help make ease the transition. But its impact has been spotty so far. On the ground, many kindergarten teachers did not notice that information from the tool was available. Others said that their own assessments, done after summer break, provided a better picture of student learning.

At a state level, Illinois State Board of Education Superintendent Christopher Koch says that the implementation of the national Common Core Standards—Illinois has signed on to the project—and the assessments that will accompany them will make it even more important for information to be shared across the preschool-kindergarten divide (although the standards are already drawing fire from some educators who feel they are not developmentally appropriate for young children).

“We have a bridge to build,” Koch says. “The standards expect educators to know not just what the standards are for their level, but for the level before and the level after.”

A new state assessment for kindergarteners could be piloted as early as fall 2012. It will likely be based on teacher observations of student behavior and learning.

At Belding Elementary in Irving Park, school-level activities aim to smooth the transition.

Principal Heather Yutzy says the area office doled out money last summer for teachers to come to the school in August and assess incoming students. Kindergarten teacher Leon Schrauben assessed 20 of his 24 students, making it easier for him to plan lessons. Plus, he adds, “they got to see the classroom; they got to meet me.”

Yutzy has also developed Project On Target, which lists specific milestones every student should be able to meet four times a year. Next, the kindergarten targets will be used to set guidelines for preschool.

Belding has also added more indicators to the district’s Kindergarten Report Card. “We felt like the reading [requirement] was a little weak,” Yutzy says. She is planning to launch a parents’ website, with links to online educational games, and wants to give primary parents educational flashcards to use with their children to build their skills.

“Our hope for preschool is that we meet with the parents and say, ‘This is where we want your kid to be,’” Yutzy says. “Our school, as diverse as it is, there are vastly different parent expectations about what kids should be able to do.”

At the end of this year, teachers will use professional development days to meet with each other, in pairs, about the students they are handing off to the next grade level. Students’ Response to Intervention documents—detailed plans to help them with their trouble areas—will be passed along and explained.

“We’re working on a one-page summary for each child,” Yutzy says. The idea is to save teachers from having to hunt for information among the three different CPS data systems.

On a wider scale, a more comprehensive effort by the Erikson Institute stretches beyond kindergarten to the primary grades: the New Schools Project, now in place in six schools. While the number is down from 11 last year because of funding constraints, the Project hopes to add more schools in the fall.

Over the last decade (the Project was launched in 2002), about 20 schools have participated, with teachers receiving a wide range of training. An instructional coach spends one to three days a week at the school, leading workshops on topics such as independent reading time for children and giving teachers feedback on their teaching.

Other activities include having coaches model lessons for teachers; school-level meetings among teachers at the same grade level and across grades, including preschool; coaching to help primary-grades teachers spend more time on math, science and social studies so that teaching focuses less on “the facts” and more on helping students develop inquiry and critical-thinking skills; consulting with principals; and meetings that bring together teachers from different schools to share ideas. Teachers can also take advantage of professional development events at the Erikson Institute.

Preschool through 3rd-grade teachers work together to examine their expectations for entering students, as well as “the teaching strategies they use, the curriculum, to make sure what happens in kindergarten really builds upon pre-K so it’s not an abrupt change for children,” says Chris Maxwell, the Project’s director.

Preschool teachers are enlisted to introduce families to kindergarten teachers, sharing their insights so that kindergarten teachers aren’t “reinventing the wheel,” Maxwell says.

In turn, kindergarten teachers are encouraged to do face-to-face outreach to families who haven’t been to preschool, and to have open houses before school starts so children can start getting comfortable in the classroom.

Among teachers who participated in the New Schools Project in 2009-10, 93 percent rated the coaching as “valuable” or “extremely valuable,” according to an Erikson Institute survey.

As with many smaller programs, lack of money, time and other barriers make it difficult to scale up. Maxwell estimates that the total cost of the New Schools Project is around $50,000 per school per year, of which schools generally contribute between $10,000 and $15,000 out of their own budget. Other costs are covered by foundations, the Erikson Institute, and in some cases, the district.

Some schools have solved the time dilemma with creative scheduling or asking teachers to stay after school—not always for pay. “Unfortunately, sometimes it’s more piecemeal than they would like because of budget constraints,” Maxwell adds.

Accountability is another barrier. Maxwell says the emphasis on 3rd-grade test scores has filtered down, affecting curricula and how young children are assessed early on. As a result, administrators tend to focus on bringing older children up to speed, ignoring the need for “a solid foundation that in the long run could really prevent some of the remediation problems they have later on,” Maxwell says.

Erikson Institute Director Sam Meisels said at a recent symposium that the Project’s approach works best when schools don’t have rigid grade-level structures, when teacher teams are given decision-making power, and when preschool programs and full-day kindergarten are available.

The Academy for Urban School Leadership has adopted the Project’s approach. With the help of Erikson Institute staff, primary-grade teachers and administrators from AUSL’s network of turnaround schools have formed the Early Childhood Task Force. The Task Force recently began meeting to hammer out strategies to better align preschool, kindergarten and primary grade teaching and assessment, while making sure instruction is high-quality and appropriate to young children’s needs.

Reynolds, for his part, advocates expanding the preschool-through-3rd-grade approach of Chicago’s child-parent centers, which offer preschool and kindergarten in the same location, parent engagement staff that focus on improving student attendance, and an aligned curriculum and lowered class sizes through 3rd grade.

His decades-long study showed that the centers produced healthier, more successful students than a control project which just offered Head Start and full-day kindergarten classes. But now, many of the child-parent centers lack the full complement of health, mental health and parent involvement staff they once had.

Eight of the district’s child-parent centers were closed in 2005. Today, 11 are in operation, and just 3 percent of the district’s Title I money goes to the centers.

But as Reynolds points out, “It makes the implementation of [other] efforts so much easier when we have these models to build on.”

Magnet and charter schools face a unique challenge when it comes to the preschool-to-kindergarten transition: Admission is governed by a lottery, which means schools often send away graduating preschoolers while bringing in kindergarten students who have never been to the school.

Disney Magnet School Principal Kathleen Hagstrom says principal discretion used to provide a way for students who didn’t win the lottery to get into kindergarten at these schools. Disney admits 196 kindergarteners each year via the lottery, and graduates 60 preschoolers.

But since principal discretion has been reined in by the district, “we have crying children, disgruntled parents, lots of complaints,” Hagstrom says. “They think it’s like a divorce. They think they’ve done something wrong to not be allowed to come to the school. We’ve developed such an outstanding program and to tell kids they can’t come to our kindergarten is just absurd.”

The Ounce of Prevention Fund’s Educare early childhood center is working with North Kenwood-Oakland and Donoghue charter schools, run by the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, on a solution: a “birth-to-college” pipeline.

Starting this fall, parents who enroll their students as infants in Educare will get an opportunity to immediately reserve a slot in the charter schools. So far, 17 parents out of 24 new Educare families have completed the application process and will be guaranteed a slot when their child is ready for kindergarten.

Demand for the option is evident: Nearly 50 preschoolers will complete Educare this spring, and 26 applied to the charters. Fewer than 10 got in.

Parents have had the opportunity to go to family events at the charters, says Brenda Eiland-Williford, director of program and curriculum at the Educare Center. And Educare’s staff is glad to have schools they can recommend to parents so that children don’t end up in “a totally different world,” where they will be expected to spend large amounts of time doing seat-work rather than hands-on and exploratory learning.

Eiland-Williford says parents struggle to help children complete a flurry of homework and worksheets—“more than what the child that particular age can handle.” Adjusting to seat work can be difficult, she says.

Educare chose to work with the University of Chicago charter schools because of their reputation for high-quality instruction, student support and family engagement, which will help to prevent some of the transition difficulties.

To strengthen the connection, staff from Educare and the charter schools will meet to set goals. Teachers will share techniques, use common assessments and share data. Having teachers work together will help prevent conflict that Eiland-Williford believes stems from a lack of understanding about what is age-appropriate for young children.

“We want those conversations. It will be a learning opportunity,” Eiland-Williford says.
Such learning opportunities could help solve perhaps the biggest challenge: the difference in teaching philosophies and training of early childhood and elementary educators.

In Illinois, a majority of early elementary teachers have K-9 teaching certificates, which allow them more flexibility in teaching assignments and may be preferred by principals. But they are not required to have training in early childhood development, which would give them a better grounding in developmentally appropriate instruction.  (The CPS Office of Early Childhood said it does not have information on the number of kindergarten teachers with early childhood certificates.)

A New America Foundation report on early-childhood teacher preparation, “Getting In Sync,” found that a majority of states have similar overlapping licensure issues, with many content courses for elementary teachers weighted heavily toward upper-grades instruction. Nationally, just 14 states require kindergarten teachers to get a certificate that is specific to early childhood.

Preparation in birth to 3rd grade early childhood programs focuses more on learning processes, hands-on activities, family collaboration, literacy, and social-emotional learning, Maxwell says, while elementary preparation gives more weight to content knowledge and curriculum.

“We have a lot to learn from each other,” Maxwell says. “We need to look at more balanced teacher preparation across the content areas. Early-childhood teachers very often get a lot of preparation in language arts, and literacy, but not in mathematics.”

Results from the New Schools Project are beginning to convince people, from back-to-basics administrators to reluctant teachers, that better alignment is beneficial to students. Participating elementary schools, on average, experienced a three times higher increase in the percentage of 3rd-grade students meeting and exceeding ISAT standards in reading and math as compared to the district average. 

“We can make progress school by school, but what we really need is to look at the systems and policies that provide the framework” for what Project schools do, Maxwell says.

On a late August morning, not long after the start of the school year, Ashe Elementary kindergarten teacher Monica Hamilton is teaching her students how to sit on the carpet. It’s just one of several lessons in which she uses explicit, step-by-step explanations to help children adjust to the reality of school. Hamilton has an early childhood certificate, but did not study early childhood education in college; she earned the credential “in the trenches,” through a program that gave her credit for kindergarten teaching experience.

“When we’re seated on the carpet we need to cross our legs Indian-style, and keep our hands folded. It helps us keep our hands to ourselves,” Hamilton says to the class. “All this is for a reason. It helps you to be disciplined. Being disciplined helps you do the right thing when you’re tempted to do the wrong thing.”

Later, Hamilton leads the children in an arm-lifting game that reinforces the difference between right and left and requires them to listen for her direction on when to put an arm down. Then, it’s time for roll-call.

“Fold your hands. Don’t put your hands in your mouth,” Hamilton tells a boy. “When I say your name, your response is, ‘I am here.’”

There’s an air conditioner in the window, but it’s not operating properly and the room is sweltering. So Hamilton has the children line up to go across the hall, to a room with working air conditioner that is at least 10 degrees cooler, to cool off briefly. “Everybody’s shirt must be inside their pants,” she says.

As the students stand in line for a few minutes in the borrowed classroom, Hamilton drills them on math and letters. “Show me how to make a ‘1’ in the air,” she says, then does the same with the letter “m.” She writes the letter “m” and the letter “a” on the board and points alternately at them. “Tell me which one I’m touching,” she says.

She asks them the meaning of plus and equal signs, then draws a series of triangles on the board. “When two and one get together, how many do we have?” she asks.

When her students struggle to finish lunch in the few minutes allotted, she notes: “You think they already know [how to behave], but they don’t. That’s why kindergarten is so hard to teach.”

Hamilton taught 2nd grade last year and explains why teaching kindergarten has been a readjustment for her. “You’re teaching a baby again,” she says. “They didn’t know how to walk in a straight line, and listen, and follow directions.”

It’s made harder, she notes, when students arrive without knowledge of how to act in a school environment. “You have to tell them what you want. Nobody has told them what to expect before they come to school.”

Tell us what you think. Leave a comment below, or email rharris@catalyst-chicago.org

• Fewer English-language learners held back
• More time engaged in reading and math lessons and greater gains
• Teachers have the time to plan better lessons

In general, CPS forwards to schools only enough money for them to offer half-day kindergarten. It forces the majority of schools to use their own discretionary money if they want to have a full-day program.

The Illinois State Board of Education counts children in full-day kindergarten like any other child when allocating state aid, providing the full amount. Students in half-day only get half as much as a full-day student.

For those schools that have only half-day, the district is losing out on state money. But for those with full-day, the district is using some of the state allocation elsewhere in its budget, rather than covering the schools’ costs.

About 1,680 CPS kindergarteners are in half-day programs, according to a CPS projection. If they switched to full-day programs, CPS officials say it would cost the district an extra $2,000 per student or $3.4 million, not including furniture, equipment or facilities. The extra teachers would cost $2.1 million, based on an average salary of $70,842.

However, by offering full-day kindergarten to every student, the district would stand to get an additional $3,000 in state aid. But there are other financial brakes. State aid is volatile and can be stagnant or reduced each year, even as teacher salaries are on the rise. The allocation is based on the average number of students in attendance and could be offset by declines in enrollment or a spike in truancy. And the district would end up fronting the money for full-day for one to three years.

Plus, not all schools want or can offer full-day kindergarten. Some parents think young children should not be in school for a full day, and children are not required to attend kindergarten in any case, since the state’s compulsory school age is 7.

Some schools don’t have enough classroom space to accommodate full-day programs.

One solution might be for CPS to expand its four-hour kindergarten programs—the half-day program is only two hours and 35 minutes of instruction. The state counts students in four-hour programs as full-time. Yet one teacher could teach two four-hour groups in one classroom, thus minimizing the extra cost. There are 75 four-hour classes in CPS, according to district projections.

“To win the future, our children need a strong start,” Duncan said. Like the previous Race to the Top rounds, Duncan says he wants this one to be a game-changer that will strengthen early childhood programs. The goals: improve low-income children’s access to early learning programs; develop better coordination among the mosaic of programs already offered; provide better training for those who work in the field, who are often low-paid and lack college degrees; and create clear learning standards and age-appropriate, high-quality assessments for young children.

The $500 million is cause for celebration among early childhood advocates, especially since it represents the lion’s share of the $700 million that Congress allocated to Race to the Top this year. Even so, it’s a comparatively small amount of money compared to the $4 billion for the original Race to the Top.

Policymakers for The New America Foundation point out another caveat on the organization’s Early Ed Watch blog: 

“At a time when research studies like the Head Start Impact Study have shown the limits of relying too much on pre-kindergarten programs without any coordination with high-quality kindergarten and first-grade programs...this new grant program represents a lost opportunity.”

A smooth transition

To ease the path to formal schooling, children need experiences that help them become familiar with a new setting and new expectations. Activities that can help ease the transition include:

• Visits to the kindergarten classroom
• Workshops and networking for parents
• Attendance at school events, for parents and children
• “Get ready for kindergarten” sessions at school

Source: Transition and Alignment policy brief, 2010, Education Commission of the States

That lost opportunity is the chance to push states to strengthen alignment between early learning and K-3 education. It’s a strategy that the early education world is pushing, with good reason. What’s the use of providing children with a rich preschool experience, only to send them off to a school that doesn’t capitalize and build on what they’ve learned? Not only is doing so a potential waste of a child’s future—it’s a waste of the money poured into preschool.

In Chicago, the need for strong transition and alignment takes on added importance because of the gains low-income children are making in preschool. The Chicago Program Evaluation Project, a study of Chicago preschool programs, found that high-risk children (including those learning English or living in a single-parent home) made substantial progress in vocabulary development, literacy and math.

 “Some people have the idea that early childhood education programs are a vaccination,” says Barbara Bowman of the Office of Early Childhood Education in CPS. “[They think] if we just have this when you’re 3 and 4 years old, you need never go to a good school, you need never have a good teacher again.”

The Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education has begun a new national study of children who started kindergarten last fall. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 will provide data about children’s learning and development. A diverse group of children in both half-day and full-day classes will be included, and the study will continue through their 5th grade year. The research can be expected to provide more evidence of how full-day programs can provide the most benefit to children.

On this front, Chicago’s policy is out of sync with many other big districts. While the majority of children in Chicago are in full-day kindergarten, it comes at a price: The district only foots the bill for a half-day program, forcing schools to pay the rest of the cost of a full-day program with their discretionary money. The impact of the policy on schools, and children, became clear to Associate Editor Rebecca Harris during her reporting for this issue of Catalyst In Depth. At Ashe Elementary School in Chatham, the year began with a full-day kindergarten class of 14 children. By late September, late arrivals pushed enrollment to about 40, forcing the school to split the class into two half-day programs. Some parents pulled their children out, while others scrambled to find after-school or before-school child care.

At Catalyst press time, state lawmakers had proposed a budget that would slash education funding by $171 million. With such a bleak financial picture, it’s even more important for schools to spend smart. One way to do so is to target cash to full-day kindergarten across the board.

Maria Elena Orozco’s 6-year-old son Abraham, a native Spanish speaker, spent two years in preschool programs Orozco says were mostly in English.

This fall, he started kindergarten at Edwards Elementary. He was identified as a non-native English speaker, and put into a native-language class that is taught almost entirely in Spanish.

The language-switching Abraham has faced is exactly the sort of scenario that new state rules – the first of their kind in the nation – aim to avoid.

Starting this year, state-funded pre-kindergarten programs administered by school districts are required to provide bilingual and English as a Second Language instruction to the 3,338 preschool students identified as English learners in the district. But many specifics about the rules’ implementation have yet to be worked out, and teachers are not required to have bilingual and ESL endorsements until 2014.

In the absence of teachers who are knowledgeable about bilingual education, it is not yet a reality in a number of Chicago-area preschool classrooms. Julie Dakers, the director of early childhood development services at Christopher House, notes that “most of the (centers) are just not there.”

Dakers is part of a committee convened by the Latino Policy Forum that is working to get the word out about the new regulations. The group may offer professional development or set up tours of model sites that are in compliance with the regulations.

“They are trying to wrap their head around it. So many providers don’t know what it is, what the law means, how it’s going to affect them... a majority are just overwhelmed with the idea,” she says.

Reyna Hernandez, a research and policy associate at the Latino Policy Forum, says it will take time before programs can fully implement the new regulations.

A lack of additional funding has made the situation more difficult. The total amount of bilingual funding given out by the state took a 7 percent dive this year from fiscal year 2010. However, the money is divided according to the total number of students identified as English learners. This year, for the first time, that category includes preschoolers from districts around the state.

Before this year, a few districts with bilingual preschool programs received state funding, but far fewer preschoolers were included in the bilingual student numbers because school districts were not required to identify them.

A document from ISBE shows that CPS received nearly $2.02 million more in bilingual funding than it would have without the more than 3,000 preschool students identified as English language learners.

But Paula Cottone, deputy chief officer of early childhood education for the district, says none of the funding has come in to the Office of Early Childhood Education.

District spokeswoman Monique Bond is still looking into whether CPS received the money and what it was used for. She notes that the state still owes CPS more than $260 million.

Even though the teacher certification requirement doesn’t take effect until July 2014, all the rule’s other requirements are currently in place, Hernandez notes. But it’s not clear how programs that largely lack bilingual and ESL-certified staff are supposed to implement bilingual programming.
 
Because demand for bilingual teachers outstrips supply, a teacher shortage has been an issue at the K-12 level for years; many early-childhood advocates expect that it will be even tougher to find teachers for children who speak lower-frequency languages.
 
The Illinois State Board of Education aims to release guidance for such programs this summer – a tight timeline for anyone trying to adopt that advice by next fall. It will schedule a “stakeholder meeting” soon to get input from professionals in the field.

But until the state comes out with its recommendations, it’s not clear what exactly programs are required to do.

“I think there’s a lot of confusion,” says Erie Neighborhood House executive director Celena Roldan. “I think it comes from the reality of what programs have to deal with in this current [funding] climate. When you know what your reality is, and you know what’s available to you, you kind of make the regulations fit.”

She adds: “We know the best way to teach bilingual education is to have certified, quality teachers. (But) it’s going to be difficult... to have one of those teachers in every single classroom,” a scenario that could result in bilingual teachers that rotate to different classrooms.

Learning about the regulations has changed the way Erie House does its instruction, Roldan says. Previously, staff would give English language learners extra explanations in their native language when needed, going back and forth between Spanish and English.

“Now we are realizing it needs to be more intensive instruction... (with) the whole reading time done in the child’s language,” Roldan says.

CPS is also figuring out how to advise schools, and it has held focus groups around the issue.
 
“We are working on program designs for schools with multiple classrooms, but only 1 or 2 bilingual teachers, [as well as] schools with one room and no bilingual teacher,” says Paula Cottone, Deputy Chief Early Childhood Education Officer in CPS. “Our plan is to recommend a variety of different plans that schools may use until they are able to hire a bilingual Type 04 teacher.”

Schools with large populations of English learners have “bilingual lead teacher” positions; in those schools, the lead teachers have started working with pre-K instructors to provide support. Help can also come from bilingual coaches, who generally have ESL endorsements.

Although they often aren’t fluent in students’ first language, the coaches can give teachers pointers on how to adapt their instruction for the students learning English.

“In some cases, the program will not change because [classrooms] already have a bilingual teacher,” Cottone notes.

The state Gateways to Opportunity scholarship program, which generally is used only for early-childhood education credentials, also has allocated some of its funding to help teachers get bilingual and ESL endorsements.

Dakers’ program, like many in Chicago, tries to have staff members in each classroom who speak students’ native languages. It also assesses all children in their home languages.
However, classroom instruction is in English for the time being, until Christopher House decides what kind of approach it will take.

Some parents may want their children to learn just in the native language, or to focus on learning English with some bilingual supports, Dakers adds.

For her part, Orozco says she sees the purpose of pre-kindergarten as, largely, to begin learning the language. If the only available preschool in her area were in Spanish, she says, she would have just kept Abraham home and taught him in Spanish herself, rather than bringing him to school.
 
For the time being, it’s not clear if the practice of having someone in the classroom speaking the child’s language, while the bulk of the instruction is offered in English, actually complies with state law.

“Without a clear definition of that person’s role and what are the intended outcomes, I don’t think we get any closer to what the law is intended to achieve,” Dakers notes. “I think it’s just another option that’s being thrown around to try and make this less overwhelming for people.”
 
Christopher House may try to start a native-language program – or even a dual-language immersion program, which is something many centers have found attractive.
 
 “It sounds amazing, the idea that you could send a kid out of a program speaking and writing in two languages,” Dakers says, but she notes that the logistics could be difficult. “The other question would be, what good does it do if you don’t funnel them into an elementary program that continues to focus on dual-language (learning)?”

One center that has solved that problem is Carole Robertson Center for Learning. Its dual-language immersion program will soon expand to include every child it serves in early-childhood and after-school programs for students up to age 12.

The agency also has a partnership with Whittier Elementary, which has a dual-language immersion program, to ensure children can continue learning two languages once they leave the agency’s early-childhood classes.

“It’s an opportunity for our teachers to learn from them, and also for our families to know where they might be able to place their children,” says Cerathel Burnett, vice president of community development and operations at the agency.

Teachers from Carole Robertson Center have visited Whittier classrooms. Burnett says the working with Whittier has helped give teachers insights on where their students will eventually be going.

For the students who go elsewhere, “we are trying to make sure that (with) the other schools in the area where children transfer to, that we know exactly what they’re doing in their classrooms and they know exactly what we’re doing in ours,” Burnett says. “They may not have the same framework... but we are trying to make sure that we are all aware of each other’s work.”

Burnett also notes that her agency works with parents to make sure they have an understanding of their child’s language strengths and weaknesses, so they can advocate for the best placement for their child.
 
“It’s going to be a reliance on parents to have the level of comfort to have those discussions,” Burnett says.
 
Executive director Gail Nelson says the dual-language immersion has helped her center avoid the difficult question of whether to put English language learners in separate classrooms.
“I don’t think anybody wants to segregate children, but I think that the budget reality of programming this way is going to vary depending on where you are,” she says. “There could be a 100-kid program that meets the threshold of 20 (English language learners). It would be hard for them to go to the expense... of having five classrooms with four (English language learner) kids in each room.”

Finding teachers with bilingual and ESL endorsements is a key challenge programs face. In the meantime, many of the teachers who are leading classrooms don’t yet have the knowledge they would need to implement a bilingual education program.
 
“As providers we are overwhelmed,” Dakers says. “We don’t have the workforce, currently, to address this mandate.”
 
What’s more, some bilingual teachers may not have their endorsements in hand until as late as 2020. The 2014 requirement can be met by teachers who pass a language proficiency test and enroll in bilingual education classes. Those teachers will be able to get a provisional “Type 29” endorsement, and an additional six years to finish their coursework. (All English as a Second Language teachers, however, will need endorsements by the 2014 deadline.)

Earlier, it was thought that a shortage of schools offering bilingual coursework that focused on early-childhood education would make the situation even worse. But in addition to the Erikson Institute and DePaul University, National-Louis University is starting a bilingual certification program tailored for early-childhood teachers, and six more universities are hoping to offer similar plans of study.

Dakers’ program also faces an extra hurdle: competing with school-based programs for teachers.

Even though all CPS early-childhood teachers are required to have the same qualifications, including a bachelor’s degree in early-childhood education, there is a substantial gap between pay in community-based organization programs, like Christopher House, and pay in the schools, which is governed by the Chicago Teachers Union contract.
 
CPS has mandated that community-based programs pay lead teachers $40,000 for a 10-month school year, Dakers says, but staff members at her program are in the classroom up to 45 hours a week, year-round. Between squeezed agency budgets and insufficient state funding, “we still have a lot that we have to come up with in order to meet the $40,000,” she says.
Nelson expresses similar sentiments.
 
“This is going to play out really differently in the community-based portion of Preschool for All than on the CPS side, because we already have trouble competing on the salaries,” Nelson says. “The pressure CPS is going to be under to meet this, is going to cause (challenges) on our side of the system in terms of recruitment.”

Dakers is also concerned about finding staff who speak languages other than English and Spanish. About a dozen languages are spoken at her agency’s Uptown location.
 
In many cases, programs where a variety of languages are spoken will have the option to offer English as a Second Language instruction instead of lessons in a student’s native language. (A bilingual program isn’t required unless a school has 20 or more preschool English language learners with the same native language at the same program site.)
 
That is likely to be the case at Goudy Elementary. The school’s Head Start lead teacher, Erin Stanfill, has speakers of 12 different languages in her class.

She says that other than teacher certification, she isn’t aware of what changes her school will need to make to comply with the ESL requirement.

Stanfill notes Goudy teachers have always used strategies like a structured schedule, so children are able to pick up on routines; picture cues; and a curriculum focused on building English vocabulary.

She says that it can be difficult just to find speakers who can communicate in a language less commonly spoken than Spanish – let alone those who would be able to instruct students in their native language.

“We have staff members in the building who speak around 15 different languages, but there’s a difference between speaking another language, and being able to translate, and being able to say things in a language that’s understood by the culture,” Stanfill says. “I feel like probably, when everything was started (with this law), they were thinking mostly about the majority of Spanish speakers that there are.”

The school’s curriculum, for example, offers English and Spanish assessments and handouts for parents that aren’t available in other languages.

Until teachers earn endorsements and more guidance comes, many programs are in a sort of limbo – not knowing what changes to instruction the law requires, lacking certified teachers, and unable to come into compliance.

Jennifer Alexander, a program manager at Metropolitan Family Services, says that classroom instruction takes place in English but teacher assistants who speak children’s home languages provide translation and support as needed, she says.

To meet the new law’s requirements, the agency is asking its teacher assistants to go back to school for early-childhood teaching certificates and bilingual endorsements.

“It’s really an unfunded mandate; even if they [already] speak Spanish, they may not necessarily be certified and that’s going to be the requirement.”

The agency’s classrooms already have books that reflect students’ home languages, and the curriculum meets the needs of English language learners – but it’s entirely in English.

“Hopefully we won’t have to find a bilingual curriculum, because that would be a major challenge,” she says. Whether the primary language of instruction in the classroom changes, Alexander says, will depend on what guidance her program receives from the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services and CPS.

She says that while she agrees with the need for the new bilingual requirements, they are not feasible.

“Realistically, it’s not going to happen that fast,” she says. “The classrooms are still going to need to be manned in the process.”’

As for Abraham, he’s having trouble keeping up this year. It’s hard to know for certain why, but his mother blames the change in language.
 
“The teacher spoke Spanish, but she communicated with the children in English only,” Orozco says.

When Abraham was 3, Orozco says, she took him to Curie High School to spend two days a week working one-on-one with students in a child development class there. He learned his colors, how to read his name, and how to count to 10. Last year, in a preschool program at Edwards Center for Young Learners, he learned to write his name, recognize numbers, and even write words.

All of it, both years, happened in English, Orozco says. She says she’d have preferred for her son to continue in English this year. “It was like going back to the beginning,” she says.

Since the fall, she’s had to practice Spanish syllables and phonics with him for an hour a day. But he still has a hard time matching letters with their sounds.

“It’s time for him to be reading, but he can’t,” Orozco says.

She says she plans to switch him back to an all-English class next year.

In his case, three years longer.

“He talks like a baby,” says Rasheed’s mother, Shavon Kalfus. “If he had the help prior to age 6, it wouldn’t be a problem.”

The district is faced with a backlog of up to 1,500 students who were referred for evaluations last year but have yet to undergo them, leaving them without special services at a critical stage in their development. Like Rasheed, most of the youngsters were in federally funded Early Intervention programs, which serve developmentally delayed and at-risk children until they turn 3, or were referred from Head Start, which has new rules meant to identify children who need special services early in their schooling.

CPS is making new efforts to track the progress of evaluations, but hundreds more children are referred every month—making it even tougher to catch up.

The issue came to a head last summer, after a school year when special education referrals for young children increased by 42 percent, putting further strain on a system that was already short-staffed. Some officials say the increase is due to the new federal rules for Head Start.

In June 2010, the watchdog group Equip for Equality complained to the state that 13 children whose Head Start teachers noticed red flags on screenings had not been evaluated by CPS within the 60-day time frame specified by federal law. The group said at the time that hundreds more children were affected.

In late August, the Illinois State Board of Education issued a finding that required CPS to remedy the situation and move forward on the evaluations of the students named in the complaint.
ISBE's finding on delayed CPS special education evaluations

Lam Ho, staff attorney for Equip for Equality’s Autism Project, says the state also ordered CPS to consider offering the students “compensatory services,” such as additional speech therapy or an extended school year, to help make up for the time they lost.

Ho, who has participated in Individualized Education Plan meetings to help parents advocate for the services, says that in most instances, CPS representatives have maintained that students don’t need them. But Ho has helped persuade IEP teams to change their stance.

About a month after Equip for Equality filed its complaint, a state task force report on the Early Intervention system mentioned Chicago’s difficulties transitioning children out of the program. Federal law requires that school districts evaluate the students and have a plan in place to serve them by their 3rd birthday. For Rasheed, that didn’t happen until after he had turned 6.

The task force report suggested that state lawmakers require school districts to pay for continuing Early Intervention services after children turn 3 if an evaluation and preschool placement haven’t taken place.

Carol Muhammad, a program manager at La Rabida Children’s Hospital (which serves Early Intervention families) says she has seen the problems first-hand. Confused school employees would turn the families away when they tried to register their children in CPS in order to have them evaluated—telling the families, incorrectly, that they had to file a medical exam or that they couldn’t register until their child turned 5. When children needed to transition over the summer months, it was difficult to reach anyone.

“Our families get discouraged, and they don’t return,” Muhammad says. Students went without the services they needed, and sometimes, without even a spot in preschool.

Beginning in fiscal year 2009, Head Start rules stipulated that programs enroll at least 10 percent students with learning disabilities serious enough to require an IEP. To boot, new federal rule changes mean that Head Start programs could lose their funding if they don’t meet the target. School districts are responsible for evaluating children and designing their IEPs.

“It puts a tremendous burden on local school districts,” says Richard Smith, chief of the CPS Office of Special Education and Supports. Districts did not receive any additional funding to hire more staff.  But when evaluations are delayed – reducing the percentage of children with IEPs – funding for Head Start programs is jeopardized.

Here in Chicago, 9 percent of Head Start children had IEPs in August 2009, just 1 percentage point short of the target, according to the city’s Department of Family and Support Services.

At the time the Equip for Equality complaint was filed, Smith had just started his job and began meeting with Head Start centers, the agencies that work with Early Intervention families, and other groups. His first task was identifying students the district had failed to evaluate and lost track of, a process that took months.

Smith’s staff asked preschools and agencies for the names of any students they remembered referring for evaluations. As of mid-December, letters mailed to 1,600 families had yielded over 300 responses. So far, about 100 students have gotten IEPs completed. The district is working with about 200 families to enroll students in CPS and schedule and finish evaluations.

Ho says it is “not a very good sign and is troubling” that so few families have responded. And the evaluation process “can take quite a bit of time” even after families are in communication with the district, he says.

Smith says his office plans to send out letters again, and is also checking with those who submitted names, to see if they can reach out personally to the families involved.

To avoid roadblocks and speed up the process, CPS has set up three special evaluation sites around the city for new and previously referred Early Intervention students, and has assigned administrators to work temporarily on the evaluations.

But, Smith isn’t sure the three sites will be enough. “We are looking at our options to make sure we don’t have backlogs,” he says. “The preliminary numbers [of Early Intervention students] coming in are very high.”

CPS has also begun centralized tracking of Head Start evaluations being done at local schools, “so a school can’t just put it in a file cabinet,” Smith says. Central tracking also ensures that the district has data on how many evaluations are done within the required 60 days following a referral.

It’s unclear how many of the children who are evaluated will need special services. But the district has enough spots in self-contained special education classrooms to serve the roughly 450 students it expects will need to be placed there this school year, Smith says.

For students who can be taught in regular classes, there are well over 1,200 additional spots available in Head Start and Preschool for All programs, Smith says. He estimates the district will only need to use half of them. (However, not all of those are in classes with special education teachers, and the district may have to hire more.)

There will be some students with IEPs whose classroom teachers don’t have a special education background, Smith says. Where it is a good fit for the students’ needs, the district will use “itinerant consultative” special education teachers. Rather than just pulling students out of classes for one-on-one work, consultative teachers coach classroom teachers on how to tailor instruction for special-needs students (a model Smith says is consistent with best practices).

Other districts around the state have not had such serious problems transitioning students from Early Intervention into pre-kindergarten, Muhammad says.

One reason: In Chicago, the transition meetings happen entirely over the phone. “The school district has not been able to provide the capacity for in-person meetings,” Muhammad says.

Now, though, “they are starting to create some systems and the ability to track the children we are referring,” she notes. To help facilitate the process, La Rabida has started sending CPS a list every month of the children who need an evaluation in order to transition into preschool, she adds. The district evaluates and enrolls them.

Muhammad says she is hopeful about Smith’s efforts to resolve the issues and reach out to other agencies. “After all these years, at least we have a face with a name,” she says. “Historically, we didn’t really have a connection with anyone at CPS that could problem-solve and track down where families were in the system.”

Left without help from CPS for her son, Shavon Kalfus ultimately spent hundreds of dollars getting an evaluation and speech therapy for Rasheed.

Before he became too old for Early Intervention, she contacted Joplin Elementary to set up an evaluation so he could transition into preschool. But she didn’t get a response.

In April 2009, when Rasheed was 4, his pediatrician wrote a letter to the district requesting an evaluation. By the time Kalfus got a response from central office, it was December. Rasheed had turned 5. It was more than two years after he was supposed to have started receiving services and enrolled in preschool.

Shortly thereafter, in January 2010, Kalfus met with school staff, who refused to evaluate her son and told her he would “grow out of it.”

She got the district to set up another evaluation, which finally began in December 2010 but hasn’t been finished. Rasheed is now 6.

This isn’t the way the system is supposed to work, says Amy Zimmerman, director of the Chicago Medical-Legal Partnership for Children at Health and Disability Advocates, which has served Rasheed and other children and families whose transition out of Early Intervention has gotten off track.

“Once the child is kindergarten age, the hope is that many of these kids will have caught up and they’ll never have to access special education services again,” Zimmerman says. But if services are interrupted at age 3 because of school district delays, in some cases, “all those gains are going to be lost.”

Anecdotally, Zimmerman says, she is seeing fewer families seek legal help for problems with the transition from Early Intervention into pre-kindergarten. But because of the district’s previous inability to track evaluations, no one will ever know if CPS has found all the students who are part of the backlog.

“[CPS] will be seeing them again,” she says. “These are kids who will likely need to access services when they become school-age.