The only visible signs of change were the front lawns in the neighborhood, now less well-kept than in the past.  Drive through the neighborhood today and you will see men standing on the corner of my block, where they have stood for years. But what you will not see is the blood that has been shed on that same corner, of men and women, young people to old.  Yet the men continue to stand on that corner, where some of their own friends have lost their lives over the years. 

I started searching for answers to these killings in 2008 when my neighbor’s son was killed on that very corner.  My search led me to discover the concept of social-emotional learning and I am eternally grateful. I believe with all of my being that it gives hope to my community and can help stem the tide of violence in my neighborhood and others. 

When my neighbor knocked on my door that fateful morning to let me know that her son had been killed, gunned down one block from our homes, it is hard to explain the depth of my feelings.  When I finally could breathe, what I did was to evaluate myself and how I may have contributed to the senseless killing. I realized that not only didn’t I know my neighbor’s son, who had been killed--but I really didn’t know her or the other eight children she was raising as a single mother. 

Yes, I had spoken to her and her children in passing, but that was on the surface. Why hadn’t I gotten to know them beneath the surface?  I had been too busy with my own family, work, friends, etc., to get to know my neighbors.  How did my block become a killing field, nicknamed ‘Beirut,’ I later learned--and how do we work to stop it?  How did we get here? 

In a sense, I had been asleep.

Now that I was awake, I had to decide what to do next.  All this personal reflection was taking place around the same time our new president, Barack Obama, was elected.  On January 19, 2009 he asked all of us to volunteer for a day.  So I decided to look for an agency or organization my family could spend the day volunteering with, in my community or somewhere on the Southeast Side of Chicago. 

When I checked the website the president’s group had published, not one Southeast Side organization was listed. I cried, because it seemed nobody cared about the children in my neighborhood.  I called up my local park district and asked if I could volunteer. I started going to meetings

Fast-forward to the fall of 2013, when I was introduced to the concept of social-emotional learning and, for the first time, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.  CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, defines the concept as a process through which children and adults learn how to effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.  In an ideal world, social-emotional learning would be a part of every school curriculum in the nation. 

In the quest to stop the killings in our community, my neighbors and I started a movement to have social-emotional learning whole-heartedly implemented in the schools in our community.  In our research, we found that no elementary school in our area teaches social-emotional skills in any measurable way. 

We believe that if children are taught sound decision-making, relationship-building, conflict management and other valuable life skills from pre-school through 12^th grade, more of them will choose to go to college or the work force instead of joining gangs and participating in negative activity that will only land them in jail before they begin their lives. 

Like President Obama has said, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time.  We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for.  We are the change we seek.” 

When I woke up, I realized that I had to actively participate in leading my community out of Beirut. 

Laura Rabb Morgan

Founder and servant leader, South Chicago Block Club Coalition SEL Grassroots Movement

The switch happened not just to me, but to 67 other juniors in my school who were told we did not have enough credits. However, in my case and many others, we had between 11 and 14.5 credits, which is enough to be a junior and qualify to take the test. Some students did not have enough credits to be juniors in the first place, but that still does not explain why they were promoted to junior year in the fall and then demoted to sophomore status right before the Prairie State test.

Under so much pressure to raise its Prairie State test scores, the administration tried to take advantage of the promotion policy and demote a third of the junior class, just to keep us from taking the test and bringing down the school’s scores. I was having challenges at school but the last thing I would have expected is that my school system would demote me instead of supporting me.

This is not what school systems are supposed to do to students. They are supposed to provide extra support to students like me who don’t do well on tests or who might fall behind. But instead, they tried to make us disappear.

I care about my education. I want to go to college and to study music engineering. But when the future of a school rests on its test scores, students like me get demoted or pushed out. That’s why I joined the more than 100 juniors who boycotted the second day of the PSAE. We boycotted school, and the test, to send a message to Mayor Rahm Emanuel: School closings and student push-out, driven by high-stakes testing, must end.

Many adults disagreed with us, including CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett. Byrd-Bennett even tried to threaten and intimidate us, sending out a parent letter that insinuated that students who didn’t take the test on Wednesday would not be promoted to senior year.

This was a scare tactic that seemed designed to mislead parents. It did not give any information about the state-required make-up test in May or the established CPS practice of promoting juniors who sit for just one of the two days of the test. And what CPS didn’t realize was that these threats had actually already happened to me. CPS was threatening to withhold our promotion to senior year, but I had already been demoted in March as a direct result of Mayor Emanuel’s pressure on schools to raise test scores or face closure.

When these scare tactics did not prevent us from boycotting, CEO Byrd-Bennett scolded us, saying that “the only place that students should be during the school day is in the classroom with their teachers getting the education they need to be successful in life.” I agree with this statement, but does Mayor Emanuel? CPS pressure on schools to raise test scores actually leads to students getting pushed out of school. Many of the juniors who were demoted at my school started talking about dropping out because it was such a discouraging experience.

If CEO Byrd-Bennett and her boss, Mayor Emanuel, actually want every student to receive a good education every day, they should limit high-stakes tests, not use them to justify school closings in mainly African-American communities. The announcement that they are ending just one of a number of CPS tests given to kindergarteners is like the promise to give air-conditioning to students whose schools get closed. It’s a token effort given to us in the hopes that we will go away.

We want our boycott to be a wake-up call to Mayor Emanuel and CPS. We demand and end to testing-driven school closings, under-resourced schools, and student push-out. And we’re not going away.

Timothy Anderson is a student leader with Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools (CSOSOS) and Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE).

We find that capital costs used to justify closing North Lawndale schools have been inflated up to 3 times. Moreover, no capital projects are now in progress at the schools slated to be closed, and they are in excellent condition. We have also found, consistently, that CPS has misrepresented the amenities of the closing schools. In most instances, the closing schools have greater amenities than the receiving schools. For example, CPS has said that Pope and Henson don't have computer labs. Yet Henson has two technology labs, a library and a computer in every classroom, and Pope has a technology lab and a media center.

(Catalyst Chicago reported on the impact of closings in North Lawndale in the spring issue of Catalyst In Depth. Independent hearing officers have recommended against closing about a dozen schools, but none of those targeted in North Lawndale.)

Community residents have questioned whether the proposed school closings are providing cover for the Academy for Urban School Leadership, which operates turnaround schools, to consolidate its interests in North Lawndale. Bethune, an AUSL school, will close before being completely turned around. This will free capacity for AUSL to take over Chalmers, situated across the street from the northeast corner of Douglas Park. Pope, situated across the street from the southwest corner of Douglas Park, will close, and Johnson, which is an AUSL school, will assume its attendance boundaries. Johnson is situated across the street from Douglas Park on 14th Street. AUSL controls Collins High School, situated inside the park. After the dust settles, AUSL will control essentially every school in or around Douglas Park.

In addition, while Henson’s receiving school is Hughes, the new attendance boundaries are drawn such that the lion's share of Henson students will go to Herzl, another AUSL school. There are also connections to the current CPS leadership. Board President Vitale is the former board president of AUSL. CPS’ Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley is a former managing director of AUSL.

While we believe schools should be improved rather than closed, it should be noted that AUSL schools do not necessarily present better options. AUSL schools in North Lawndale have historically under-performed the North Lawndale Average.

More segregation?

School closings will also “re-segregate” the African American and Latino communities around Paderewski, and will not provide better opportunities for African American students. Currently, Paderewski is the only North Lawndale school whose attendance boundaries include North Lawndale and Little Village. Paderewski’s student population is 82% African American and 18% Latino. African American students generally live in Lawndale, north of Cermak Road, while the Latino students generally live in Little Village, south of Cermak Road.

Even though CPS has designated Cardenas and Castellanos as receiving schools for Paderewski, the new attendance boundaries for Cardenas and Castellanos are drawn such that the northern boundary is Cermak Road. Likewise, the southern boundary for Penn and Crown is Cermak. Effectively, Latino students will be sent to Cardenas or Castellanos, which are higher-performing, while African American students will go to Penn or Crown, both lower-achieving. Cardenas is Level 1 and Castellanos is Level 2, and both are nearly filled to capacity. Paderewski, Crown and Penn are all Level 3 schools, and Paderewski is the strongest of the three.

We ask that CPS put a moratorium on school closures until they can complete their master facilities planning process, mitigate any conflicts of interest and change any plans that could compound segregation.

Valerie F. Leonard

Co-Founder, Lawndale Alliance

 So it should be no surprise that our failure to keep up with the rest of the world on matters of education poses dire consequences for our economy and national prestige.

Here are some important statistics: the U.S. ranks 14^th in global college completion and by 2020, an estimated two-thirds of all jobs will require an education beyond high school.

We have seen a troubling trend for low-income and minority students — students who, in the past, have been left to fend for themselves.  This is particularly true for Latinos — who represent the fastest-growing, youngest demographic in the country. Thousands of Latino students, who have with the smarts and skills to succeed in college, aren’t even applying.  Increasing degree attainment among this particular demographic is essential, considering our nation’s goal to re-establish our place as the world’s leader with the highest proportion of college graduates by 2020.  As the U.S. strives for global competitiveness, training a new generation of workers is increasingly critical.

As a young man who grew up on the streets of the South Side of Chicago and today is a successful businessman, I have a particular appreciation for the importance of a well-educated, diverse workforce. I have seen the devastating effects of repeated cycles of poverty on those who can’t break it.  That’s why I feel so strongly that all students who are academically prepared for the intellectual demands of college — no matter their location, background or socioeconomic status — have a right to fulfill their potential.

I have known many Latino students, in particular, who have the academic potential to succeed in college but lack role models and resources. They need support and guidance. They need parents, teachers and schools that foster a college-going culture in the earliest grades.

If you work on behalf of students or feel your expertise could help to support traditionally underserved students, I strongly recommend that you attend “Prepárate™: Educating Latinos for the Future of America” from May 1 to 2, 2013 at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago. Hosted by the College Board, the conference will convene the voices and best practices of some of America’s most respected educators and advocates to improve academic success and opportunity for Latino students.  Teachers, counselors and administrators from high schools and colleges will address critical issues within Latino education and focus on successful strategies that include: creating opportunities for students to experience challenging high school course work that prepares them for college; strengthening students in math and science for STEM careers; and ensuring high school graduation and improving timely college graduation rates.  To register and for more information, please visit http://preparate.collegeboard.org.

We face, in no uncertain terms, a crisis that threatens our nation’s long-term health and prosperity; America’s success in the 20th century was achieved not only through the might of our arms but the dexterity of our minds.

It is our responsibility as parents, elected officials, administrators and business leaders to support each and every one of our students. We must be advocates and we must keep pushing our students to achieve greatness above and beyond even their own expectations. If we fail, our failure will become theirs. If we succeed, our success will echo for generations.

Martin Cabrera, Jr.

Founder, CEO

Cabrera Capital Markets

Recently, Chicago Public Schools announced a formal Instructional Materials Adoption Plan, starting with Literacy and Language materials for the 2013-2014 school year.   As a third-year teacher in the district, I value the autonomy I have in making curricular decisions.  Teachers should have the ability to design and create classroom curricula fitted to the unique needs and interests of their students.

Recently, our class has been engaged in a massive project to create a 40-inch by 60-inch, 3D map of the damage caused by the Great Chicago Fire.  The areas burned in the fire have orange buildings, and buildings that went untouched are green.  Roads are made from Popsicle sticks, as streets at the time were made of wood. Important historical sites are labeled.  Most importantly, the project was completely designed and created by the students and me, with students doing the majority of the work—I acted largely as the facilitator. 

Is the project messy?  Yes.  Have I wanted to pull my hair out because tape and construction paper are everywhere?  Of course.  But, have my students learned to work together? Are they learning material that is applicable to their lives? And have they begged me to work on the project every day since we began? Absolutely.    

The project does not just fulfill social studies goals. It also integrates a range of topics, as students read about the fire, write expository essays about the fire, write as though they are citizens during that time, record video explaining the project, and use a grid system to locate points on the map.  It is an all-encompassing learning experience. It is possible because of the freedom we currently have to plan curricula that is relevant to our interests.  It is also just the kind of curricula that could be used to meet the Common Core State Standards in my classroom.

Narrow choices 

I worry about what mandates will be placed on teachers with the new Instructional Materials Adoption Plan.  From what I have read, curriculum adoption will be universal across the district with only narrow choice options.  While new materials are being purchased to accommodate the Common Core, I wonder how teachers will have time to adequately learn a new curriculum for the 2013-2014 school year if many do not even know that new materials are being purchased and no dates have been given for their arrival or for trainings.

Recently CPS sent out an email inviting teachers to be a part of a committee to help identify Literacy and Language Instructional Materials.  I couldn’t wait to sign up.  I quickly emailed my principal to ask for permission to participate (yes, principal approval is mandatory), only to realize that the meetings were scheduled over spring break.  Like most teachers, I have already made plans for the week.  Spring break was just two weeks away when we received the initial email.

Teachers are professional educators who know how to design, plan, modify, and implement curriculum that works best for our students.  In fact, according to Domain 1 in the new Framework for Teaching, the framework used to evaluate teacher performance, teachers should be able to plan and prepare effective instructional outcomes, assessments, and instruction that demonstrate knowledge of content, pedagogy, and students.   I am uncertain about the flexibility teachers will have to demonstrate this skill or the ability administrators will have to evaluate it if curriculum is mandated. 

Teachers should play an integral role in the adoption and implementation of all new materials.  We are professionals who know our students and know our craft.  The new Framework for Teaching presents an opportunity for CPS to identify teachers who are particularly effective at designing innovative curricula, and target those teachers to advise the district or even coach colleagues.  Let us ensure life continues to be good for students and teachers alike, that they have a choice and play an active role in the learning and instruction in their classrooms.

Paige Nilson is a teacher at Hamilton Elementary and a member of Teach Plus, an organization that supports teachers in urban schools.

This ethos, which has shaped the American experience from the inception of our nation, explains why we’ve devoted so much time, attention and energy to public education over the last 40 years.  After all, an individual’s chances of gaining employment—especially high wage, good benefit employment—are more closely correlated with educational attainment now than ever before.  So it’s no surprise polling data consistently shows Americans believe every child should receive a good public education. 

Yet despite this broadly shared belief, America’s public education system fails to provide each child with a meaningful educational opportunity.  While there are many reasons for this failure, one core barrier stands out: the way our nation funds schools.  It is this very issue that motivated Congressmen Mike Honda of California and Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania, to work with the Obama Administration and create the Equity and Excellence Commission under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education.  I had the distinct honor of serving on this Commission from its inception on February 2, 2011, through issuance of our final report “For Each and Every Child” two years later, on February 2, 2013.

The commission’s charter challenged us to take the education funding issue head on, and in meaningful new ways. For instance, while states currently have the primary obligation to fund schools, the commission was charged with delineating “how the federal government can increase educational opportunity by improving school funding equity.”  In addition to rethinking the federal role, the commission was tasked with making “recommendations for restructuring school finance systems to achieve equity in the distribution of educational resources and further student performance, especially for students at the lower end of the achievement gap.” 

This meant the commission had to identify: (1) what educational resources and other services are needed to provide a meaningful educational opportunity to all children, with a particular focus on children who have traditionally struggled to achieve academically, like those who live in poverty or are English language learners; and (2) how to pay for it.  This focus on ensuring adequate capacity to educate at-risk children was challenging, but also the absolute right thing to do.

That’s because public education in America is “broken” not because it fails to educate all children well, but because it is under-resourced to provide every child—regardless of race, ethnicity or income class—with a quality education.  Indeed, in most communities where resources are abundant and available, the public education delivered is competitive with the best performing systems in the world.

The Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, measures how students in different Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries stack up in reading, math, and science. When the 2009 scores were released last year, the overall U.S. tally of 500 was middling.  But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Poverty, unequal resources 

A study that divided U.S. schools into cohorts based on poverty found that non-poor U.S. children performed quite well. Indeed, American schools with less than 10 percent of students living in poverty scored 551 on the PISA, best in the world for nations with a similar poverty profile, with Finland coming in second at 536. American schools with poverty levels between 10 percent and 24.9 percent also placed first when measured against nations with similar poverty profiles. In fact, PISA scores of American schoolchildren did not start plummeting until poverty concentrations climbed to significant levels.  

This puts the real problem in stark relief: America isn’t broadly failing to educate all children, but it is failing poor and low-income children.  And a big reason for that is resources—or the lack thereof.  See, we know quite a bit about the educational practices and resources that have been proven to enhance student achievement over time.  We just don’t have a national finance system that can cover the cost of providing them in poor and low-income communities.  Too often, a state’s funding of public education is tied to what decision-makers believe that state’s fiscal system can afford, rather than the actual cost of educating each child.  This encourages an over-reliance on local property taxes to fund schools, which in turn results in significant, meaningful disparities in the resources available among wealthy, middle-income and poor communities. 

The net result: American children receive qualitatively different educations simply based on the state in which they were born, the district in which they are enrolled, and the school to which they are assigned.

To address this clear inequity, our commission issued numerous recommendations for how state governments should determine what it will take to provide each child with a meaningful education, including how to pay for it in a fair, sustainable way.  But we didn’t stop there.  We also recommended that the federal government take a substantially greater role in covering the cost of educating our nation’s at-risk students.  This is especially important given the widely varying fiscal capacities and demographics of the 50 states. 

It was incredibly difficult reaching consensus on these contentious issues.  Indeed, the very composition of the commission itself made it doubtful that any agreement on school funding equity could be reached.  Not only were a broad array of world-views represented, the commission included members who literally were on opposing sides in education funding lawsuits.  Yet despite all that, we voted unanimously to endorse the final recommendations contained in the report, and with good reason. 

See, it shouldn’t matter if a child is born in Mississippi, Connecticut, Illinois or California. That child is an American and our entire nation has the responsibility to ensure he or she receives a high-quality education.

Ralph Martire is the executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability and served as a commissioner on the U. S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission.

Teacher strikes, school closings, new standards, new standardized tests, new teacher evaluations, too much testing, unequal resources between neighborhoods, charters vs. traditional school advocates, increasing childhood poverty, lack of recognition for schools that are doing well, reduced resources overall--so where are teacher voices in all of this?

Some teachers speak out bravely. Some complain angrily. Some moan mainly to each other. What we lack is a wider sharing with the public about effective classrooms where teachers are creative and inspiring and where kids are engaged and learning in depth. Teachers feel undervalued, misunderstood, not heard. Yet it’s not in the tradition of teaching in America to sound our horns in public.

Increasingly, though, some educators are calling for more exercise of teachers’ voices. And teachers can begin simply and effectively by telling their stories – not complaining about challenges we face, real as those can be, but telling what our classrooms are like, at our best. Without this understanding, it’s impossible for citizens, parents, or policy-makers to know how to support our work. If we want people to understand and value what we do, it’s up to us to tell them. Think of this as “building our brand.” That’s what Coca-Cola does; it’s what Ford Motor Co. does. And in America, that’s what we must do.

(Note for hurried readers: Of course I want you to hear all my reasoning. But if you already agree with me and are short of time right now, I still want you to go to the end to see what I’m asking – namely for teachers, as well as appreciative parents, to write your own great classroom story and send it to me to see about getting it into print.)

Wonder whether teachers’ stories can really get heard? Here are a few excellent examples from other parts of the country:

• Teachers connected with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project provide monthly feature articles for the Hampshire Gazette, a local newspaper there. The teacher who facilitates this says that area superintendents love it.
• University of Georgia Professor Peter Smagorinsky writes portraits of outstanding teachers, published regularly by journalist Maureen Downey in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
• Atlanta TV station WXIA features a weekly video portrait of an excellent teacher, nominated by parents and moderated by reporter Donna Lowry

Building public trust

We’re not saying that all schools are wonderful and all teachers excellent. We know there are struggling, alienated, burned-out teachers in some places, and schools that have become dysfunctional organizations. But improving them means not simply judging and firing teachers--and where would all those supposedly better teachers come from, anyway?--but helping them, starting with a clear view of what a great classroom looks like, in its many forms and styles. It means understanding a school as a complex social organization where each adult influences the others – rather than just a disconnected collection of separate classrooms. And we can best start on this with our stories.

Certainly unions and teachers organizations can contribute to this informing, this education of the public. But while these groups play an important part, unfortunately their voices are too often perceived as “special interests.” However, when large numbers of individuals speak out from their own experiences and expertise, change can begin to happen.

True, the positive approach I propose will not solve all of our problems in education. But if it helps build public trust and support, it will lay the groundwork.

Now, there are obstacles to teachers speaking out more publicly, even when speaking positively:

• Lack of specific skills. Writing effectively in public forums, on blogs and websites, in newspapers, requires particular kinds of rhetorical skill that many of us have not had an opportunity to learn.
• Lack of time. A teacher’s first responsibility is of course to his or her students. The work is intense in any educational setting. Most non-educators, having no idea how intense, are shocked, if they change careers, when they first step into the classroom. And with new mandates, larger class sizes, and little time for planning or collaboration, teachers are more stressed than ever.
• Fear of administrative reprisal. Many teachers worry they’ll anger their principal if they go public in any way, except perhaps through informational messages to parents. This worry may or may not be justified in specific schools or situations.
• Believing no one will listen. Some teachers have described attempts to communicate in their schools on some issues, only to be rebuffed, or worse, ignored. Others feel that decisions are made by powerful voices with money and influence, leaving them helpless.
  

New strategies from organizers

However, some of us have been learning from community organizers, who, having faced similar obstacles in many struggles over the recent course of American history, have learned how to overcome them. (I’d like to especially credit Kim Zalent at Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, an organizer with whom I worked for several years, for what I’ve learned about this.) Organizers have explicit training in how to strategically inform and energize people, and how to thoughtfully exert influence in a community or organization.

Here are some strategies I’ve learned from this thinking: 

• Hold one-on-one discussions with key people – the principal, supportive fellow teachers, active parents – not to argue for specific actions, but to build trust as a basis for later collaboration. Talk with teachers who are like-minded so you aren’t acting alone. But also meet with and listen to people who don’t see things your way.
• Build connections with parents, community members, and groups by finding common ground, involving them in the school, and visiting them on their turf. People outside the school can often be more believable spokespersons for your work than you.
• Document meaningful data about students’ learning in your classroom, to concretely show the important learning that takes place.
• Get your message out through newspaper articles, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, e-mail, letters to parents, etc. Craft messages to share ideas positively. Messages must be well-crafted so we don’t become defensive or self-serving.

I’ll share just a few thoughts on the first strategy for now. It’s not directly about speaking out publicly, but creates the base for it. Ask almost any organizer about his or her most valuable tool, and you’ll be told: “The one-on-one meeting.” When you sit down with an individual over coffee, not in a public forum, it becomes possible to non-defensively exchange stories about how you came to the work you do, what each of you values, and how you think about your situation. Doing this even briefly, but repeatedly, with a principal can build trust and understanding. Then later on when you approach him or her about writing an article on good things happening in your classroom or the school, the principal can trust your motives.

For more detail on the strategies I’ve outlined, plus good examples of teachers’ public writings, check out my website, www.teachersspeakup.com .

So here’s the point: I’ve talked with a number of news editors and reporters in the area who are strongly interested in teachers’ stories. I urge teachers – or parents, principals, or interested community members – to write and send me, through the website, stories about vivid moments of great teaching and learning. I can work to get some of them published in local newspapers and/or online. (This could include Catalyst Chicago, we hope, but also more general media.) I’ll be happy, too, to give feedback to writers who wish it. I’m not just seeking the nodding of heads here. I want action.

Steve Zemelman

Director, Illinois Writing Project

At UNO, I’ve heard of teachers working average of 10 hours a day with minimal preparatory periods and only three 25 minute duty-free lunches a week at pay that is 20% less than the average teacher in Chicago. They have few protections on the job and teachers have reported being fired for breathing a hint of criticism at UNO's CEO Juan Rangel. He, in contrast, is paid many times his average teacher, making over $200,000 a year for running 13 schools, while Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett makes nearly as much for operating an entire district of over 600 schools.

This state of affairs contributes to the extreme turnover of teachers at UNO, where over half the educators leave every two years.

Additionally, students are often taught in over-crowded classrooms that average 15% larger than all of CPS, despite UNO's contention that their school expansion will help ease overcrowding. This is unjust and unsustainable for the teachers and their schools’ community.

Imagine an UNO where management did not squander tax-payer dollars on political favoritism and clout and instead invested that money in educational programs, retaining staff, lower class sizes and serving the people who learn and work in their schools. If UNO educators had a union they could feel able to question the cronyism that is rampant throughout the organization and insist that resources be directed to where they belong, their classrooms. 

UNO teachers must be empowered to speak out. Almost four years ago, my colleagues and I founded the first charter school teachers union in Chicago and we’ve been growing ever since. Our union has grown to represent over 350 teachers in just three years.  I am proud to have the ability to speak out about issues that impact my colleagues and our students in Chicago’s charter schools and I believe all teachers should have the same opportunity.  UNO teachers, contact Chicago ACTS and let’s talk about how you can affect change at UNO.

Brian Harris

President, Chicago Alliance of Charter Teaches and Staff, Local 4343, IFT-AFT, AFL-CIO

Special Education Teacher, CICS Northtown Academy

Yet when Advance Illinois recently released its 2012 report card on Illinois public education, early education received for the second time an Incomplete.  This was informed by national rankings, enrollment patterns and data when available on dozens of key metrics. Significant information gaps persist in early education, however, that, as a state, we must address if we are to target resources and services to the students most in need of early support.

Providing a strong, early start to young children is one of the state’s most powerful opportunities to close the achievement gap before it begins, and we collectively must build upon our early work in this area.

First, however, I would offer some context for the grade and direction for how Illinois might fill the information gaps that continue in early education.

New information on kindergarten readiness

Illinois improved access to early education during the past decade and today enrolls 20 percent of 3-year-olds and 29 percent of 4-year-olds in state-funded preschool programs, making Illinois a leading state in this effort. The rate of growth slowed recently, however, as the economy worsened and state funding declined. Unfortunately, fewer children may be served in the coming year due to a $25 million cut to the state’s early childhood block grant this year.

National research suggests that before they even begin kindergarten, 4-year-olds who live in poverty are nearly 14 months behind their classmates. But in Illinois, when students arrive in kindergarten – the front door of the K-12 education system – the state knows little about where they stand cognitively, emotionally and socially. This critical information would help educators target resources and supports that students need early in their academic lives. As importantly, information about students’ kindergarten readiness encourages families to engage sooner and in smarter ways.

The good news is this fall, Illinois piloted a developmentally-appropriate kindergarten readiness measure that is expected to roll out statewide in 2015-16. This is not a paper and pencil test. And this is not about high-stakes exams. This is about giving teachers tools, training and a common language to observe and describe student development and identify what we need to do – as educators, as parents, as adults – to meet them where they are.

The lack of clarity about student readiness is not the only information gap that constrains Illinois’ early education efforts.

As a state, we know little about the quality of children’s early education experiences, the demographic and economic backgrounds of students served in state-funded programs and whether students eligible for bilingual early education instruction, in fact, receive the services that state law now requires. Such information would help identify gaps and target resources at a time when Illinois has finite amounts of them.

Because of this critical information gap, Advance Illinois assigned the state an incomplete for early education, as it did two years ago in The State We’re In: 2010.  (Illinois’ K-12 and postsecondary education systems received a C- and C+ respectively.)

Notably, Illinois held its ground as student poverty increased.  The next step is to ensure that more students achieve at high level.  Illinois faces a real challenge in determining how best to develop and support its youngest children, particularly those born in poverty.

Whether supported by research or our own observations, we know the early years provide the best window to eliminate the achievement gap before it takes root. This is vital if the state is to improve academic outcomes and opportunities for all students.

Reading by 4th grade essential

The hard truth is Illinois is not getting the majority of students where they need to go, and this fact has not changed in the past decade. When Advance Illinois looked at key milestones in a student’s academic life, we found that one-third of students succeed. For the rest, the education system simply isn’t working.

This is particularly striking in 4th grade. One-third of Illinois 4^th-graders read proficiently, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress, and decades of research suggests this is one of the most powerful predictors of future success. Students who do not transition from learning to read in the early grades to reading to learn by this point often fall further behind and are at greater risk of dropping out.

The trend continues throughout the state’s education system. For every 100 Illinois students who begin high school, for instance, less than one-third will go on to earn a two- or four-year degree.

As a state, we cannot wait until high school to intervene. The good news is we’re not.

For the first time in a long time, Illinois has a broad reform plan that aims to strengthen the education system from the early years through college graduation day. This requires building upon initiatives that enroll more children in early education programs, creating a developmentally-appropriate method to gauge student development early in their schooling, providing school report cards that help families understand how schools and districts serve students and how to engage in their child’s education as well as raise expectations for students and educators alike.

Lasting improvement takes time and the impact on student achievement does not happen overnight. Funding cuts made in recent years exacerbate what already is challenging work. But Illinois is on its way and can succeed.

As a state, we all have work to do.

Robin M. Steans is executive director of Advance Illinois.

In the 1970s, when I began my journey in this field, the emphasis and funding stream was focused on the seemingly self-evident good of exposing students to works from a variety of art forms. Thus, we cycled millions of kids through our respective theaters, opera houses, museums and concert halls along with providing countless assembly programs, residencies and touring productions in their schools to reveal the essences of each individual art form. Vestiges of this “exposure” model are still in evidence, reflected in the education programs of many major arts providers.

Spurred by the publication of “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, the educational establishment embarked upon reinventing the wheel every 10 years or so: Goals 2000 in the 1990s, No Child Left Behind in 2002, and now Common Core Standards in 2012.  The arts in education community followed suit, especially in view of the fact that the hundreds of millions of dollars expended on exposure did not seem to slow down the overall decline of the arts in schools.

(Parenthetically, none of the dire predictions of “A Nation at Risk” have come to pass, not one of the Goals 2000 has been achieved and the No Child Left Behind framework has crumpled under the burdens of its own proscriptive edicts.)

However, all this turmoil gave birth to the “teaching artist” who would become the primary interface between arts providers and classrooms. Neither completely an educator nor wholly a practicing artist, this type of arts education has increasingly become a separate employment category for those idealists intent on changing the world through the arts. Their desire to make a difference is shared with the majority of educators who labor mightily in dysfunctional educational systems that promote data over efficacy and emphasize time spent on documentation over time spent on teaching and learning.

Artists can’t solve social ills

But I have become aware of an ethos held by many in Chicago’s arts education community that may, in the long term, be counterproductive to our advocacy.  This is the widely embraced view of “social rectification” through the arts: A belief that the arts can “fix” what’s wrong with kids or that the arts will better our society in general if arts programs are promoted as agents for social justice.  A laudatory example of this effort is the “Now is the Time” initiative undertaken by numerous Chicago theatre companies to combat youth and gang violence.

I would like to offer an analogy in reference to these well-meaning efforts. For five years I was a volunteer emergency medical technician.  As part of my 350 + hours of training, I was taught what to do if a child suffered a potentially lethal asthma attack or an incidence of anaphylactic shock.  There is nothing in my experience as an artist, or in any other artist’s background, that would equip us to know how to deal with either of those two events. 

However, many of my peers seem to believe that their training, experience and study as artists has equipped them to deal with children’s emotional or psychological trauma—which is, I submit, a much more complex challenge than an asthma attack. The debilitating effects of such trauma on children are at the root of efforts that address issues such as bullying, teen pregnancy, drugs, and a host of other deleterious conditions. But I believe it is naïve to assume that we, as artists, are adequately equipped to significantly diagnose and address the root causes of such pathologies without specific, rigorous training in the various forms of art therapy.

My fear is that we are positioning the arts at the bookends of our society – with access either for the disadvantaged or the affluent.  We will either underwrite the arts to ameliorate the negative outcomes experienced by at-risk children, or we will support the arts to provide the opportunity for those who can afford it to experience great works as a luxury product.  Both approaches leave out the vast middle ground of those who perceive arts education as only for “Glee” wannabes (i.e., kids who want to be artists) or as remediation for the less capable. 

But what most people really want is for kids to become self-supporting, and they realize that the path to this goal leads through a good education.  This aspiration offers us a much more fortuitous approach and justification.

Help students develop academic ‘habits of mind’

The educational status quo is undergoing a major paradigm shift through the adoption of Common Core State Standards and its attendant dictates. At the heart of this new framework for teaching and learning is less reliance on access to and delivery of content and more focus on what to do with it; even a cursory overview of what I would call Common Core key terms reflects this. Instruction will be focused on having students analyze, evaluate, assess, integrate, reason abstractly, collaborate, demonstrate, make use of structure and develop.  These and many other similar concepts will profoundly affect how teachers educate students. 

These terms are also indicative of what artists do. We can help develop the habits of mind necessary for students to successfully function in an increasingly arts-infused society and 21^st Century economy.  To cite but one example of this evolution: the Internet, which is a visual and aural—that is, artistic—medium.

This means that we as arts educators, in and outside of school time, need to recalibrate how we implement arts education and go beyond having students remembering lines, staging, notes, choreography or terminology.  It means to integrate the more important mental constructs into classes and programs by design, thereby reinforcing students’ application of them in other academic areas and increase overall student achievement.

To effectively traverse the changing education landscape, we must reevaluate how we deliver arts education by taking a hard look at what we do and why we do it.  All too often, I witness “confirmation bias” in our field and incidences in which colleagues take up residence in an echo chamber of group-think without questioning the basis on which we make our assumptions. 

We will accomplish little if we only align our energies with social remediation without significantly deepening students’ academic capacities ……. and we can. 

After all, if you don’t think arts educators should be held accountable for overall student achievement, why should they be working in a school?  Our artistic ability is contained in the one percent of our DNA that distinguishes us from our nearest primate relative – the chimpanzee.  In many profound ways, it is this quality that makes us, us.

More than ever, we have the chance to be seen as able to contribute something much more valuable than “enrichment” – an appellation that is, in reality, only a euphemism for “non-essential.”

Also by Taylor: Arts education essential for city's future

Bruce Taylor is a consultant and the author of "The Arts Equation" published by Watson-Guptil. He has served as a cultural envoy for the U.S. State Department and as the director of education for Washington National Opera.

We are a city in crisis—because we are a city of poverty.

“We cannot ‘fix’ what is wrong with our schools until we are prepared to have an honest conversation about poverty and race,” said Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Karen Lewis in a speech before the City Club of Chicago on November 20, 2012. Many schools targeted for action by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are in communities where drug abuse, gang warfare and unemployment are rampant, but instead of working to change the community, CPS chooses to target the school. It’s akin to putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg.

We all need to recognize that poverty must be addressed if we are to close the education gap and provide the best quality of life for our students and their families.

Gun control is a crucial element in this struggle, but gun violence flourishes only amidst darkness and despair. The lack of gainful employment, basic social services, mental health facilities and other supports are directly related to poverty, which is a precursor to inner-city violence. Ending the cycle of poverty is the only chance of saving our students and their community.

The CTU would like to invite our members of the Illinois General Assembly, Chicago Board of Education officials and policy experts to help us design a nationwide tour of schools with successful social and emotional supports that will help us improve, broaden and expand the services currently available to Chicago students.

Some suggested stops on the tour: 

• Visit the six national Blue Ribbon schools in Newark, New Jersey.

• Investigate the impact of the Global Village Zone in Newark, New Jersey, which is an effort to coordinate instruction, teacher coaching and family social services in seven high-need neighborhood schools in the city's Central Ward.

• Visit Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles, California—a school that has implemented successful social justice and community engagement programs.

• Assess the impact of higher school funding formulas in New Jersey and New York

• Examine the Learning Opportunities Index and Model Schools interventions in Toronto, Canada.

These are just a few of the models that work to engage students and parents and address poverty and violence. The CTU welcomes a dialogue on which programs make the most sense to replicate locally. Our goal is to act quickly to address the tremendous loss of life and human potential that continues to afflict our great city. 

Jesse Sharkey, Vice President

Chicago Teachers Union

The opportunity to be part of the hiring process for my school’s new principal came from my position on the local school council, or what I like to call a “mini school board.”  The autonomy Chicago Public Schools have given individual schools through LSCs has, I believe, been very effective in giving teachers and the community a stronger voice in education policy in Chicago.

LSCs, established in each school, are comprised of six parent representatives, two community members and three school employees (two teachers and one non-teaching representative). This committee has full authority to hire and evaluate the school’s principal, as well as make decisions on curriculum and school-based policies and help develop and approve a school budget.

This is distinct from the common practice of having an elected school board make these decisions. In most school districts, these decisions are made externally, and schools are not offered the same opportunities to make individual choices for themselves.

At the moment, my school, like others in CPS, is at risk of losing its autonomy through the weakening of LSCs, which have been under assault throughout Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s current tenure. Our current city-wide school board is appointed by the mayor, and many Chicagoans believe it’s time for the city to have an elected school board instead.  Earlier this month, the question of creating an elected school board was on the ballot in many precincts, and 90 percent of Chicago voters in those precincts voted yes.

Elected board important, but so are LSCs

I don’t disagree with the importance of an elected board. I believe in the democratic process and think that there are many positives that will come from electing board members - possibly most importantly, pushing the general population to pay more attention to what is going on in public education. I am only concerned that this loud push for an elected school board is undermining the efficacy of LSCs.  If Chicagoans had a better understanding that LSCs were an effective system of managing our individual schools, perhaps we would not be as anxious about a mayoral-appointed school board’s control over our local schools.  The conversation needs to focus not just on electing our district-wide school board, but on how the school board and LSCs can work together more closely.

My experience on my school's LSC has largely been a positive one. Despite the large amount of time the principal selection process demands, I have been impressed with and honored by the opportunity to impact my school and advocate for my students and colleagues. I think that many teachers, parents and community members would be interested in being elected to their LSC if they realized how effective they actually are. As a council member, I have had influence on not just our school’s leadership, but also on our curriculum options, technology offerings and fundraising opportunities.

These may seem like small issues, but when looking at an individual school and its intricacies, is it not much better to rely on the judgment of people who are actually inside the school on a daily basis? Each school has its own personality - different needs, different ways of doing things, and is thus in need of governance not just from a district-wide ruling body, but from people whose lives are entwined with what goes on there.  Being on an LSC may become a more desirable appointment if it meant opportunities to participate in decisions being made by the district school board as well.

LSC appointments might be more attractive if council members were offered the opportunity to meet with the school board to discuss important issues such as school closings, which most directly affect schools with higher populations of low-income students - the same schools in which it is most difficult to convince people to join their LSC.

While I am fully aware of the shortcomings of the current LSC system - the lack of proper training and guidance when it comes to selecting a principal is one of the most glaring problems - I believe that trading or weakening the LSC system for an elected school board would be disenfranchising to schools that are in desperate need of having their own voice in CPS policymaking.  As a city, we will benefit from having both an elected school board and a strong LSC system. 

It would be a step backwards for us to gain a city-wide voice in electing our school board, if at the same time we cut off individual schools’ autonomy and strangle the voices of parents, teachers and community members in schools that are most in need of a platform.

Kylene Young is an LSC teacher representative at Pulaski International School, where she is a middle-grades special education inclusion teacher. She is also a TeachPlus Teaching Policy Fellow.

I’ve spent considerable time recently trying to understand why schools in several other cities seem to be outperforming ours.  If we take reading proficiency in 4^th grade as one measure of doing well, for example, about 18% of Chicago’s children reached that mark on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Of 21 cities tested,  NAEP ranks 12 of them as doing significantly better than Chicago, among them Boston, New York, Austin, Atlanta , Houston, and Miami; at least 7 districts have 30% or more of students reaching proficiency.  Chicago does better than a few cities, including Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Detroit, the latter trailing the nation at 7%.   

There are measures on which we look a little better or a little worse, but overall, Chicago is squarely in the middle of the national pack. After twenty years of vigorous reform -- If it’s twenty years old, can it still be called “reform?” – our schools still look mediocre. Why can’t we do better?  During the first few days of the strike I sent a letter to the Tribune suggesting that part of our problem may be a deeply dysfunctional civic culture, most easily exemplified by the state of educational journalism in some of our most influential media outlets.  At the time, I was complaining about the one-dimensional and static portrayal of the teachers’ union, the polarizing rhetoric, the oversimplification of important issues, and the uncritical advocacy of “reforms” with little empirical support.  I complained too soon.  Had I but waited a few days, I would have had so much more to complain about.

Setting a low bar

Consider the breathless editorial (on September 19) with which the Tribune greeted the end of the strike, opening with:

Wednesday will be another school day for 566 students at Fuentes Elementary charter school on Chicago's Northwest Side. Fuentes isn't a traditional Chicago public school, but part of the United Neighborhood Organization network of charter schools, run under different rules without union teachers.

Fuentes students — who outperform students in traditional Chicago public schools in reading and math — have been in class since Aug. 6. They haven't missed a single day of instruction while 350,000 of their peers have slept late and waited for striking teachers to return to classrooms.

“Let 100 Fuentes Elementaries bloom” proclaimed the subhead.   With all respect for that school-community, the choice of that school as some kind of exemplar says a lot about what ails the city.  If we look at 2012 test scores, Fuentes has 82% of its students meeting or exceeding state standards, better than the 74% rate for traditional schools or the 76% average for charters.   Still, over a hundred schools outperform Fuentes by that measure, many of them traditional neighborhood schools with student bodies that don’t reflect any form of selection.  Let us hold some of them up for praise as well.  (I know, by the way, that at least a handful of Chicago charters are making earnest efforts to shape student bodies that better reflect the city’s student population, for which they should be commended.)  One of my pet peeves is that when our schools do good things, they should get more public praise than they typically do but that should apply to all schools, not just those of a certain type.

More importantly, using ISAT scores in this way sets a pretty low bar. One of the ways in which our newspapers have dumbed down the conversation in Chicago is by uncritical use of the “meets and exceeds” standard.  I’m fairly certain that every education reporter knows that state standards are so low that just knowing which students meet standards tells you very little. One of the things adding rancor to school closing debates is that CPS has in the past made decisions about which schools stay open based on very small differences on a very dubious test.  The students who score in the “exceeds” category are the ones likely to do well subsequently.  The 2011 exceeds number for Fuentes is about 16%,  just under the city average. So we are saying, “Let 100 Average Schools Bloom?” Only in Chicago.

It can be very instructive to look at the ISAT exceeds category across school types. The latest data I have comparing charters, traditional public schools, and magnets are from 2010, when traditionals showed about of 11% of children in the exceeds category,  charters showed 12% but magnets, which select their student bodies in the same way charters do, showed 24% of students exceeding.  On average, then, the charter vs. traditional schools debate is over that 1% difference.  The starting point for discussion should be that both charters in Chicago and traditional schools in Chicago are failing the overwhelming majority of their children. Magnets are showing substantially more promise, and maybe more of our citywide discussion should be about what they are doing, whether it can be expanded and how fairly they are distributed across the city.  I know CPS is committed to expanding the magnet program, which is good, but that is different from giving them the kind of place in our civic conversation the charter issue has held.

Aspiring to mediocrity

Our problem in Chicago is that we think prosperity means having ten cents more than a beggar. The September 19 Tribune editorial offers an even better example of aspiring to mediocrity: 

CPS has other powerful tools to revive troubled schools, including its successful "turnaround" program in which the district replaces school leadership and staff, revamps curriculum, beefs up security and brings in more social workers and counselors. This strategy is yielding impressive student gains in many cases. CPS should put more schools into turnaround.

By way of full disclosure, I was, once upon a time, very hopeful about what turnarounds could do.  That was before the Consortium on Chicago School Research released its evaluation some months ago. It is instructive to look back at some of the headlines with which those results were greeted:

Chicago Sun-Times, “Editorial: CPS must learn from successful turnarounds.”

Chicago Tribune,”Progress seen at city ‘turnaround’ schools”

Catalyst Chicago, “Turnaround study shows only small gains”

The Catalyst headline is the one most aligned with reality.  The research showed that at the high school level there was little difference between turnarounds and comparisons.  At the elementary school level, over four years, schools made up half the distance between themselves and the system average, and the pace of change may be improving.   One doesn’t want to disparage hard work in tough schools, but four years to get halfway to average in a system where most children are failing is hardly what people envisioned from the turnaround experiment and it is long way from being “a powerful tool” for anything.   

Here again, looking at other cities can be instructive.  In their first year, Philadelphia’s  K-8 turnarounds outperformed comparison schools by 14%  in math (students reaching proficiency on state test) and by 8% in reading.   In Philadelphia, the teachers union was involved in the design of the schools  -- I used to call this the world’s meanest union-  there was a provision for community advisory councils and it looks like there was considerable concern with developing stronger teacher efficacy.  We can’t say whether these differences had to do with the outcomes, but the point is that different cities have very different ways of thinking about the same reform and the more we know about that, the more likely we are to ask the right questions about reforms in Chicago.

Caution on charter expansion

The main message of the September 19 editorial is that we should be expanding charters as rapidly as possible.   It’s not clear what evidence supports that conclusion.  We’ve already noted that test score data in Chicago might, with some charity, be called a push.  I don’t have comprehensive data, but I think charter high schools are frequently improving graduation rates, as would be expected from smaller schools. I understand that in other cities, there are data suggesting parents find charters more responsive. Given the number of stories I hear from Chicago parents about feeling pushed out and demeaned by the professionals in traditional public schools, I wouldn’t be surprised if that is a pattern here as well.  Still, there is nothing compelling in the local record of charters. Nationally, I take it that the most authoritative national study is still the 2009 report from the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes at Stanford, concluding that while 17% of charters showed significantly better academic achievement than traditional neighborhood schools, about 46% showed about the same level of achievement and 37% showed significantly worse.

Charters also seem to suffer high student turnover – over 50% in three years in some cases – with the students who leave being disproportionately low-achievers. There are places – Boston and New York being among the most cited –where charters seem more likely to outperform other schools, but I would note that Boston and New York seem to do a lot of things more effectively than we do; that is, the differences may have more to do with infrastructure than model.   If we look at early reading on the NAEP specifically among poor children, of the seven poorest –performing districts,  5 are heavily chartered, with 20% or more of their students in charters (Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, DC and Milwaukee).  That is not causal data but it is also not data that makes a case for more charters. If we as a city are going to make a substantial commitment to charters, we need to reason to believe that at scale they are substantially better than alternatives and I have yet to see that data.

We should be especially cautious of rapid expansion.  The history of urban school reform is littered with cases where rapid expansion undermined promising work.  Projects outrun their supply lines.  The little data we have nationally on teacher turnover in charter networks may be an indication that some of them are already reaching that point.  It is not clear that Chicago’s central office, after much turnover of key personnel and the downsizing of some key offices is in much of a position to support rapid expansion of charters or anything else (which, again, tells us that the discussion we should be having is about building system infrastructure, not expanding this week’s fad).  It would be foolish not to attempt some expansion of our best charter networks, but it should be done with due caution and in the context of renewed emphasis on developing the schools we already have, irrespective of type.  

A real conversation on the future of schools

I don’t want to leave the impression that media coverage of these issues has been entirely one-sided.   A recent (October 24)  Tribune  front-page story carried the headline “A Cautionary Tale on Charter Schools.”  The story chronicled the long-running problems with the performance of charters in Ohio.  It missed some important points but perhaps it was a step toward a more cautious discussion.  Chicago media should also be commended for their persistent sense of urgency.   They act as if the current system is intolerable, which is right. One of the ugliest notes creeping back into the national conversation is the idea that maybe schools can’t really do anything for poor children after all; the real issue is poverty.  We have to acknowledge without blinking that poverty damages children but we also have to recognize that the stronger schools and school systems do much better by children than schools where the leadership spends its time whining about poverty.  Public figures who don’t get that, forfeit their right to be taken seriously.

Other cities spend more time talking about building real partnerships with parents and communities, about building trust across sectors, about benchmarking themselves against genuinely high standards, about balancing business expertise and educational expertise,  about dramatically ratcheting up the quality of instructional leadership and support, about having resources follow need,  about making sure children get a strong early start, about improving all schools, about enriching opportunities for learning beyond school hours, about access to and transparency of information. All of these conversations exist in Chicago but they tend to be pushed to the side by our bloody wars over one oversold silver bullet after another.  Sometimes we seem like children desperately defending our little mudpiles. 

Part of what is so frustrating is that I know people in the neighborhoods are past ready for a real conversation about the future of their schools, even though they know it cannot be an easy conversation.  Instead, they get one quick fix after another thrown at them. This is a failure of leadership to frame the conversation the city needs.

Charles M. Payne is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. He is the author of So Much Reform, So Little Change, which examines the persistence of failure in urban school districts. Dr. Payne served as chief education officer under former Schools CEO Terry Mazany.

Strike or no strike, do we have enough excellent teachers? If the new teacher evaluation system that has fueled so much action and so much debate is used as planned to dismiss under-performing teachers, do we have the types of teachers that we want, and that so many Chicago students need, waiting in the wings?

Recent events have shown how questions about fairness—fairness for teachers, fairness for students, and fairness for parents—too often trump the raw economic question of supply and demand in teacher policies. That is, are the salaries and working conditions (inclusive of performance evaluations) in Chicago’s schools sufficiently attractive to talented professional people? Of course they are attractive for some, but are they attracting enough talented teachers to meet our city’s needs?

Do CPS teacher salaries and working conditions entice those excellent teachers already committed to the profession to stay in the classroom for the long-haul, and do they make teaching an attractive career option for talented men and women choosing between many career options available to them? Research conducted by McKinsey & Company on our younger generation of college students suggests that in fact, very few college students from the top-third of their class view teaching as offering them as appealing a career as their alternatives.

If teachers were behaving inappropriately by picketing and partying on Chicago’s streets, what would it take to recruit a more professional, and more highly effective, teacher workforce?

Taking a step back from the chaos of the strike to reconsider whether Chicago as a city is doing its part to secure enough of the kinds of teachers that can get all students reading, writing, and mathematically literate, while also developing their aspirational capacity, requires a comprehensive, systemic human capital approach that strategically addresses not only teacher evaluation but also teacher preparation, recruitment, hiring, induction and mentoring, professional development, working conditions, and compensation.

It’s time to take the bird’s-eye perspective—creating a world-class Chicago teaching force—rather than the worm’s-eye perspective of striking a deal and getting students back in the classroom. At a national convening of state departments of education, Arne Duncan’s teacher quality advisor, Brad Jupp, called for statewide conversations among citizens about what the teaching profession ought to look like and how teacher evaluation reforms can serve as a launching point to help schools and the public to realize that vision.

Chicago researchers at American Institutes for Research, with colleagues from Public Agenda, have created a model and free online resource to help teachers spark these conversations in their schools (see www.EveryoneAtTheTable.org). Let’s start this conversation in Chicago—book clubs, community groups, and most importantly educators, should use this historic strike to spark a renewed conversation to shape the future of our teaching force and the future of our city.

The national wave of teacher evaluation reforms are playing out differently across the country, with the New York Times publishing an article on New York City’s “worst teacher,” and a Los Angeles teachers’ suicide even attributed to the outing of his students poor test scores. What mark does Chicago want to have on the nation—the largest strike, or the largest, most collaborative conversation about how to advance this most important of professions? 

Ellen Behrstock Sherratt is a researcher and policy associate at the American Institutes for Research in Chicago. An expert in teacher quality, she is a coauthor of Improving Teacher Quality and the forthcoming Improving Teacher Evaluation—With Everyone at the Table.

Allison Rizzolo is the senior communications associate for Public Agenda, a national research and engagement organization. She is also a coauthor of Improving Teacher Evaluation—With Everyone at the Table.

Both of us work with Everyone at the Table: Engaging Teachers on Evaluation Reform, a nationwide initiative to encourage teacher voice in the teacher evaluation policy dialogue.

But as educators deeply invested in the success of Chicago’s schools, we come away with very different lessons. We argue that teacher unions have in the past proven to be an essential voice in improving public education; that the recent strike has preserved that voice for Chicago’s teachers; and that unions must continue to serve as the teachers’ voice into the 21st century.

Throughout a century of disagreements with mayors over patronage, segregation, and unequal resources, organized teachers in Chicago have used their collective power to foster improvement in the public schools. The recent strike reflects this legacy, with the CTU taking a stand against charter schools and high-stakes testing. The spread of charters, on which Mayor Rahm Emanuel staked his position, has had exactly the same mixed results in Chicago as elsewhere:  Research consistently shows that overall, charters perform the same as, or worse than, comparable neighborhood schools while also increasing segregation along racial and class lines. Now, CPS plans to close up to 120 public schools and welcome 60 charters anyway.

Another central issue in this dispute was the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. The rush to use standardized test scores, despite documented significant flaws, has been compared to early 20th Century IQ testing and the minimum-competency exams of the 1970s, both of which are now recognized by historians as having been racially discriminatory and bad for children and learning.

Many backers of these so-called reforms--including Rauner, CPS board member Penny Pritzker and the Gates Foundation--are politically connected and wealthy, and they are also generous donors to both local and national campaigns. Organized teachers provide a vision of public schooling grounded in the daily realities of children, communities, and schools that offsets this unequal distribution of power. Only one of the seven appointed members of the CPS Board of Education has any education experience. Unions support continued education and the sharing of best practices grounded in empirical research. In fact, the only research-based proposal to come out of this recent contract fight came from the CTU, which argued against the narrowing of the curriculum, more charters, and value-added evaluations.

It’s time to start trusting educators again. Teachers unions of the 21st Century can evolve to become as dynamic and diverse as learning.  Unions should collaborate with districts to put new tools of education, such as mobile computing, in the hands of all students. Teachers’ collaborative power will also be enhanced by bringing charter and “virtual school” educators into unions.  And, as we have seen too many smart people leave this profession out of frustration, unions can carve out new career ladders based on peer-certified mastery: mentor for aspiring and new teachers, master teacher to coach colleagues, online educator, and so on.

All of this takes time, and we have heard over and over again that our most disadvantaged students don’t have it. But we also need to stop treating education as if it is in crisis. The patient is not bleeding out; she has a chronic illness. There is a big difference between doing something—whether to please those demanding that something be done, or out of desperation for a solution—and finding the right thing to do.

It’s time to do the right thing for the children of Chicago and the United States.

Charles Tocci is a clinical assistant professor in the School of Education at Loyola University Chicago. Melissa Barton is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago as well as a teacher and union delegate in the Chicago Public Schools.