Current Issue

School closings

As CPS prepares to close a record number of schools, the fate of students and communities is in question.

high schools

January 19, 2010

During the press conference on school closings and turnarounds today, the reporters there were handed a single sheet of paper with the names of the 38 schools that will get a "culture of calm" grant.

 

January 12, 2010

blah, blah, blah

January 08, 2010

Fenger High School will use more than half of the $500,000 grant promised by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in October after the beating death of Derrion Albert to provide more support to teachers in how to manage students without harsh punishments.

December 08, 2009

Sometimes a name is just a name, but sometimes a change in name can set the stage for a change in focus. That was the hope of the Developing Communities Project, which asked the Board of Elections today to have voters weigh in on changing the name of Carver Military Academy back to George Washington Carver High School.

December 07, 2009

Leah Marshall feared the worst when one of her students, Jermaine, became homeless his senior year. As a teacher on the South Side, Marshall had seen even the best and brightest of students fail classes or drop out when faced with difficulties outside of school.Jermaine, however, would not join their ranks. Marshall opened up her classroom to Jermaine during the after-school hours, giving him a quiet place to complete his homework and study.

“He had an adult who was there to listen, and he had a space in which he could decompress,” Marshall says.

Jermaine is now enrolled in a community college in downstate Illinois. His story inspired Marshall toward an ambitious goal: To open the city’s first public residential school for underprivileged students.

November 12, 2009

CEO Ron Huberman said today that he’s added positions charged with going out, finding dropouts and figuring out what’s needed to pull them back into school. He also told the audience at a dropout forum that he is putting alternative schools through his performance management process, to figure out which ones are effective and which ones aren’t.

 

November 03, 2009

Twice a week, students walk into Peggy Foley’s classroom at Kelly High School in Brighton Park armed with homework, ready to break up into groups divided by subject areas. Math is on one side, history another. Tutors mill around and check the work. But instead of looking for correct answers, the tutors check for something else: The students’ homework is to develop questions about their schoolwork, as a strategy to help build critical thinking skills.

October 27, 2009

Arne Duncan does not want to hear that any of the moves he made as CEO have anything to do with a spike in violence in schools. But several deans at high schools where discipline code violations have risen dramatically in recent years immediately point to school closings as a factor.

September 15, 2009

Sometime over the past week, CPS officials quietly posted the 2009 Prairie State and ACT test scores. They didn’t hold a press conference or even issue a release, as is the custom. And it is no wonder. Scores on both exams stagnated this year.