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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, the high-rise public housing has been wiped away, leaving the area with a smattering of row houses, townhouses and some stretches of still-empty lots.

Over the past decade, three of the schools that served the area’s children have been closed and reopened—one as a charter school, one as a selective enrollment school and the third as a lease by a private Catholic school that costs about $8,000 a year.

Miranda and other parents are now fighting furiously to save one of two neighborhood schools left. A parent volunteer who calls all the students at Manierre Elementary “her children,” she is emphatic that she won’t give up. The School Board is scheduled to vote on the closings on Wednesday.

“My son is upset,” she says. Miranda’s son has a disability that includes learning and speech difficulties and she’s afraid that he will simply “shut down” if he has to transfer to a new school.

But there’s something more that is eating at her. Even though Manierre is surrounded by high-performing schools, the school that her children are now supposed to attend is a Level 3 school with almost identical test scores.

Like Manierre, the receiving school, Jenner, has mostly black, low-income students. The other area schools are more diverse with far fewer poor children.

“I don’t want my children to go from a Level 3 school to a Level 3 school,” Miranda says. “I don’t want that for my children. They are good kids. They don’t bother nobody. They respect their elders.”

In some ways, Manierre is unique compared to the vast majority of schools slated to close on the South Side and West Side. Manierre is on the Near North Side, nestled next to some of the wealthiest areas in the city.

But in other ways, it is not different. Two months ago, CPS leaders announced their intention to close 54 schools, co-locate 11 and hand over six to the Academy of Urban School Leadership to be turned around. The end result of the school actions is that traditional, district-run neighborhood schools will become scarcer. Schools to which students have to apply and those run by private organizations will continue to take over, casting an ever-bigger shadow over the district.

The mayor and CPS officials have cast the move much differently, repeatedly saying that closings and consolidations will allow the district to redirect resources to fewer schools. And with the district facing a $1 billion budget shortfall, officials say closings will save $43 million a year in operating costs (starting in two years) and another $437 million in capital costs over the next decade. 

“What we must do is to ensure that the resources some kids get, all kids get,” said Byrd-Bennett in a videotaped message on the CPS website. “With our consolidations, children are guaranteed to get what they need.”

Yet many of the district’s claims have drawn intense scrutiny and raised questions that undercut the rationale for closings as either a cost-savings or school improvement strategy.

Going to “better” schools

The first claim to face scrutiny is that students at closing schools will end up in higher- performing ones. According to state law, Byrd-Bennett has the authority to define “higher-performing,” and she determined that even when a school has the same performance rating, it can be considered higher- performing if it does better on a majority of the metrics, such as attendance and test scores.

Yet researchers note an important point: A move to a school that is only slightly better, at most, likely won’t mean much to students. The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that, in previous rounds of closings, displaced students only reaped an academic benefit if they were sent to markedly better schools, defined as those in the top quartile.  

In this case, just six receiving schools out of 55 are in the top quartile of all CPS schools. And in only three cases—3 out of 53 closings—are kids being sent from a school in the lowest quartile to a school in the highest, according to an analysis by WBEZ. Two-thirds of the closing schools are among the lowest rated in CPS, but in 18 cases students will be sent to schools that are equally low-rated. 

Even among the 12 receiving schools that have the highest CPS rating, there is a broad range in terms of performance. Chopin, on the Near North Side, has nearly 96 percent of students meeting standards on the ISAT and nearly 70 percent exceeding standards, while Faraday, on the West Side, has 73 percent meeting standards and about 13 percent exceeding them. Research has shown that students need to exceed standards to perform well in high school.

Furthermore, no one knows exactly how many students will end up at the designated “receiving school”---the one that by some measure is higher performing. Last year, less than half of students went to the designated receiving school with many parents choosing closer or more convenient schools that performed no better than the school they left, shows a Catalyst analysis. 

CPS officials counter that the money invested into the receiving schools will improve technology and other resources. The schools will be air-conditioned, with iPads, playgrounds and libraries. The district is also designating 19 schools as specialty schools, with International Baccalaureate, STEM and fine arts programs. This year, the new specialty schools will receive $250,000 to $360,000 in extra money to pay for positions and training.

While leaders may have meant for this to sweeten the deal, parents and activists have been incredulous that their schools must close in order to get resources that are common place in other schools.

Parents also aren’t convinced that the new turnaround schools will be better for their children. CPS plans to hand over six schools to the Academy for Urban School Leadership for turnaround, which entails firing all or most of the staff, including the principal and the lunch ladies. For each turnaround, AUSL gets $300,000 in upfront costs, plus $420 per student for each student for at least five years.

Contracts with AUSL are for five years, but for several turnarounds they have been extended.

In her letter to parents, Byrd-Bennett said that turnaround schools have improved twice as fast as the CPS district-average.

“We want to provide your child with access to the same opportunities to boost their chance of academic success, which they will receive next school year if this proposal is approved,” she wrote.

Yet parents point out that many of the schools run by AUSL are not high-performers. Only one turnaround school, Morton, is a Level 1 school. And one of the closing schools, Bethune, is a turnaround.

Mathew Johnson, a parent at Dewey Elementary, says 98 percent of parents signed a petition saying they did not want their school given to AUSL. He says the school’s new administration seems to be on the right track and is doing a turnaround of its own.

“We are not afraid to hold the administration accountable,” says Johnson, who serves on the local school council.

Costs and savings

Because so many of the so-called “welcoming,” turnaround and co-locating schools lack resources, CPS officials will spend big money to get them up to par. In April, the Board of Education approved a supplemental capital budget that the district plans to finance with a $329 million bond.

About $155 million of that will go toward improvements at the receiving schools and another $60 million will fix up schools that are slated to be turned around or co- located with another school.

For the next 30 years, CPS will have to pay $25 million in interest and principal on the bond. This expense was not factored into the $43 million that CPS officials say they will save by undertaking these school actions. 

CPS leaders have repeatedly cited budget problems as a rationale for closings--yet one reason CPS is facing perpetual large deficits is its already-existing debt. In the upcoming fiscal year, the district’s payment on principal and interest is scheduled to rise by about $100 million to $475 million.

Capital cost savings are also not likely to be higher than estimated. CPS officials lowered their original capital savings estimate and say the district will save $437 million over the next decade by not having to repair or maintain the 50-some buildings they are shuttering.

But only six of the closing schools have had recent assessments to determine their capital needs.  In all of these cases, the updated assessments caused CPS to lower its savings estimate.  

In order for the district to save real money from closing schools, it would have sell off shuttered schools and lay off a lot of teachers, said Emily Dowdall, a senior associate for the Philadelphia Research Institute, which is part of the Pew Charitable Trust. 

CPS officials say they are going to work with city department heads to figure out what to do with vacant buildings, but there is no specific plan in place.

CPS has sought to steer the discussion away from teacher layoffs, though the closing schools have about 1,100 teachers.

“Many of these teachers will follow their students to welcoming schools per the joint CTU-CPS agreement included in last year’s teachers’ contract, which allows tenured teachers with Superior or Excellent ratings to follow students if their position is open at the welcoming school,” according to a CPS fact sheet.

But school closings will likely mean that class sizes will be bigger in the welcoming schools than in the closing ones, meaning that fewer teachers will be needed for the same number of students.  A quarter of class sizes at closing and welcoming schools have fewer than 20 students—way below recommended sizes of 28 for primary grades and 31 for intermediate grades.

Not including these affected schools, only 9 percent of schools have such small class sizes. 

Changing demographics, changing landscape

CPS officials have stressed that the main reason schools need to close is that 145,000 fewer school-age children live in the city than in 2000. But, as many have pointed out, enrollment in CPS has declined by much less: In September of 2013, CPS had 32,000 fewer students than in September of 2000.

Neighborhood schools have been hit hard by the district’s opening of new “schools of choice,” whether magnet schools, charter schools or selective enrollment schools. A Catalyst Chicago analysis of CPS data found that in 14 predominantly black South Side and West Side communities that CPS defines as “underutilized,” an average of 54 percent of elementary students attend their neighborhood school. In other communities, two-thirds of elementary students attend their neighborhood school. 

If all of the school actions are approved on Wednesday, the landscape of public education will continue to change--especially for students in particular neighborhoods,

Next fall, CPS will run about 84 percent of public elementary schools in Chicago, down from 86 percent this year. The rest will be run by private entities, most by charter operators or AUSL.

The shifting landscape will result in fewer neighborhood schools—schools where students are guaranteed a spot if they live within the attendance boundaries. In 2000, nearly 98 percent of elementary school students attended neighborhood schools.

Also next fall, the percentage of elementary schools with attendance boundaries will drop to 70 percent, down from 75 percent this year (should all closings be approved and with the planned opening of 10 more elementary charter schools).  

CPS officials say this might be the wave of the future as they try to increase choices, without increasing the number of buildings in the district’s portfolio.

For parents like Miranda, the shift means one of two things:  taking their children further from home to get to the new neighborhood school, or filling out several applications to a ‘school of choice,’ then hoping and praying that they win a spot.

Like so many parents in the past few months, Miranda says going further away from home poses increased danger. Miranda is worried about a busy street that her children would have to cross to get to Jenner. Other parents in her school say that there’s an entrenched rivalry between Jenner and Manierre students, so much so that teams from the two schools aren’t even allowed to play each other in sports. They worry about fights and point to nasty posts on Facebook by Jenner students threatening those at Manierre.

Miranda says she doesn’t think this would be a problem at Newberry, LaSalle, Skinner North or Franklin—all of which are closer to Manierre than Jenner.

But these are all magnet or selective schools and assigning children to them is not the way CPS works these days.

Below is a slideshow of Monday's marches against school closings. The CTU organized three days of marches, which ended downtown. (Slideshow by Lucio Villa)

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett will recommend that 54 school programs be shut down. Nearly 90 percent of the students in the closing schools are black, though African Americans make up only about 40 percent of the district’s entire student population.

The impact of school actions on black communities has been a major factor driving opposition among activists as well as the Chicago Teachers Union, which held a press conference attacking the actions. 

Under this proposal, the communities that would have the most closings are: West Town, Auburn Gresham, Austin, West Englewood and West Pullman.

In addition to the 54 shut-downs, 11 schools will co-locate with another school, eight of them with charter schools. Two severely underutilized high schools—Bowen and Corliss—will share their buildings next year with new Noble Street charter high schools. CPS officials said this will give people in the area two “good, strong” options in one building, but some community members and others are likely to worry that the charters will drain away more students from the neighborhood schools. 

Finally, the non-profit Academy for Urban School Leadership will get six more schools to “turn around,” a process that entails replacing virtually an entire staff. AUSL is a politically-connected teacher training program that has won national recognition from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. One AUSL school, Bethune Elementary in East Garfield Park, will be closed. Also, Dodge and Morton, two AUSL school, will co-exist in the Morton building. 

The board is set to vote on this proposal at its May 22 meeting. Before then, CPS will hold three hearings on each recommendation, two in the affected communities and one with an independent hearing officer at its downtown headquarters.

Cost savings, teacher layoffs

Initially, these moves will cost CPS money but over 10 years, the district will save about  $1 billion, said Chief Transformation Officer Todd Babbitz. The savings are a combination of $560 million in capital costs and $430 million in operating costs.

Critics will likely argue that less than $1 billion in savings over 10 years is not a lot of money, considering CPS has a $5 billion yearly budget.

But Babbitz and other officials said the school district is not only closing schools to save money, but also to make the remaining schools better. 

At the welcoming schools, CPS plans to make $155 million in capital investments and spend $78 million in “up front” operating costs. 

The initial investment is high as CPS officials have spent the last week announcing the various things they plan to provide for welcoming schools. Each will get air conditioning,  a library, a science lab and computer lab, as well as a social worker and other social supports for students. In addition, safe passage workers will watch over students as they make their way to their new school. Students at a handful of schools will get bus transportation.

CPS leaders earlier today announced that 19 schools will get specialty programs, such as International Baccalaureate or fine arts programs. These will be magnet cluster programs, which maintain an attendance boundary, but can take students if they have space. Officials could not say on Thursday how many extra staff these schools will get for these programs.

Spokeswoman Becky Carroll argued that the district is prioritizing these welcoming schools, many of which will become the neighborhood schools. 

“These are communities that have been under-resourced and underserved for years,” she said. “We want to give them all the things that they need that they do not have now.”

At the Chicago Teachers Union press conference, President Karen Lewis lambasted Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who reportedly is on vacation with his family. “This is not going to save money, it is going to cost money and it is going to leave abandoned buildings,” she said.

CPS officials could not immediately say how many teachers will be laid off as part of the upheaval. As part of the new teacher’s contract, those teachers from closed schools get to follow their students to a new school, if they are tenured and highly-rated.

But at the press conference, little was said about the fate of teachers. Lewis, parents and teachers said they worried most about the students.

Kohn lunchroom attendant Takeeva Thompson said that at her school, a 7-year-old was killed and other students have been shot. She said the school is a haven for students. “We are either giving them a gun or a book,” she said.

Nina Gibbs, a parent of a student at Mahalia Jackson, said the plan calls for her daughter to go to Fort Dearborn Elementary. “That is on the other side of the tracks,” she said. “What kind of safety and security are they going to have? You have already got a lot of children here been shot, beat up, kidnapped. What about the parents who will no longer be [in] walking distance from the school?”

Safety a top concern for parents

Adam Anderson, the district's officer of portfolio, planning and strategy, said that officials took into account the concerns about safety that parents and residents expressed at the 28 community hearing held this winter. 

Among the things that CPS officials heard were that people want a school in their area and they don’t want children to have to cross barriers, such as railroad tracks, to get to school. Anderson said it also was important to him and other school leaders that children were sent to better facilities and better schools. 

But all these criteria created quite a puzzle for CPS leaders and this is evident by the plan they laid out. In several situations a school program closes, meaning the administration is displaced, but the children stay in the building. The principal and staff from a better-performing school take over that closed school program, leaving their building empty.

For the first time perhaps ever, CPS will try to combine three schools into one building and, in at least one case, the district will split children from one closed school up between two schools.

These unusual combinations left some people in the community with their head spinning. Dwayne Truss, an activist in Austin, said he was trying to get his head around all the proposals for his community. 

“Some of this is just crazy,” he said.

ACTION LIST

The Sun-Times also has the lawsuit story, noting that Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman Marielle Sainvilus said in an email, “We have not seen the lawsuit and cannot provide comment until we have reviewed the allegations.”

Chicago’s Department of Public Health wants to bring mobile eye examinations to students in the city's public school system. Illinois state law requires annual vision screenings for many students in public, private and parochial schools, including Pre-K, kindergarten, second, eighth grade, and all special education students. (WBEZ)

Negotiating teams in West Chicago Elementary District 33 are scheduled to return to the bargaining table Jan. 3 and 4 — just days before teachers legally will be allowed to strike. (Daily Herald)

IN THE NATION
Two 36-year-old educators who are identical twins are sharing the job of principal at Oakland's Claremont Middle School this year. (The San Francisco Chronicle)

College students, who have often protested over cafeteria food, dorm life and tuition increases, have begun to object to collegiate marketing campaigns. (The New York Times)

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.

CPS was awarded on Thursday a $25 million federal School Improvement Grant to perform what is called "transformation" on four high schools and to turnaround one.

Transformation is a process in which a newer principal works with an outside institution--sometimes a curriculum company or a university--to improve the school without firing all the staff, as in a turnaround. Transformation schools must extend learning time and analyze student data to improve instruction. 

The desire to use the transformation strategy might signal that CPS leaders are not convinced that turnarounds work in high schools. A recent study by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research showed that turnaround high schools showed initial improvements in student attendance, but, in other measures, did not make impressive progress.

At its meeting Thursday, the Illinois State Board of Education approved school improvement grants to do transformation for Clemente Community Academy, Bowen High School, Bogan High and Al Raby High. Chicago Vocational will undergo a turnaround. Outside of Chicago, East St. Louis Senior High and Cahokia High also are up for grants. Washington High School was originally on the list to be transformed, but was pulled at the last minute, according to ISBE spokeswoman Mary Fergus.

The ISBE board packet says Chicago Vocational Career Academy will be transformed, but CPS spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler says the packet is wrong and the school will be turned around as planned.  At the May Board of Education meeting, Principal Doug Maclin talked about the improvements he has been able to initiate since taking over last year--and without bringing in an entirely new staff. Maclin said student misconducts were down and attendance was up.

The $3.5 billion School Improvement Grant program is the federal initiative to try to improve the nation's lowest-performing schools. Al Raby and Bowen, which have fewer than 500 students, will receive about $2.6 million over three years. The other Chicago high schools, with more than 1,400 students each, will get $5.5 million.

Districts can choose one of three methods for reform: turnaround, transformation and restart, which entails a charter school operator taking over a school.

CPS is doing eight elementary school turnarounds this year and only one high school turnaround. CPS did not ask for SIG money for the elementary school turnarounds.

Last year was the first year CPS used the transformation method and, while it is too early for results, initial indicators show some progress. Transformation schools typically use the extra resources to provide more social-emotional and academic supports for students, such as social workers and writing coaches.

When Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the School Improvement Grant program, he considered transformation the least optimal of the three methods of reform because it doesn’t bring a cohort of fresh people into the school. However, transformation is by far the most popular of the reform methods, in part because of the difficulty of finding replacement teachers and staff in some communities.

One of the provisions of getting a School Improvement Grant is that the school must work with an outside entity. In an unusual set-up, CPS’ Office of School Improvement is an approved outside vendor and all the transformation schools on tap are slated to partner with the office.

At the same time, OSI is undergoing changes itself.  At a meeting last Saturday, CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said the office will no longer take on turnarounds. Instead, the unit will work with schools that are on academic probation and in danger of being targets for drastic action.

Brizard says the office will develop systems for schools to use when they are on the edge of failing. “We want them to put in place concrete processes that schools will be required to follow,” he said.

Brizard will also look for more outside organizations to do turnarounds. Currently, 12 turnaround schools are managed by the Academy of Urban School Leadership. In the past, CPS has looked for other groups to do turnarounds, including a charter school operator, but none has entered the picture.

 Of the 250 schools currently on probation, 150 have had that status for at least five years. 

Brizard, who appeared respectful but assertive at the hearing last week, agreed with legislators about the ultimate goals for schools, neighborhoods and children and responded calmly to the harsh interrogation with seemingly full command of his facts. But he failed to quell the anger that state legislators from Chicago feel about closings and turnarounds, which they characterized as precipitous, disruptive of school neighborhoods, harmful to students and perhaps, even racially biased.

The legislators accused CPS of circumventing and marginalizing local school councils, of failing to respect the “culture” of Chicago neighborhoods and of purposely causing schools to fail and then closing them to facilitate change that is unrelated to education—essentially, to invite gentrification.

So the war is not over. After the hearing, House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee Chair Rep. Linda Chapa LaVia told Brizard that more testimony is required, especially testimony “from the community.”

Chapa LaVia, state Sen. Iris Martinez and state Rep. Cynthia Soto – leaders in ongoing legislative efforts to change the district’s process for deciding on school actions – agreed that a “summit hearing” of the Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force must be scheduled soon.

Brizard apologized Thursday for not appearing at a previous committee hearing on March 26, saying “The last thing we want to do is disrespect any members of this committee.” He cited some CPS successes, such as the 94 schools that made the Illinois Honor Roll. But, he noted, “Too many of our schools have for too long failed to help our children succeed academically.”

He went on to note statistics, such as the fact that more than 120,000 students attend low-achieving schools, dropout rates remain high and the achievement gap between students of color and white students is “climbing to the high double digits, bucking national trends.”

“This is my 26th year [in education] and what I’m seeing is a system that’s doing well for some kids and not doing well for a lot of other kids,” Brizard said.

Dispute over community input

Recalling his arrival at CPS last May, Brizard said officials “knew we had to do something right away” to address the problem at failing schools and asserted that the administration wanted “to exceed the requirements of the law” in terms of getting community engagement into decisions.

At that point, Brizard may have lost Martinez, who, in a rare occurrence, was permitted to sit in on the House committee and question witnesses. Martinez was the chief sponsor of SB 630 (now P.A. 97-474), which requires CPS to adopt an Educational Facility Master Plan to guide its school closing and turnaround actions.

“I don’t think the new board and the new administration really let this bill resonate the way it should have,” Martinez told Brizard. “It was just signed [into law] in August of last year and, on December 1, you already had [made closing and turnaround] decisions on 17 schools.” She questioned whether CPS leaders were “carefully looking at every school and what was going on in that area.”

For example, referring to a co-location of two existing schools into the same building, Martinez said “You can’t put a Level 3 school [the lowest-performing category] into another Level 3 school. Our anger with this process is that we don’t think that everything was carefully looked at.”

Martinez noted that she and Soto worked for 18 months with the Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force to identify “best practices” for effective school interventions and suggested that CPS ignored those findings in its hurry to close and turnaround schools. The task force made its final recommendations in March. Martinez and Soto both have filed bills this year calling for a moratorium on school actions through the 2013-2014 school year.

“Some of the things that you said as far as engagement and going to public hearings in these schools – that did not happen, you know it and I know it,” Martinez asserted. To that, the audience applauded and Chapa LaVia made the first of several request for participants to be “more respectful.”

Brizard fought back. “We had a hundred meetings before the actions and a hundred after the guidelines were distributed,” he told the committee. “I am not an arrogant person. I will never tell you we can’t do better. It can. It has to get better, because this stuff is never easy.”

While a school closing or turnaround can affect “sometimes entire families,” Brizard said his administration wanted to do something quickly to improve schools. Some of the decisions did not require much deliberation, he suggested, pointing out that one of the recently closed schools “had been listed for years as the worst school in the entire state of Illinois.”

Martinez was pretty harsh with Brizard, but no harsher than other legislators in the room.

Rep. Kenneth Dunkin commented at length, returning over and over to the need for CPS to “show some respect” for citizens and the General Assembly. Rep. Luis Arroyo challenged CPS to testify before legislative committees as a condition of receiving state funds. Current law does not require CPS to testify, but Arroyo filed a bill this year to change that policy.

Rep. Monique Davis complained about the narrowing of curricula at CPS schools. “There’s a lot of scripted lessons and there’s a lot of testing going on. The children are not being allowed to grow as whole people,” Davis said. “They’re not learning poetry. They’re not participating in drama. They have no art.”

Race becomes an issue

Davis also criticized the district for having too few people at the decision–making table “with a cultural sensitivity to the people being served.” As a parting shot, she demanded that the district “stop pushing out older African American teachers. I want you to stop it. Stop it.”

And on it went. Rep. Mary Flowers charged that the schools CPS has closed have been on the south side of the city or have affected just “Latino or brown” communities. “Can you tell me what European or Caucasian school that you have closed or turned around?”

Brizard said that race and ethnicity are unrelated to decisions about interventions, but Flowers continued on a roll. Brizard tried to respond, but could not.

Children are not being prepared for college or for jobs, Flowers said, a situation that will cost the state down the road because they won’t have jobs and pay taxes. No other industry, she added, can produce as many “defective products” as CPS and “continue to command the audience that you do and receive the monies that the state gives to the Chicago Public Schools and/or to the Board of Education.”

Chicago Public School officials Friday hailed as “historic” a new evaluation system that will eventually tie up to 40 percent of a CPS teacher’s rating to student growth — a prospect teacher union officials immediately blasted as “deeply flawed.’’ (Sun-Times)

WBEZ features an interview with Katie Ellis, Chicago Public Schools’ executive director of access and enrollment. She talks about the fact that a record number of students applied this year to selective enrollment high schools.

Also, featured on WBEZ's education home page is a map of 10 years of Chicago school closures. The sortable chart and maps show where schools have been closed or turned around, what's become of the school buildings and how well new schools in those buildings are performing. This item was mistakenly highlighted in In the News today. WBEZ has alerted Catalyst to the fact that, due to an update in its Web site, the page is not displaying correctly. 

IN THE STATE
The sluggish economy has led to an influx of students in south suburban communities where housing is less costly, or where parents have given up on paying to send their kids to private schools. Crete-Monee District 201U is one of those districts where enrollment is up because of the poor economy. (Southtown Star)

Officials of the Rockford School District say a tentative contract agreement reached with the teachers union will mean classes will resume Monday. (Tribune)

IN THE NATION
Protesters are set to convene in Washington Monday for four days of rallies, marches and talks taking high-stakes testing and the "corporatization" of public schools.  Being called “Occupy the DOE”—for its target, the U.S. Department of Education—the event is being portrayed as a way to build on last summer’s Save Our Schools event, which drew people to the nation’s capital for a high-profile demonstration and meetings focusing on many of the same themes. (Education Week)

Parents are pushing a plan to eliminate pre-kindergarten in New York City schools because some children can't get into kindergarten in their own neighborhoods. (ABC)

It may take a generation to know for sure whether e-books are better for children than regular books. (The New York Times)

In the end, the House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee decided to call for a joint hearing of four legislative committees – the education committees and appropriations committees of both the House and the Senate – and to force Brizard and Mayor Rahm Emanuel to attend even if they have to be subpoenaed to make that happen.

“We have been bamboozled again by CPS,” exclaimed Rep. Esther Golar (D-Chicago), complaining that constituents “got two minutes to talk and then they cut them off, they cut them off” when those citizens tried to object to a school closing at a CPS hearing late last year.

“With all due respect, it was not done properly for the community,” she lectured the CPS officials. The district had “people who were actually paid” to attend the hearing and support the school closing. “They were all plants. They were not from the community.”

Rep. Mary Flowers (D-Chicago) accused CPS of “destroying our future,” the children of Chicago. “You purposely close schools and send children in harm’s way.”

Rep. Cynthia Soto (D-Chicago) who has sponsored a bill calling for a moratorium on CPS school facilities actions, looked at the CPS officials and implored, “What does it take [for CPS] to understand? We’re just spinning our wheels. We’re stuck in a ditch and can’t get out.

“I’m just a little bit upset,” Rep. Kenneth Duncan told the CPS representatives at Monday’s hearing. “Today is not a good indication [that the CPS Board] is doing right by the kids,” he said. He called upon the CPS “chief executive officer and the chief educational officer and the chief financial officer … and all those other key chiefs [to meet with the committee] and show us some respect.”

He told committee chairperson Rep. Linda Chapa LaVia (D-Aurora) that the CPS representatives on hand Monday “should be removed from the panel up here and we should listen to the other guests who are serious,” referring to students and parents who had traveled to Springfield to protest CPS’ facilities actions.

Eventually, Chapa LaVia did dismiss Adam Anderson, whose title is Officer of Portfolio Planning & Strategy, and Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Michael Rendina from the hearing. Then she invited members of the audience to offer testimony. Two students took her up on that offer.

Pointedly, Chapa LaVia said the controversy surrounding CPS school closure decisions “is now out of Chicago,” indicating that legislators from all parts of Illinois are now interested in the outcome of Soto’s bill and a similar one pending in the Senate also requiring a moratorium on CPS facilities actions.

Rep. Robert Prichard (R-Sycamore) illustrated the point by asserting that the CPS is “not serving the people of Chicago” as it should. In the committee hearing and again at a brief news conference under the Capitol rotunda, Prichard stressed his belief that the CPS “is too large” to be managed effectively.

The failure of Brizard to attend the committee hearing infuriated legislators at least as much as reports from constituents about what one representative called the “chaos” resulting from precipitous school closings in Chicago’s minority neighborhoods.

At one point Chapa LaVia had to halt the hearing and remove the committee members briefly to a nearby room just to calm them down. Chapa LaVia later told Catalyst Chicago she had never before taken such action and had never even seen it done before at the Capitol.

Sandra Pihos (R-Glen Ellyn), the Republican spokesperson on the committee, made the motion to call for the joint hearing of the four committees, and she specifically listed Brizard, other top CPS officials and Mayor Rahm Emanuel as witnesses whose appearance should be sought.

Rep. Elizabeth Hernandez (D-Chicago) is Vice-Chair of the Appropriations Committee for Elementary and Secondary Education funding. Expressing her frustration with CPS actions and lack of “transparency,” she said if it takes “holding the funding [from CPS to gain its cooperation], so be it.”

“Is [CEO] Brizard just a figurehead?” demanded Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago), sarcastically implying that Rendina and Anderson were not high enough on the CPS totem pole to address the committee. She also demanded to know who obtained contracts and how much they are paid for school turnarounds.

“Someone is making big dollars … to manage the turnarounds,” Davis said.

Anderson told her that a fee of “$435 per student goes to fund the operating model” of turnaround schools. He cited AUSL, a nonprofit organization created initially to prepare teachers for CPS. David Vitale , a former AUSL board chairman, is now president of the CPS Board.

As to why Brizard was a no-show, Rendina explained that the district expected the hearing to be on the “subject matter” of facility interventions and that Anderson “is the expert” on that subject. CEO Brizard did not believe presence would be needed at the Capitol.

Chapa LaVia said the committee was “operating on the assumption” that the CPS would take the hearing as seriously as state agencies and other organizations do when the subject matter is exclusively about them.  “You have to understand the gravity of this,” she said.

What they didn’t talk much about publicly was where future students living in the Price and Guggenheim attendance boundaries would go. In fact, most will be assigned to schools that are currently no better than Price and Guggenheim, but are slated to be turned around next year. In turnarounds, the district fires the current staff, including the principal, hires a new staff, and provides them with more resources.

New students in Price’s territory will go to Fuller and Woodson South; those from the Guggenheim area will go Stagg. The turnaround process at Stagg and Fuller will be handled by the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a not-for-profit educational management organization, and the turnaround process at Woodson South will be managed by the CPS Office of School Improvement.

CPS spokeswoman Marielle Sainvilus says CPS officials explained the change in attendance boundaries to parents and community members in letters and in person.

Margo Murray, a special education teacher at Price, said parents realized the distinction, but were confused. “That is the whole ball of wax,” she said. “They have lower test scores than us. It doesn’t make any sense.”

CPS officials said that with the track record of turnarounds, the new students can expect a better experience. Turnarounds, they said, have been proven to raise expectations for children and improve a school’s climate and culture, as well as increase test scores.

“The students will be walking into a dramatically better school than Guggenheim or Price,” Sainvilus said. She said Guggenheim was the worst school in the city last year so virtually anywhere else would be better. (Fuller’s composite ISAT score was worse than Guggenheim’s.)

CPS officials point to overall trends, but their data show that the narrative of each turnaround school is different. Several saw a decrease in test scores during the first year, and then rebounded in subsequent years. Many saw increases in composite test scores that were driven mostly by math, but minimal gains in reading.

Sherman, the turnaround school run by the Academy for Urban School Leadership since 2006, still has only half its students reading at grade level. Meanwhile, Fulton, a turnaround run by the Office of School Improvement since 2008, has only 43 percent of students reading at grade level—10 percent less than at Price.

The assignment of future students in the Price and Guggenheim attendance areas is part of a trend. Increasingly, students from closed schools are being funneled to turnarounds, most of which are being run by AUSL.

Students from Dyett, a phase-out, will be assigned to Phillips, a school in its second year of being turned around by AUSL. Students from Lathop, another closing school, will be rerouted to Johnson Elementary, a 2009 turnaround run by AUSL.

More such reassignments can be expected. CPS leadership has been clear that in a district with 251 schools on probation and 310 schools underutilized, more closings are on the way.

The problem, according to Chief Portfolio Officer Oliver Sicat, is that there aren’t enough better-performing options.  “Turnaround schools create high-performing options,” he told board members in December. 

"Education reform alone can’t solve the problems that adults, acting like children, tend to sweep under the rug," Jim Warren writes in his final CNC column, which addresses the Chicago School Board's vote Wednesday to close and "turnaround" 17 public schools.

Legal Newsline looks at the recent Illinois Supreme Court decision on hiring laid-off teachers. The court ruled last week that the state's School Code does not give laid-off tenured teachers the right to be hired again after an economic layoff.

Chicago Magazine writer Whet Moser on the new push for vocational education in Chicago.

At least three universities in and around Chicago’s downtown plan to close or have already changed schedules because of the NATO and G-8 summits that are expected to attract an influx of thousands of protesters, many security restrictions and commuter headaches. (Sun-Times)

IN THE STATE
A $280,000 grant from the Illinois State Board of Education will create a two-year program for Champaign school district teachers to create secondary math curriculum based on the Common Core State Standards. (News-Gazette)

IN THE NATION
Los Angeles schools Supt. John Deasy said the district will report all teachers accused of misconduct to the state credentialing commission in an effort to keep those who pose a risk to students out of the classroom. (Los Angeles Times)

Since authorities charged an elementary teacher with lewd acts in his classroom nearly a month ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District has seen a flurry of arrests of school employees accused of inappropriate behavior with children. (Los Angeles Times)

Washington, D.C., mayor Vincent C. Gray and Chancellor Kaya Henderson are discussing a plan to restore the District’s power to create public charter schools as part of an effort to raise the quality of education in low-income communities. (The Washington Post)

A Philadelphia-based e-mentoring program aims to reduce dropout rate among black males. (The Notebook)

As states and districts begin the work of turning common academic standards into curriculum and instruction, educators searching for teaching resources are often finding that process frustrating and fruitless. (Education Week)

The board's decision to move ahead with closings and turnarounds came despite the outcries of parents, activists and other opponents. (Catalyst Chicago)

WBEZ goes "inside" Herzl Elementary in North Lawndale to check out accusations that Chicago's school district lets some school buildings go to pot before turning them over to private management groups.

Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis told school board members Chicago is at the "epicenter of the education justice fight in America" after the board voted late Wednesday to close seven schools and completely re-staff 10 others. She said the nation is watching." The Rev. Jesse Jackson told the board, "This is Little Rock, 1957. This is apartheid." (WBEZ)

Dozens of people packed a conference room at Chicago Public Schools headquarters Wednesday and another 100 or so filled an overflow room upstairs to plead for board members to put off a vote on closing or overhauling 17 struggling schools. (Tribune)

About 33 neighborhood schools with at least 95 percent low-income students not only outscored equally poor schools cleared out of all staff and “turned around’’ by the Academy for Urban School Leadership, but even beat the city test score average, a study by Designs for Change indicated. (Sun-Times)

Joining a crowd of hundreds that packed two rooms at Board of Education headquarters, the Rev. Jesse Jackson made his first appearance ever at a school closing vote. He declared that closings disproportionately impacted African-American communities and teachers and reflected an “apartheid” Chicago educational system. (Sun-Times)

Trib Nation points out something that's become obvious of late: "the pace and emotional intensity of stories about the Chicago Public Schools has increased."

Here's how the Wall Street Journal's Stephanie Banchero summarized the Chicago School Board's actions on Wednesday: "This city's school board voted Wednesday to shake up the teaching staffs at 17 low-performing public schools, handing Mayor Rahm Emanuel a victory in his battle with the teachers union and highlighting an increasingly aggressive stance on education overhauls by a number of Democratic mayors nationwide." (*A subscription is required for full access to WSJ article.)

IN THE STATE
A public hearing Tuesday served as a litmus test on a proposal to open a charter school in Cary Elementary District 26 in the next school year. (Daily Herald)

IN THE NATION
On The New York Review of Books blog, NYR, in a post titled “No Child Left Untested,” education historian Diane Ravitch calls it “madness” to rely on a system of teacher accountability based on student test scores.

Crimes and homicides in public schools nationwide have declined, part of a downward trend seen over the past several years. Data released Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice show declines across a number of indicators, including thefts, violent crimes, bullying and gang activity. (WBEZ)

Concerns are mounting that strict new federal rules meant to improve the quality of Head Start preschool services for poor children could drive good providers out of business, as scores of Head Start programs begin to face the specter of losing the federal funding they have received for decades. (Education Week)

When the vote finally took place after 5:30 p.m.--seven hours since the meeting got underway—the small group of parents and activists still in the audience started chanting "rubber stamp." Jitu Brown, an education organizer for the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization and a Dyett local school member, booed. Dyett will be phased out next year.

Latrice Watkins, chairwoman of the Piccolo local school council, sat in a chair outside the board chambers and cried. "We did everything we could do," she said. "They will reap what they sow."

After the board meeting, school board member Mahalia Hines defended her action. In going out to public hearings, she said she was disturbed by the numbers of parents who seemed to be okay with schools whose low test scores only increased 5 percent over two or three years.

"It is not okay," she said. "Whether I was elected or appointed, I would have voted the same way."

School board member Jesse Ruiz added that he felt good that he had done "something, even if that something wasn't perfect" for students going to poor performing schools. 

The following actions were approved:

• Crane and Dyett High Schools will begin phasing out next year, though Crane's building will house a charter school next year and a health and science academy in the fall of 2013. Chief Portfolio Officer Oliver Sicat said there were no plans to put another school into Dyett.
• Price and Guggenheim elementary schools will be closed. 
• Chicago Vocational Career Academy and Tilden High will be turned around, as will eight elementary schools. Wendell Smith and Woodson South will be turned around by the CPS Office of School Improvement. Piccolo, Casals, Fuller, Stagg, Marquette and Herzl will be turned around by the Academy for Urban School Leadership. Chicago Vocational Career Academy will be allowed to keep its career programs, and a Montessori program at Stagg will still be available in the community either at Stagg or at another school four blocks away.
• In addition, the board approved measures that will allow several new schools or charter schools to share buildings with existing schools and will close three schools that were on their way to being phased out.

Activists look to legislature, courts

A few supporters of the plans also spoke during the three hours of public participation. Rebeca Nieves-Huffman, director of the Illinois chapter of Education Reform Now, worked at Piccolo years ago as a City Year corps member before a career working for national charter school advocacy organizations.

“I support the closure, I support the turnaround strategy because it appears to be working,” she said.

Another was Hibbard Elementary LSC member and parent Aureliano Vazquez. “These changes are going to be a benefit for all the students and will have a good result in the future,” he said through an interpreter.

But the vast majority of speakers denounced the plans and said their fight was not over.

Chicago Teachers Union spokeswoman Stephanie Gadlin said the next step in the union’s fight would be “taking it to the courts” and to Springfield, in the form of bills that would halt school closings, consolidations and phase-outs. Proposed legislation already in Springfield calls for a moratorium.

Chicago Principals and Administrators Association President Clarice Berry also is taking part in lobbying on the bills’ behalf. “I’m concentrating my efforts on school closings in Springfield,” she said, rather than addressing the board meeting.

Jesse Jackson was one of a number of speakers who threatened that more lawsuits would be filed over the closing and turnaround dispute. 

Jackson asked board members to put a moratorium on school actions until the board can study education equity in the  system and he warned the board members that if they don't back off, he and other activists will “ask the General Assembly and court to come to our rescue.”

Another was Rev. Paul Jakes, president of the Christian Council on Urban Affairs, which he said represented over 100 churches.

“We certainly believe there has been a violation of our equal rights,” Jakes said, before asking CPS to help defray the cost of funerals for young people who are killed if the school closures and phase-outs contribute to gang violence. That has happened in the past, as students must travel through different neighborhoods to get to their new schools.

“It’s a moral issue,” Jakes said. “Those who are in positions such as this need to have sensitivity to lives being lost.”

After addressing the board, Jakes said he has met with several “top-30” civil rights attorneys such as Thomas Todd, Standish Willis, and Lawrence Kennon.

Many of the parents and teachers at schools slated for turnaround said they wanted their current principals to have more time to try to improve their schools. Before the meeting, demonstrators from Action Now picketed outside board headquarters and sang “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around, turn us around, turn us around. We’re going to keep on fighting, keep on marching. Education is a human right.”

Board members asked questions

CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said it is up to CPS officials to heal the communities following the vote.

Some of the people who spoke criticized the CPS leadership for failing to listen to them. Matt Farmer, a parent activist, pointed out that the hearing officers who listened to public comment at the turnaround hearings—and later endorsed the board’s plans—were lawyers with firms that work for CPS.

Board members asked several questions about safety and school culture.

“How will you monitor the safety plan?” board member Penny Pritzker asked. She said she would like to hear how the safety plans are being implemented.

CPS Chief of Safety and Security Jadine Chou said that the Safe Passage program, in which community members are paid to shepherd students home, will be utilized in the schools.

Ruiz said he pushed CPS officials and that now is the time for board members to support it. He said CPS officials need to harness the passion expressed by those who opposed the turnarounds.

Board member Andrea Zopp asked about whether AUSL expels more students. Some speakers said they worried about students who were pushed out of turnarounds. But Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley, who formerly worked for AUSL, says the children who were there before the turnaround are still there and enrollment is going up at many of schools. (However, CPS data shows that AUSL turnaround schools do issue an extraordinary number of misconducts.)

Katie Osgood, who teaches at an inpatient mental health facility that works with many former CPS students, complained that she sees students who were pushed out of turnaround and charter schools.

“Where I work, we don’t charge them $5. We don’t kick them out and tell them they don’t fit in there,” she said. “These kids need the most resources, but instead CPS gives them the least."

Even so, CTU President Karen Lewis pled with the board to change their minds.

“Children who need the most resources get the least. Parents who cry out the loudest get their voices drowned,” she said.

And some of those high-performing neighborhood schools are getting results in facilities sorely in need of repair, while CPS is pouring millions into turnarounds, said Don Moore, executive director of Designs for Change, Catalyst reports. 

Public Schools has reached a deal with community leaders on the West Side to bring in a new neighborhood high school to replace Crane Tech, which is expected to begin a three-year phase-out next fall. (Tribune)

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday sought to frame Monday night's protest outside his home by hundreds of people upset at his plans to close or restructure several schools as a response to the difficult but necessary steps he's taking to improve the education of Chicago children. (Tribune)

The Chicago Teachers Union, parents and community members will picket in front of the Board of Education in support of a massive call for a moratorium on CPS' actions that could lead to the closure and turnaround of several neighborhood schools.  The school board is expected to vote on the proposals during its regular 10:30 a.m. meeting.  All of the targeted schools are in Black or Latino neighborhoods. “CPS’ decision to starve some schools and resource others amount to education apartheid,” said CTU President Karen GJ Lewis. “Most of the students impacted by these failed policies are African American and Latino. All public school students deserve access to a high quality education; and anyone who works in these schools demands to be treated with respect.” (Press release)

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chancellor Cheryl Hyman announced Tuesday a $479 million five-year capital plan to support City Colleges of Chicago’s College to Careers initiative. The capital commitment includes construction of a new Malcolm X College, including a new Allied Health Academy that will strengthen ties to the Illinois Medical District and prepare Chicagoans for the expected 84,000 local job openings in healthcare over the next 10 years. The new Malcolm X College campus, projected to open in the spring of 2015, will be located just south of the United Center, across the street from the current college site at Jackson and Damen streets on land already owned by City Colleges of Chicago. The 500,000 square foot campus will be composed of two 3-story academic buildings and a 1,500-car parking facility connected via an atrium. (Press release)

Chicago will build a new $251 million Malcolm X College and 1,500-space parking garage in the shadows of the United Center to create a state-of-the-art facility to train students for careers in health care, Mayor Rahm Emanuel disclosed Tuesday. (Sun-Times)

On the eve of the Board of Education vote on school closings and turnarounds, CPS leaders said they will reopen a neighborhood option in the Crane High School building, city council members questioned CPS leaders and activists and parents made final arguments that their schools have made gains and don’t need dramatic change. (Catalyst)

After months of intense fighting between officials and activists about whether or not to close the Near West Side’s Crane High School, Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard has signed on to a plan to keep the school open. Under the new plan, Crane will be shifting its mission, changing from a high school that’s solely neighborhood-focused to one that’s focused on training students for jobs in the medical industry. (Chicago Journal)

IN THE NATION
The Obama administration is working on setting nutritional standards for foods that children can buy outside the cafeteria. With students eating 19 percent to 50 percent of their daily food at school, the administration says it wants to ensure that what they eat contributes to good health and smaller waistlines. The proposed rules are expected within the next few weeks. (The New York Times)

Seniority rules and teacher transfer rights will remain intact in Oakland's public schools this year, despite the superintendent's call for a change. (Mercury News)

Many parents and Denver Public Schools community members vented in a survey that the district’s calendar features far too many weeks in which children are not in school for full days Monday through Friday. (Education News Colorado)

Across more than 30 topics covered in the Advanced Placement program, participation in geography is rising faster than any other. It's joined by AP courses like Chinese, environmental science, psychology, and world history that have been gaining ground most rapidly in recent years. (Education Week)

A trio of studies released last week by the Civil Rights Project, a social science research group at UCLA found that black and Latino community college students in Southern California are failing to advance because many have graduated from low-performing high schools that ill-prepare them for college work. These students then end up at similar two-year institutions with poor transfer records. (Los Angeles Times)

Also, an advocacy organization once again raised questions about whether turnaround schools produce results.

Tuesday’s last-ditch efforts capped two months of wrangling about the proposal by CPS to close two elementary schools, phase out two high schools and turnaround 10 schools. Six of the turnarounds—a process that entails replacing an entire staff—are slated to be managed by the Academy for Urban School Leadership.

This year, CPS leaders didn’t take any actions off the table. In the past, the district has in some cases backed off following community and parent opposition. 

The only concession made by CEO Jean-Claude Brizard was the announcement on Tuesday that Crane will house a health sciences high school. The current Crane High School will still be phased out and next year’s freshmen will be assigned to other neighborhood high schools.

But starting in the fall of 2013, area students will have the option of attending the health sciences high school. Whether Crane staff will automatically get jobs in the new high school is undecided and is an issue that will be grappled with by a committee that Brizard intends to create.

State Senator Annazette Collins said she thinks it is a “great thing” that CPS is ready to turn a proposal from the community into reality. She noted that Crane is close to the medical district and Malcolm X City College, which is going to become a medical specialty school.

“What a good place to train students for sustainable careers,” she said.

Parents and activists from other schools, however, say they have no reason to suspect Wednesday’s vote will bring a reprieve.   

Willie Williams, an activist whose wife is a security guard at Casals, said he believes that the “powers that be” don’t like to be told they are wrong. He spoke at a press conference held Tuesday in which parents and staff once again invited CPS leaders to visit their school and said that students are making gains based on standardized test results. 

“They want to tell is what they are going to do, not the other way around,” Williams said.

Parents in Humboldt Park forced attention to the situation at Casals and Piccolo elementary schools, which are slated to be handed over to the Academy for Urban School Leadership. On Friday, they, along with members of Occupy Chicago, staged a sit-in. On Saturday, they were promised meetings with board members.

After meeting with board Vice President Jesse Ruiz at the school, parents had phone conversations with three other board members and told them that the district should support their current principals, who are new and making changes. The parents want the schools to be spared a turnaround and instead allowed to remain open under a probation plan for two years. 

According to parents, board member Andrea Zopp asked them why they would oppose a turnaround.

"We are already being turned around,” Piccolo's local school council chair Latrice Watkins responded. “Give us a chance, we don't need AUSL. Give us some of those dollars you are giving AUSL. Why do we need more changes? We've already had 3 principals in five years."

But not one board member committed to voting against the turnarounds on Wednesday, a disappointment to parents.

“It was not just about us talking, it was about them really seeing this plan and a possible reality," says Latoya Walls, parent at Piccolo who was also on the calls. 

Piccolo and Casals parents and activists also pointed to a study released Tuesday by Designs for Change as another reason why the turnaround shouldn’t go forward.

Designs for Change analyzed ISAT scores and found that many high-poverty neighborhood elementary schools are out-performing turnaround schools. And some of those high-performing neighborhood schools are getting results in facilities sorely in need of repair, while CPS is pouring millions into turnarounds, said Don Moore, executive director of Designs for Change.

“Most