Current Issue

School closings

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

early childhood education

May 06, 2013

Dumas Elementary teacher Nadjea Butler-Wilson leads her 3rd-grade students in a lesson on reading a persuasive paragraph. The author believes his town needs a new library. Butler-Wilson wants her students to analyze his argument.

 “The reason he’s giving you is that the library is too small. How can you prove that? What is some fact about the library that will show it’s too small?” she prompts the class.

 “Some people think it’s too small,” one boy says.

April 25, 2013

Amid an escalating battle over standardized testing that included a “play-in” protest at CPS headquarters last week and a student boycott of the Prairie State Achievement Exam on Wednesday, CPS officials are undertaking a broad review of testing in the

April 17, 2013

CPS faces more intensive state monitoring following a ruling that the district isn’t doing a good enough job helping students transition from Early Intervention services into preschool special education.

April 10, 2013

As the city shifts preschool seats to better programs in needier areas, at least nine community agencies that are losing their funding say they will likely be forced to replace their state-certified preschool teachers with child care staff who hold lesser credentials--associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees without teaching licenses, or no degrees at all.

April 05, 2013

STORY CORRECTED TO REFLECT UPDATED INFORMATION--More than 40 community-based preschool providers around the city will lose preschool funding under the city’s “Ready to Learn” preschool competition, an effort to shift preschool seats to high-quality programs in neighborhoods where they are needed.

April 03, 2013

CPS hasn’t announced yet which schools will be able to keep offering preschool programs in the fall. But the announcement is likely coming soon, because the district has launched a new centralized enrollment process that will ask families who want their children to attend preschool programs in CPS schools to apply by May 3. 

March 07, 2013

In January 2012, CPS officials and visiting dignitaries from Target Corp. swarmed into Cardenas Elementary in Little Village – one of eight schools that became part of the Children’s Literacy Initiative through an Investing in Innovation grant awarded in 2010.

With the program set to expand to three more schools with funding from Target, classrooms were on display. One visitor, Stephen Zrike Jr., chief of schools for the Pilsen-Little Village Elementary Network, noted the impact of the initiative. He called the amount of reading and writing being done by Cardenas students “unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

February 08, 2013

A follow-up study of students who attended the Ounce of Prevention Fund’s Educare early childhood center show promising results—for parents as well as students.

February 04, 2013

On the first floor of Brown Elementary School is a room with colorful mats on the walls, a ball pit and calming low-intensity lights.

Principal Kenya Sadler proudly shows off this new feature of her school. Sadler raised private money to install it because she thought the specially designed environment would benefit the children in her schools’ two classes for children with autism.

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