high schools | catalyst-chicago.org

Current Issue

School closings

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

Read More

high schools

Chicago students give recommendations to fix failing high schools August 25, 2009 By: Sarah Karp What’s wrong with high schools? Just about everything, according to students. A group of students walked into CEO Ron Huberman’s office last week and presented him with a wish list for improving high schools. He, in turn, handed them a reality check. Antwan Ward, a senior at Orr High School, was part of the group, the Mikva Challenge Education Council. They told Huberman that in order reinvent high schools, he’ll have to dramatically cut class sizes, to 15 to 20 students; significantly lengthen the school day, from the current 5 hours and 45 minutes to 7 hours; buy more laptops; find more challenging curricula and get teachers to make classes more engaging; and stop schools from suspending students for any but the most serious offenses. Their recommendations are based on a survey of 400 students from a cross-section of public high schools. Read More \| (3) Comments	Transformation fails to spark improvement in Chicago high schools, say researchers August 20, 2009 By: Sarah Karp and John Myers Former CEO Arne Duncan often said that a key to creating the best urban school district in the country was to improve long-failing high schools. But Duncan’s broadest, most expensive effort, called High School Transformation, sputtered in implementation and has failed to spark significant improvement, according to an evaluation released Thursday. The evaluation blames poor teaching and student absenteeism, among other factors. The report is part of a package of evaluations that also criticize the lack of impact on high schools of two other district initiatives: Renaissance 2010 and AMPS, or Autonomous Management and Performance Schools, which aimed to give higher-performing schools more freedom. The reports are from research institute SRI International and the Consortium on Chicago School Research. The report is not the first sign that the High School Transformation project wasn’t going well. In fact, the district has dropped the name and simply calls the project IDS, for Instructional Development Systems—the package of curriculum materials, professional development and support that were supposed to be the first phase of the transformation project. Read More \| (9) Comments
More transformation for high school math and science August 04, 2009 A $5 million grant from federal stimulus funds will help CPS fill a missing piece of the puzzle in its High School Transformation Project: 12th-grade math and science. The National Science Foundation grant will pay for 160 high school math and science teachers to attend content-area classes and workshops on leadership and teaching, designed by faculty at five local universities. Forty teachers each year, for four years, will attend the classes, with the goal of becoming teacher-leaders who work to bolster the quality of math and science teaching at their schools. (The NSF is using stimulus funds for the grant.) Read More \| (5) Comments	New high school principal center at U. of Chicago will focus on data July 23, 2009 By: Sarah Karp Principal training took a new turn in Chicago this week when the Chicago Public Schools entered into a partnership with the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration (SSA) to create a center to help existing high school principals make sense of data and prepare new ones for the task. Read More \| (6) Comments
A little bit of high school transformation left July 16, 2009 By: Sarah Karp As private support winds down, CPS will continue scaled-back support of its High School Transformation project. Board members recently approved $12 million over two years for consulting services from seven companies that supplied curriculum packages for the project and an additional one that provides assessments. Those packages—called IDS for Instructional Development Systems—include materials, assessments, professional development and coaching; they were to be the starting point of the district’s comprehensive plan to improve neighborhood and some magnet high schools. Read More \| (10) Comments	What nonprofits should do to help students graduate May 29, 2009 By: Linda Lenz Nonprofits can do good things for kids, but if they’re not paying attention to what kids are doing in school, they’re not helping them graduate. That was one of several admonitions delivered at a forum aimed at helping CPS and its external partners boost Chicago’s graduation rate, which ranges from an appalling 38 percent for African-American boys to 71 percent for white girls. “There are a lot of really good programs out there,” said Elaine Allensworth, a co-director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research. “But if the people who work with kids don’t know how they are doing in class, they’re working blind.” Read More \| (7) Comments
Grassroots student group follows in footsteps of activist teachers May 26, 2009 By: Sarah Karp As a journalist who covers the schools, I think the CPS survey that asks students what they think about academics and climate in their school is a good idea—a way to take the pulse of what students think. But to a couple of students at Julian High School, that wasn't the case. A poster displayed at an expo organized by a new student group explained why: the survey was passed out after the ACT and was multiple choice, demanding that students fill in little bubbles—something they had just spent hours doing. And the questions asked about all their teachers as a whole, even though, as high schoolers, students have different instructors for different classes. "If they want to serve us better they would come down and talk to us their d--n self,” noted Cheresha Guest, who helped assemble the poster and suggested administrators meet with focus groups to get the real deal on what students think. Read More \| (1) Comments	Putting the brakes on high school transformation April 28, 2009 By: Sarah Karp An ambitious districtwide effort to overhaul high schools is in limbo. After a three-year rollout that spanned 43 schools—just shy of the target of 50—there are no schools in the pipeline for next year. Previously, schools were selected each spring to adopt the beefed up curricula that underpin High School Transformation. Funding for the project, some $80 million ($20 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), has nearly run out, leaving a cash-strapped CPS to foot the bill. Weeks ago, funding for a long-planned evaluation of the project was pulled. Gates spokesman Chris Williams declined to comment on whether the foundation will fund the project in the future. Read More \| (2) Comments
Top CPS grads often land at less rigorous colleges April 23, 2009 By: Sarah Karp A new report from the Consortium on Chicago School Research has a surprising finding: Even students from top CPS high schools and programs are winding up at colleges far below their qualifications. The study, released Thursday, is the fifth in the Consortium’s series on CPS graduates after high school. In this new study, Consortium researchers build on previous work that revealed a substantial mismatch between the colleges CPS students could get into and where they go. The study found this mismatch extends to top students in selective schools and programs. Even in schools such as Whitney Young and Lane Tech, about a third of students go to less rigorous colleges. The study can be found at the Consortium website. Read More \| (8) Comments

go here for more