(Note - that's my husband Larry whose shoulder State Senator Obama has his left arm around. I might add that it's not the first time Larry has been at the right place at the right time -- like that time in the fall of 1974 in Saarbrucken Germany where he met me....)  

He was the new Governor, he had such great hair, and we found ourselves surrounding him with PURE enthusiasm.

Turns out it was Blagojevich who put everyone on notice that he would veto any tax swap or increase, even for schools, and who therefore killed any chance of funding reform during his administration. 

So, in honor of Rod Blagojevich's well-deserved first day in court, this PURE memory.

According to a survey by GMAC Insurance, the average score on a sample written drivers' test has gone down since last year, and 18.4 percent would actually flunk if they had to take the test today.

Yet these losers, these failures, these probable test flunkers, are still out on the roads driving! 

If we take our standardized, multiple choice tests seriously -- and you know we do here in Arne Duncan country -- we should be yanking the licenses of the flunkers and sending them to Kaplan classes to get those rules of the road pounded into their thick heads. 

Because as we all know, the best way to tell if someone is a safe driver is a multiple choice test.  

*****

Take a look at this fun comparison of driving-based performance assessment with multiple choice and norm-referenced tests for more on this critical issue....

CPS teacher Wade Tillett has posted a great postcard to Mrs. Obama on the bubbleover.net site. It reads in part:

I was at Grant Park on election night. Your husband reminded us of the changes that occurred in the last 100 years, and asked us to dream of what life would be like in 100 more....What will prepare us for the unforeseen challenges of the next one hundred years is not the ability to fill in the right bubble, but the ability to ask questions that understand both the urgency of now and the direction of our future.

Please send  a postcard today (or send another if you've already sent one!):

First Lady Michelle Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington DC 30500

The Texas textbook controversy exploded all over the nation as the Texas State Board of Education considered and then finalized some 100 amendments to revised state history standards a few days ago.

Why should folks in Illinois care about what students in Texas are tested on? Because in the perverse world of standards-based education, what's tested is what's taught, and what's tested in the nation's largest textbook market is what ends up being taught in lots of other places, too.

So, here's what the Texas State school board decided:   

• Speeches by Confederate President Jefferson Davis should be taught in equal value with Abraham Lincoln.
• Conservative institutions such as the Moral Majority, the National Rifle Association and the Contract with America should be emphasized with no counterbalance from the progressive perspective.
• President Thomas Jefferson’s contribution to the writing of the U.S. Constitution did not promote the concept of the Separation of Church and State.
• The anti-Communist campaign of 1950s Senator Joseph McCarty was justified.
• While not removed entirely, as first proposed, the role of such African-American and Latino heroes as Che Guevera and Thurgood Marshall will be marginalized.

Do this mindful of the fact that 48 states have been collaborating on national standards in reading and math. The final draft of these standards is due to come out tomorrow on this site.

Valerie Strauss included my postcard to First Lady Michelle Obama in her Washington Post Answer Sheet blog today. 

Start sending those post cards today! 

Here's what I'm writing to Michelle Obama as part of this weekend's postcard campaign:

You are a strong advocate for our children's physical health, and for that we thank you. Today we are asking you to be a strong advocate for their mental, emotional and intellectual health, too – to promote the fitness of their minds as well as their bodies.

You planted a garden at the White House to give children a hands-on experience that would help them begin to think about nutrition. Our children need a garden of learning, too, where we plant great ideas, get children excited about education, and harvest academic success for every student. You've asked children to get active, to move, play, and get involved in sports. Children also need to be freed from bubble sheet learning-- to get up off of their desk chairs in class to create, demonstrate, and integrate!

We'd like you to join us in a new campaign – “Let's Move Away from High-Stakes Testing.” The goal of this campaign is to make sure that children grow up with healthy minds, learning a full, enriched curriculum nurtured by a variety of healthy, active, hands-on instructional and assessment methods.

It's important that the whole country get behind healthy learning, and this includes everyone understanding more about what can happen when schools depend too much on standardized tests.

Because, unfortunately, high-stakes testing is an invasive weed in our healthy garden of learning. Teaching to the test has choked out critical areas like the arts, science, history and civics along with physical activity and sports.

Like fast food, high-stakes tests are easy, cheap, quick – and potentially unsafe when overused. Yet they have become the main dish of schooling despite the warnings of scientists that they should be used only sparingly, in a balanced "assessment diet."

High-stakes testing seems to have a disproportionately negative impact on low-income children whose schools can be the educational equivalent of the urban “food desert.” Unlike more upscale areas, these neighborhoods don't offer a lot of fresh produce or wide varieties of foods, and their schools tend to focus more on the empty calories of test drill than on an enriched, varied curriculum.

It's not by choice that this situation has developed. Schools across the U. S. have been force-fed this testing regime under the harsh test-and-punish policies of the No Child Left Behind Act.

As Congress begins to rewrite this law, we are asking for your help to phase out the bad, unhealthy aspects of testing in our schools and help us replace them with an educational diet and exercise program of enriched curricula, diverse instruction, and appropriate, high-quality assessments.

My husband thinks it would be a bad idea for me to walk the four blocks from our house to the Obama's Hyde Park home to deliver a bunch of postcards to Michelle while they're in town for the Memorial Day holiday this weekend, so I guess I'll just drop them in the mail to the White House with everyone else...

Don't forget to send out your postcards to Mrs. Obama beginning tomorrow (May 28th) asking her to help us reduce the focus on standardized tests in our schools. The Time Out from Testing web site offers sample letters, postcard templates, and other tools.

The Obamas' daughters have always attended schools that offer a well-rounded curriculum and de-emphasized standardized testing.

The message to Mrs. Obama is simple: We want the same education for our children that you provide for Malia and Sasha. Our child is not a test score. Encourage the President to end the use of high stakes standardized tests!

Read more about the nation wide postcard-writing campaign in this Washington Post blog.  

With the endorsement of another losing caucus, the CDSU, earlier in the week, CORE would have enough votes to win in the June 11th runoff election if all members of these two caucuses cast their votes for CORE candidates.

Final vote tallies are still murky, but based on the number of votes for the five presidential candidates reported in Substance on May 24th, CORE's Lewis won about 33% of the overall vote, PACT's Lynch about 18% and CDSU's Porter 7%, or a total of about 58% of the vote for president.

Of course, it's unlikely that all votes will go that way, but the PACT endorsement is a major plus for CORE. 

I believe that a new amendment will have to be passed by both houses. Will they take the time to give a handout to a handful of private religious schools, while leaving our public schools and hundreds of thousands of children behind?

State rep contact info. State Senate contact info.

Last year Anthony wrote an open letter to Arne Duncan and then created a Facebook page to collect the ideas of other teachers and to organize a national teacher resistance to Race to the Top and the Duncan Blueprint.

A while ago Anthony sent 100 of the teachers' letters to Obama, and one thing led to another which led to Arne Duncan agreeing to a telephone conference this past Monday to "listen" to 12 of them.

We in Chicago know what it's like when Arne "listens." Anthony had a similar experience, but is committed to pursuing any potential opportunity to help teachers influence the critical federal education policy decisions that are going to be made in the coming weeks.    

I posted this response to Anthony's story:

Hi Anthony- As someone who dealt with Mr. Duncan for over eight years in Chicago, I support your degree of skepticism about any positive outcome of this phone call.

Duncan is where he is because he sounds very sincere when he lies, prevaricates, and covers up the truth. His role has been to pour oil on troubled waters, not to improve schools or educate children. He is the "aw shucks" face of the school privatizers, period.

However, the fact that you did get him to respond is definitely a sign that you're now perceived as a threat. You have brought together and made public so many powerful, compelling statements from teachers. Your strategic approach to the forum was just the kind of careful preparation and follow up work that devastates Duncan and his gang.

You can tell from his vague, pandering comments that he means to assuage you and your allies, not change direction.

But you don't have to roll over for such an obvious ploy. Keep doing what you are doing -- crank it up! lots of us will help! -- and pretty soon Arne's act won't be enough. They may have to actually do something different.

Here's a favorite Arne defensive move from a Tribune business section interview last year:

"Q: You describe your policies as research-driven, but aren't most of the findings unreliable?

"A: I'm actually more optimistic than that."

Now, apparently, he's channeled that optimism into a set of DOE reports that purport to offer a happier, more positive track record for these strategies. According to the DOE, this set of reports outlines "research that supports the proposals in the blueprint." 

After reading one of these reports, I'd have to say that the most honest and expressive phrase used is "This page intentionally left blank." See, for example, page 3 of the "Fostering Innovation and Excellence" report. This is the report which offers "research-based support" for more charters, "innovation," and school choice.

Apparently, the research base is pretty thin.

For example, the "evidence" supporting charter schools is that "many" charters (wait for Arne's favorite adverb) "dramatically" outperform other schools "in the community or state." The report goes on to mention a handful of charter schools and to detail the hype surrounding them (p. 7), including the Chicago Tribune's highest compliment - they have waiting lists.

On page 9, the report actually acknowledges the major study out of Stanford that found overall dismal results for charters nation wide. But the report "balances" this major national study, which reflects countless other negative findings,  with a small study by a charter supporter focused on New York City schools, and about whose work serious questions have been raised. The overall effect is a too-obvious effort to dismiss the bulk of charter research to suggest that the jury is still out. The report goes on to imply that any problems with charters are the fault of state laws. 

The "research" on charter success (p. 10) wraps up with the work of a Chicago astroturf parent group funded by Bill Gates and calling itself PRISE at the time of the report (it has undergone several name changes since then). The group's overall mission seems to be to expose how stupid parents are for liking their neighborhood schools, and to go door to door to try to convince parents to reject the neighborhood school and choose charters.

The "research" on school choice is summarized with this phrase: school options increase choice (oh, really?) and "have the ability to produce positive outcomes of students" (p. 13). Well, don't most schools have the ability to produce at least some positive outcomes?

And again, parental ignorance is posited as a major barrier to choice programs. 

Turnarounds missing 

Conspicuously missing in this report is any "research" to back up school turnarounds, which are one of the four major strategies required by the RTTT grant program, and pushed in the Blueprint. 

Apparently, Arne and his crack team of researchers decided not to try to fake up the kind of false hype about Renaissance 2010, AUSL, and such schools as Dodge, Sherman, etc. which he tried to foist on the public during the first year of his administration until the lies caught up with him.

Still, this report is an embarrassment, a parody of research, a transparent effort to put lipstick on the administration's piggish plans, and a disturbing portent of what we can expect from Duncan's approach to ESEA reauthorization.  

Why Parents United for Responsible Education

OPPOSES SB 2494 (voucher bill) and

SUPPORTS HB 174 or other fair funding for PUBLIC schools

What if our state elected officials went to Springfield

and all our children, parents, schools, and communities got was a handful of vouchers?

That would be shameful.

Read the rest of the message here.

Act locally, call long-distance toll-free.

Yesterday about 5,000 parents, teachers, students, and other public school supporters shut down rush hour in the Loop to protest threatened city school budget cuts.

Today, the NEA is asking for our support for their Speak up for Education and Kids Day.

They have set up a national toll-free call-in number

866 608 6355

for us to call Congress and urge them to pass the Education Jobs bill, an emergency fund of $23 billion designed to save some 300 thousand teaching positions and avoid some of the catastrophic layoffs that are threatening Chicago schools and other districts across the nation as a result of the recession.

The NEA is reinforcing this message with a TV ad that will air in DC and in select House districts.

When you call the toll-free number, you will first hear about the issue and what's at stake.

You can also e-mail your members of Congress to support funding to save education jobs in the emergency supplemental appropriations bill, and become a fan of Speak Up for Education and Kids on Facebook – a community of educators and concerned citizens – now more than 16,000 strong – who believe our nation has a responsibility to invest in education and avoid the short-sighted cuts that could deprive our students of the bright futures they deserve.

Today it's the teachers, parents and community adding our voices to the call to our state legislators to fix school funding. It's Public Schools Action Tuesday - PSAT.

Tuesday, May 25, 4 - 6 pm

CPS headquarters, 125 S. Clark Street

Some legislators are apparently too busy collecting votes for vouchers to help out private and religious schools -- oh, sorry, I mean, "saving" a few "poor children stuck in failing schools" -- to do their real job and support statewide funding reform.

Some are even OK with the Senate's proposed $400 million in education cuts.

If you can't march today, please go to the noto37 site and send a message to your state reps (the site does it all for you) or make a direct call or fax to your House rep or Senator in Springfield or their local offices. Tell them that we expect them to represent us, our children, and our precious and essential  public school system, and that we are watching them.

We have Jon Burge in a courtroom here, up on charges of torturing dozens of black men to coerce false confessions 20 years ago

Then you have the Supreme Court In Washington D. C. ruling that Chicago's firefighters' exam was unfair to African-American applicants.

We're going to try to keep the momentum going with our challenge to CPS's discriminatory student promotion policy. For 15 years, CPS has been flunking a disproportionate number of African American and Latino students based on their annual standardized test scores. This practice has to stop.

,

Mayor Daley has said a lot of crazy things, but his "jokes" at a Thursday press conference were the clearest indication yet that this man has lost whatever grasp he had on reality.

And it's not just his "up your butt with a bayonet" comments. 

It's the implied threat to the Supreme Court which Daley also blathered about, and which the mainstream media has since tried to suppress:

"Maybe they'll see the light of day," Daley said at a City Hall news conference. "Maybe one of them will have an incident and they'll change their mind overnight, going to and from work."

I think that might be a felony. In fact, Daley does have close personal friends who might take that as a direct order. Yet Daley continues to roam unshackled, shooting off his mouth.

But he is done, over, toast. Mark the date.  

CTU rules require that the top two vote-getters vie in a run-off on June 11. 

The other three caucuses (PACT, SEA, UDC) are running considerably behind the UPC and CORE.

Substance reports that 34 schools' ballot boxes were not picked up Friday. Those votes will be added, as will the votes of those who split their ballots among various caucuses. Final results are expected Monday May 24th.

So- now we'll be wondering if any or all of the three other caucuses will join forces with either CORE or UPC, or if two-thirds of the CTU membership will vote against the incumbents again on June 11, as they did Friday.  

Congresswoman Chu's report summarized the arguments against the Blueprint, criticisms which have been been gaining increased support throughout the recent hearings held by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) and the House Education and Labor Committees.

Rep. Chu claimed that the Blueprint will:

1. Box In Schools

2. Ignore Student Needs

3. Tie the Hands of Teachers and Leaders

According to Chu's report, "The most successful school improvements come about when teachers, parents, administrators and the community all come to the table." The SOS plan, she says, will

1. Promote flexibility and collaboration

2. Remove barriers to student success

3. Foster teachers and leaders

A press statement from House education committee chair George Miller reflected support for Chu's position: "Congress should encourage, incentivize and support the universal elements that research and best practices show are working to turn around the country’s lowest performing schools... Research outlined by witnesses shows that successful school turnaround must include flexibility, shared leadership, professional development, capacity building, extended school and learning time, community involvement and beyond."

"There are elements in the research and our experience that tell us that efforts to improve poor performance work best when we work intensively with school leaders and teachers from a sense of shared accountability rather than demanding accountability on a narrow range of behaviors,” said Jessica Johnson, Chief Program Officer at Learning Point Associates. “We also know that meaningful change is more often sustained when a more comprehensive approach is taken and community and parents as well as educators are involved in the solution. The flexibility to orchestrate these variables is critical to success.”

Among the other House committee witnesses was Chicago's John Simmons, whose effective work at Strategic Learning Initiatives has been detailed here.

You have to read all the way through this to get the payoff (and it's important information).

Jim is sharing his distaste for the Illinois Policy Institute:

the sham “think tank” that now “informs” so many legislators. Republicans on the Senate Education Committee, for example, tend to review IPI position papers as bills are debated, turning the pages in unison like the sheet music of an orchestra. The IPI is the force behind the school voucher bill that may pass in the House next week. It also urges, among other things, cutting state funding for early childhood education by $200 million in FY 2011, and zeroing out Regional Offices of Education entirely.

He offers this morsel of praise:

While IPI in fact just advocates privatization – it is a nest of lobbyists, not researchers – and despite the fact that I disagree with most of its positions, I will give IPI credit for performing an act of public service. It has revealed a Republican budget proposal.

He gives us the link to the Excel spreadsheet of the proposal.

Knowing how most of us react to the opportunity to review Excel spreadsheets of budget proposals, he gives this alternative:

Sure, it takes a policy wonk to wade through all this. For those of you who don’t have time for tedious study, here’s an article about the privatization of a public school that you may find more interesting.  

Do it. 

But here's something special courtesy of the Christopher House Head Start located at the Rogers Park Presbyterian Church, where we were just celebrating 100 years of ministry to the community. Preschoolers emulating John James Audubon's famous flamingo painting, doing a beautiful job and enhancing the door of the children's restroom...

According to nola.com, it's become a "theme" for Duncan this year:

In February, Duncan told leaders of historically black colleges and universities that "we have far too few teachers of color. Only 2 percent, one in 50 teachers today are African-American males. Something is fundamentally wrong with that picture."

Although he didn't spell it out on Friday, Duncan's campaign to recruit more black teachers may be driven by research that found improved test scores for black students who spend at least a year with a black teacher. In past speeches he's mentioned that black teachers are more likely than their white peers to want to work in high-poverty, high-needs schools, the front line for closing what he calls the nation's "insidious achievement gap" between white and black students.

Well, I have a "theme " for you, Arne - why don't you look for some of those black teachers in your own #%&*! back yard, where you buried them?

During his time as CEO of CPS, Duncan oversaw the loss of nearly 2500 African-American teachers, while the numbers of CPS teachers in all other racial groups increased. Take a look at this PURE chart from 2009.   

The situation Duncan created became so egregious that CORE filed a federal discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which will decide any day now if they will send the case to the Justice Department for prosecution.

MARCH AND RALLY

TUESDAY, MAY 25

4-6 PM

125 S. Clark St (CPS HQS)

Join the CTU, GEM, and others to protest CPS budget cuts--No to 37 students in a classroom. This is a march/rally for all who are opposed to the cuts and who want the city to pay for the crisis through their TIF funds and other sources.

Why are our children always the ones to sacrifice for their economic crisis? How come no one ever asks why the financial and corporate elites don't have to sacrifice and cut profits instead of teachers having to cut pensions/wages, or children having to have cuts services?

Our messages?

• Cut Board Waste, Chop the Top

• Freeze Charters and Turnarounds

• Make the City Pay [through TIF funds, etc.]

Here's a quote from Ben Joravsky's Oct 22, 2009 Chicago Reader article about the TIF Budget:

Earlier this year Gene Saffold, Daley's chief financial officer, and Christine Raguso, head of the community development department, told the City Council's finance committee that the city had a little more than $1 billion in TIF funds on hand at the beginning of 2009. To put that in context, this year's official city budget was about $6 billion.

So you can see, there's a lot of money out there.

If you want more information on the TIF's, the city's "shadow budget" (Joravsky's term), and more, check out the Chicago Reader TIF Archive.

In some respects, our 2-year-old LSC lawsuit has been like a masters' class in language arts. A lot of it boils down to sentence structure. Which schools are exempt from the basic LSC law? Under what circumstances? With what exceptions? Do the words "or" and "not" relate to the same verb? What does paragraph 34-2.4b of the school code really mean?

Well, our state legislators are definitely not skilled wordsmiths, so we are now waiting for Judge Stuart Palmer to consider everything he heard today in a two-hour hearing, and let us know what he thinks this part of the school reform law means. 

The hearing was a fairly extensive review of the case's main points for Judge Palmer, who is new to the case. His questions were thoughtful and reasonable. He seems reluctant to go against the opinion of our original judge, who ruled last year that CPS did not violate the law in the case of the original three small schools that filed. But Judge Palmer did probe into some of the same issues as they relate to three new small schools in the case.

He also seems to share Judge Hall's interest in the alternative schools issue, as represented by the dismantling of the LSC at Carver Military School. This was the main reason that Judge Hall denied CPS's motion to dismiss the case.

CPS offered their usual odd assortment of arguments. In response to our attorney Elaine Siegel's statement that LSCs are important decision making bodies, the CPS lawyer claimed that this was a "hyperbole" -- that LSCs really have very limited powers, like selecting principals and deciding on student uniforms. Well, we know that's how they treat the LSC role.

CPS said that it was OK to force R2010 schools to have alternative LSCs because they "didn't ask" for real LSCs (not true, actually) and if they had, it could only be a request anyway and not a right. The fact that they misled school communities into signing off on small schools proposals by promising real LSCs, and then went back on that promise, didn't seem to bother the CPS lawyer.

CPS complained that one plaintiff's attachments were not stapled to his affidavit, so the whole thing should be thrown out (the judge disagreed). 

They argued that the case is too old -- even though they are the ones that have delayed it over and over again. 

And CPS seemed to think it was OK to close a "school" one day and "reopen" it the next, claiming that the school has no existing LSC anymore. Elaine suggested that would be like claiming at the end of every two-year Congressional term that the House of Representatives no longer exists. 

So, we wait for Judge Palmer's opinion. Stay tuned.  

If you can't attend the LSC lawsuit hearing today at 11 am (Daley Center, Room 2305) please do something else for LSCs by calling Governor Quinn and asking him to veto HB 6017, the bill that adds a  non-teaching staff member to the LSCs, ending the parent majority. LSCs had no input into this bill. We are concerned that this change could create an imbalance on LSCs by allowing principals to exert more control.LSCs have been the cleanest form of government in Chicago - why mess with success?

Governor's office: 312-814-2121

The impact of school closings and the University of Chicago's study on wholistic school reform will be the subject of a story on CNN at 7pm CST/8pm EST this evening (May 17). We know that tonight's story will include the experiences of at least one Chicago family affected by school closings.  

The following day, same time, same station, the U of C researchers and others will discuss school disciplinary policies.

• He may agree with the Chicago Public Schools' motion to dismiss the case. In that event, we will file the case with the appeals court.

• He may decide we will go to trial.

• He may ask from more information and set another hearing date. 

This case was first filed in February, 2008. We have yet to get past CPS's efforts to get the case dismissed. Legal strategies generally take lots and lots of time, but are a necessary part of our overall fight to strengthen local governance of our schools, which is even more important during a budget crisis and with public education itself under attack.

*****

Since the Mayor took over the schools in 1995, CPS has attacked LSCs at every level, in spite of a strong body of research evidence that LSCs have been a key element of the most successful improvements in Chicago’s schools.

LSCs have successfully engaged parents and community members in their local schools, even in disadvantaged communities where civic involvement is historically low. LSC have proven to be the cleanest form of government in Chicago. There is no research showing any negative effects of LSCs.

On the other hand, there is growing research showing the negative effects of Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 plan. The facts show that Renaissance 2010 has disenfranchised thousands of CPS parents, teachers, and community members, is associated with increased youth violence in the city, destabilizes the lives of hundreds of students by causing them to move from school to school or by changing the entire adult staff in their school, and strips communities of meaningful participation in local neighborhood schools which used to serve as community centers.

Right before the SAT story was a bit about the concern of military experts that childhood obesity has become a national security issue. They blame fast food marketing for creating an out-of-shape recruiting pool.

Colbert didn't make an explicit link between that story and the SATs, but there is one. Our children and, yes, our freedom, are just as threatened by the privatization of education which uses standardized tests as the coin of the realm.  Maybe the military experts will stand up for our children's education some day -- after all, a sound mind is at least as important to military readiness as a sound body.

Senior staff will inform parents of the changes in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Parents will have an opportunity to share their concerns, comments and questions.

We're hoping that a number of parents will raise some of the questions and concerns detailed in the recent Parents Across America letter to President Obama and Congress. Check out (and sign!) the PAA petition site where parents are reporting where they've sent copies of the letter.  

No travel for Chicago parents?

We understand that a number of Chicago Title 1 Parent Advisory Council members are planning to attend this meeting, which is great.

However, we have also heard that some are being told to cancel those plans based on a new CPS policy restricting travel due to budget problems. 

We believe that this should not apply to parent travel using Federal Title 1 parent involvement funds. If you have questions or are having problems with your travel plans, or if you want to learn more about the parent forum, please call the USDE Region V office, 312-730-1700. Ask for the parent involvement specialist.

Kellogg is supporting our assessment advocacy work, specifically our efforts to address the disparate number of African-American students who score too low on standardized tests and are retained. Research has shown that retention is harmful, not helpful, and yet the Chicago schools continue to implement this unfair, unsound policy.

Who knew that eating Frosted Flakes as a kid would some day pay off in a chance to do good work?

State School News Service's Jim Broadway reports that SB 2494 will very likely be brought back -- now, while they are supposedly "working" on a budget deal -- and that many of the "no" votes were changed "yes" votes based on a legislative version of playing chicken. So we will probably get to see Rep. Joyce cry again, and I may get a chance to sell my t-shirts.

Call your reps - the game is not over yet!

Public School Action Tuesday - share this call to write a postcard to Michelle Obama on May 29.

Parents, teachers, students, and concerned citizens have initiated a postcard campaign to First Lady Michelle Obama to help end the over-reliance on standardized tests promoted and even mandated by federal education policy.

Here is what Michelle Obama said about the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind program on the campaign trail in Wisconsin on February 28, 2008: “No Child Left Behind is strangling the life out of most schools....If my future were determined by my performance on a standardized test I wouldn't be here. I guarantee that.”

Thousands of us agree with her criticism. We need her help to end the reliance on high stakes standardized tests.

Background: When the Obamas lived in Chicago, their daughters Malia and Sasha attended the University of Chicago Lab School, whose director has stated, "Personal and political agendas are constantly challenging us...Just one of those   challenges, but perhaps the most misguided one, is that somehow the testing of children will restore order, raise accountability, and quite simply raise the achievement level of American children. From my perspective, nothing could be farther from the truth."

The girls' current school, Sidwell Friends, is progressive and focused on the while child. The school's College Counseling Test Guide states   "The school day is not an appropriate time for standardized test prep work."

Unfortunately, President Obama is pushing a different agenda for other peoples' children. We are asking Mrs. Obama to stand with us as we demand for our children the same excellent, well-rounded education with appropriate, quality assessments that she and Preident Obama have chosen for theirs. 

Here's what you can do:

On Saturday, May 29, 2010, get everyone you know to send postcards to the First Lady.

Address the post card to: First Lady Michelle Obama The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington DC 20500

Dear Mrs. Obama:

We want the same high-quality education for our public school children that you provide for Malia and Sasha. Our child is not a test score. [Our children are not test scores. My child is not a test score. My children are not test scores.]. Please encourage the President to end the use of high stakes standardized tests!

Sincerely,

[your name]

Phil Kadner, writing in the Southtown Star, perfectly expresses the flawed (or is it just careless?) logic of some voucher supporters:

State Rep. Kevin Joyce (D-Chicago), the House sponsor of the voucher bill, made a passionate speech about the need to help children.

He asked his fellow legislators to imagine they were on a bus driving by a body of water where children were drowning. They would have a responsibility, he said, to stop and try to help some of those children.

Some of those children? The responsibility, it seems to me, would be to try to help all of those children.

If you can't do it, fine. But don't you have to try?

Not in Illinois.

You let the weakest drown. You let them turn to gangs and put them on the streets, where they often end up leading a life of crime.

Penny Bender Sebring, founding co-director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, discusses what it takes to improve schools.  

This edition of "Beyond the Beltway" will address the questions: Why can't we make school reform work? Has everything been tried? There have been school closings and turnarounds. Students have been paid for good grades.  Charter schools and big voucher program are moving forward.Yet for every success story using a new strategy, there seem to be an equal number of flops. What's missing?

 

On the panel to address these questions with Penny Bender Sebring will be:

 

John Simmons--President, Strategic Learning Initiatives

 

Beth Purvis--Executive Director, Chicago International Charter Schools

 

Steve Jubbs--Oakland School Reformer

 

If you are a Chicagoan, you can watch the edition of "Beyond the Beltway":

• Sunday, May 9 - 10:30 PM, WYCC-TV/Ch. 20, Chicago
• Monday, May 10 - 11:00 PM, Comcast Cable/Ch. 3, Suburban Chicago

For our other colleagues and friends, please check your local listings or watch and listen LIVE on the Web on Sunday, May 9, from 6-8 p.m. The programs are also archived.

 

Mrs. Williams was appointed to the position of Chief Financial Officer to replace Donna Dunnings, Cook County Board President Todd Stroger's cousin, who was fired in the wake of a scandal involving a hire of Dunnings. Mrs. WIlliams' raise from $176,000 to $230,000 looks a lot like part of Stroger's end-of-term buying and spending spree.

Rufus Williams was forced to resign his board president post after having alienated just about everyone possible during his reign. I don't know anything else about his wife, but I do know that this story says a lot about how Chicago operates. People can appear to be thrown under the bus one day, from one area of city/county government, only to pop up a while later, clearly back in the game in another area.

These fat cats do seem to have nine comfy lives, all of them paid for by us, the taxpayers. 

Even cooler that she received this award in part for her activist work against R2010, as reported by the Sun-Times Rosalind Rossi: "Kellina Mojica, a Julian High School senior who helped found the Julian Jaguars for Justice, a club that successfully lobbied for CTA buses to stop more frequently outside Julian. Kellina, 18, who plans to become a civil rights lawyer, also argued against school turnarounds and charter schools at Chicago School Board meetings and helped build homes in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans."

Suddenly I feel a lot better about the future of education.

But I'll get over it.

And anyway, they'll be back with another try - you can count on that. Our hapless representatives won't pass up another opportunity to cry, beg, plead, and beat their breasts for the poor children of Chicago, especially if they don't have to do anything meaningful, like fund the schools adequately.  

Sadly, House voucher sponsor Kevin Joyce just doesn't get it. According to the Sun-Times, he said about the defeat, "Today, those kids lost out because the people that are a part of that system are afraid of one little change: giving kids an opportunity to go to a better school."  

Few want to "escape" anything - and private/parochial schools are hardly the paradise some would make them out to be. .

Anyway, can you imagine the clout list for getting one of those vouchers???. Maybe the Tribune supports vouchers just to assure a steady supply of headlines like the ones for its prize-winning U of I clout series.  

Thankfully, not all of our elected officials are as clueless as Rep. Joyce. The Tribune offers this slice of sanity from Rep. Art Turner, who opposed the bill: Turner "railed against the current educational system, saying improvements need to be made in the home life of children and in the city school system.... 'Chicago Board (of Education), get busy, 'Turner said. 'Do what you're supposed to do.' "

Right. And state legislature, do what you're supposed to do - fund our schools. 

According to the Tribune, police shut down several blocks on Clark Street between Monroe and Adams Street for about two hours for the protest. 

We haven't seen this kind of action since 1987 when parents and teachers took over the Loop to end the 19-day school strike and usher in the era of Chicago school reform.

Office of the Governor 207 State House Springfield, IL 62706 Phone: 217-782-0244 TTY: 888-261-3336

Office of the Governor James R. Thompson Center 100 W. Randolph, 16-100 Chicago, IL 60601 Phone: 312-814-2121

Here's PURE's position on the bill.

PAA has set up a Facebook petition here. Please sign on to support parents' concerns that the Duncan/Obama Blueprint for America's schools takes the wrong approach and that parents voices must be heard as critical decisions are made about the future of our children's education.

But Arne is sunnily optimistic that more money and competition can fix all that. In his May 3 Georgetown speech he proposed the following:    

• Better school report cards.
• More school choice,
• Support for programs that solicit parental feedback.
• More schools that serve as community centers.
• $200 million for Promise Neighborhoods, which include comprehensive social services.
• Allowing family engagement to be included as one measure of success in teacher and principal evaluations (a proposal made by the national PTA).
• Defining professional development of teachers and school leaders to include working with families. 

The 2 percent solution

Arne also wants to double the funding for parent engagement-- from one to two percent of Title I dollars--or a total of $270 million.

States will be able to use another one percent of Title I dollars – about $145 million -- for grant programs that support, incentivize, and help expand district-level, evidence-based parental involvement practices. Parent Information and Resource Centers will be able to compete for these funds, along with districts, community-based organizations and other non-profits.  

Building on a joke from another of his new best friends, Warren Buffett (Arne seems to have made a lot of rich friends since the move to DC), he says, "we have to stop treating the issue of family engagement as if it was not our dog."  

Gee, Arne, first of all, how about not thinking of parent involvement as a dog?

But let's look at a more critical, real "cognitive dissonance" -- you know, the one where you tie federal funds to failed strategies like charter schools, turnarounds, and high-stakes testing.  

How about instead of looking out the window at the mess you are making across the country, and admiring yourself and your hot shot friends in the mirror, you try looking at a book, at some of the research into your pet programs that other friends of yours are making money off of?

Here's a story about it in Substance.

Meanwhile, parents across the city are arriving in Springfield to take the same message to our legislators. They urge those who couldn't get to Springfield to send an e-mail message via the noto37 site today.

Our CPS students have been the leaders of the citywide budget protests this year. CPS and political leaders may not value their education, but the students and their parents do, and we are not backing down.  

Oppose the Administration’s “Blueprint” for Education Reform

Today, parent leaders and advocates from throughout the nation sent a letter to the President and Congress, asking them to keep the parent voice in public education and to oppose the administration’s “Blueprint” for the re-authorization of Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) put forward by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Eighteen parent leaders from cities including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, and Washington DC, pointed out that the parent voice has been missing from the national debate on education and is entirely absent from the top-down and often draconian proposals being put forward by the administration.

They expressed their conviction that the Blueprint’s proposals would undermine rather than strengthen their city’s public schools, and that these reforms represent large-scale experiments on children with little or no backing in the research, and lacking informed parental consent.

The signers pointed out that the Blueprint removes existing and essential mechanisms for engaging parents, and that the document’s only recognition of the need to involve parents for parents of Indian children be included in the design of school-level programs. They also drew attention to the fact that class size reduction, the top priority of parents in national surveys and one of the few reforms proven to increase learning through rigorous evidence, is omitted from the administration’s priorities.

In many cities, thousands of parents, teachers and students have erupted in protest against the closing of neighborhood schools which are often the anchors of their communities, and in opposition to the prospect that more exclusive screened schools or charter schools will be put in their place. Yet instead of offering more resources and support to improve the troubled schools that our most at-risk children attend, the proposed legislation threatens to further undermine them, by requiring that five percent be closed, turned into charter schools, or that half their teaching staff be fired.  

The signers of the letter particularly objected to the administration’s focus on forcing states to privatize education, by radically expanding their charter school sector. They urged the Congress “to be wary of the influence of venture philanthropy on our public education system,” and to be aware that “powerful foundations are shaping many of our federal and local education policies with dollars rather than evidence-based solutions.”

According to Leonie Haimson, New York City public school parent and Executive Director of Class Size Matters, “the approach of this administration to education reform has been at best oblivious; at worst, it is highly disrespectful of the central role that parents should play in their children’s education and lives. Moreover, the punitive approaches embodied in the Blueprint would undermine and discourage quality teaching and learning, particularly in the nation’s schools that need it the most.”

Julie Woestehoff, Chicago parent advocate and Executive Director of Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) said, “the Blueprint pays almost no attention to the need to address the enormous disparities in funding across and within states, saying only that states should be asked to measure and report on these disparities. Yet in a plan filled with heavy-handed threats and promises of financial windfalls, this statement seems to be a mere afterthought with no consequences attached.”

The parent leaders who signed the letter insist that the next version of the ESEA must formally incorporate the views of public school parents: “As highly knowledgeable primary stakeholders, we must be permitted to have a seat at the decision-making table.”

The letter concludes its message to Congress this way: “You hold a great responsibility in your hands this year in reauthorizing the ESEA. We hope you will listen to parents, the most important stakeholders of our public school system, before you make the radical and destructive changes that the administration has put forward. “

Read the Parents Across America letter here.

With Illinois legislators scheduled to approve a state budget by May 7, this could be our very last week to fight devastating budget cuts that would harm our children, families, and communities. It's crunch time: We must take action now for a responsible revenue-and-spending plan.   

Please join Voices and other Responsible Budget Coalition members in TODAY'S statewide call-in action. Urge your legislators, "Raise new revenues needed to prevent devastating cuts in vital public services."

Statewide Call-In Day: Today , May 4, 2010

Call 1-800-719-3020 to be connected to your legislators. Thanks to the Illinois AARP for generously providing phone lines.

Visit Voices' website for suggested talking points.

Once you've made your calls today, you may wish to send a follow-up e-mail to your legislators reinforcing this message using the Responsible Budget Coalition's new e-mail tool.  

Oh, and don't forget the line, "We'll find out in the next couple of days if they, and the rest of the House, will vote for parents and kids or …"

Yeah, it's all about the parents and the kids. 

Now State School News Service reports that an out-of-state group is promoting call-ins from across the country to push vouchers on our state. 

"See the list of targets below," a Washington-based conservative advocacy group instructs web visitors as it urges them to carpet-bag support for SB 2494, the pending school voucher bill.

Americans for Tax Reform describes the voucher bill as "revolutionary," although is it like other voucher programs, none of which has worked. ATR says the vouchers' cost would be current per-pupil spending in Chicago or the tuition charged at a private school, whichever is less. Not true in its current form.

"Rather than pursuing the tired agenda of shoveling more taxpayer dollars into failing schools, SB 2494 would allow the money to follow the student to a school of his or her parents' choice," says ATR. ATR gets its misinformation from the Illinois Policy Institute, the Springfield-based privatization group that masquerades as a think tank and somehow has become Illinois GOP legislators' new best friend. But who populates this "list of targets"? Thirty-four Illinois House members - all of them Republicans.

Lobby, even if you don't live in Illinois The IPI must have told ATR these Republicans may be "soft on vouchers." Actually, they may be right. If so, the efforts of teachers unions, the ACLU and others who are concerned about vouchers effects, and about the Constitution, may be working.

ATR thinks non-Illinoisans should play a role in this. "Whether you live in the state or are concerned about the trajectory our national public education system is following, call the provided list of target legislators ... and tell them to vote yes for a sensible budgetary policy," ATR urges its readers.

By the way, if you want to voice your opinion on the bill, you'll find House members' contact information on the General Assembly's web site. The bill is still on second reading, so there's still time to act. The House doesn't convene today until noon. Another amendment has been filed. It will need a hearing to be adopted, but that could happen today. A final vote is unlikely before Wednesday.

Thanks to Patrick Smith for this one on PURE's LSC lawsuit. 

"As President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan take the Chicago model of slow-burn privatization national, Chicago may just be seeing a full fledged revolt against it. With the recent revelation that there are now no educators among the CPS top leadership, scrutiny of a reform program dominated by entrepreneurs and private interests (including a Board of Education stacked with financiers and real estate developers) is likely to sour people further.... Teachers have been under a full assault by corporate interests and the disingenuous reformers they underwrite for decades, and this assault has only intensified since the election of Barack Obama to the White House and the elevation of former CPS CEO Arne Duncan to the top of the Department of Education. Obama and Duncan have undertaken to bring Chicago-style education reform to the level of national policy, without any evidence whatsoever that that reform works."

Share this article with friends, especially those across the country who need to know what to watch out for. 

The group was recently organized by CPS parents concerned about the looming budget crisis in our schools, and the long history of underfunding by the state. So far about 50 CPS schools are represented in the coalition.

They are asking parents and other school supporters to sign the NOto37 petition and share it across the city & state.

RYH is planning a Springfield Lobby Day on Wednesday May 5. They will leave at 6:30 am from Audubon School, 3500 N. Hoyne. Please contact RYH using the Google Group (see link below) if you plan to go with the group to Springfield.

Join the Raise Your Hand Google Group here. You can sign up to receive emails, read the latest “discussions” or volunteer to help on a Sub-Committee (Technology/Website, PR/Communications, Events, Membership/Outreach or Advocacy).

Not that that has stopped the Tribune from continuing to be stupid (see here and here, a review of the documentary "The Cartel" which concludes that charters and vouchers are needed to counteract those horrible teachers' unions).

This bill, which would add a non-teaching member to the LSC and destroy the parent majority which has worked well for 20 years, was the only item on the committee's agenda. No testimony was allowed, and at least one committee member who had questions about the bill was not allowed to ask them. It was "approved" on an attendance roll call vote, which means that everyone in attendance went on the record as voting yes.

This bill is a train wreck waiting to happen. Please contact your local state Senator NOW to get his or her promise to vote NO on HB 6017. Here is their contact information.

Read more here. 

According to the Tribune Real Estate section, "The 11-room, Victorian-style house, built in 2008, had been listed for $947,500. Features in the three-story house include 3 1/2 baths, three fireplaces, a finished basement, two wet bars, 8-foot solid cherry doors, crown moldings, Brazilian cherry hardwood floors and a chef's eat-in kitchen with Viking and stainless steel appliances, a large island and cherry cabinets."

CPS continues to deny that Huberman has gotten a raise this year despite the cleaning and dicing the Reader's Ben Joravsky gave the story.

There's a great profile of Karen and her campaign for the CTU presidency in this week's Hyde Park Herald, too, though due to that paper's 20th century tech capacity, it's not online yet. Check the HPH link in a day or so - it will update eventually. 

Although thousands of people log hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours as council members every year, there is so little good press about LSCs that this story was especially welcome.

The piece offers a nice overview of LSC roles and responsibilities, and demonstrates why people are attracted to joining an LSC - it offers the best opportunity to make a difference in your school.

They're going to be working on a rally at Lane Tech HS (Addison and Western) at 2 pm Sunday (5/2) and a rally in Springfield on 5/5.

It was great to see a turnout of RYH parents at our GEM/Student leader press conference this morning! United we are even more powerful! 

More on the RYH group here.

We've heard that the CTU asked for it, that Designs for Change is on the record in favor of it, and that CPS has decided to oppose it.

Read more about the bill here.

The Senate Education Committee is meeting tomorrow, Thursday 4-28, at 3:30 pm  - just to consider this bill. Many of these folks don't know anything about LSCs. They need to know why the parent majority is important. They are being told that non-teaching staff are not represented, which is not true - all staff vote and are represented by the 2 teacher LSC members. The way the bill is written is a mess, too.

The members need to hear from you TODAY or tomorrow morning - tell them, don't mess with the LSC balance:

Chair -James Meeks: Springfield phone 217-782-8066 Local phone/fax: 708/862-1515/862-4745

J. Bradley Burzynski - Springfield phone/fax: 217/782-1977/782/4885

Dan Cronin - Springfield phone 217/782-8107 Local phone/fax 630/792-0040/792-8620    Deanna Demuzio - Springfield phone - 217-782-8206 Local fax- 217/854-5311

Michael Frerichs - Springfield phone: 217/782-2507 Local fax: 217/355-5255

Susan Garrett - Springfield phone: 217/782-3650 Local phone/fax: 847/433-2002/433-8002

Kimberley Lightford: Springfield phone: 217/782-8505 Local phone/fax: 708/343-7444/343/7400

David Leuchtefeld: Springfield phone: 217/782-8137 Local fax: 618/243-5376

Iris Martinez: Springfield phone: 217/782-8191 Local phone/fax: 773/463-0720/463-0795

Kyle McCarter: Springfield phone/fax: 217/782-5755/783-0116

Heather Steans: Springfield phone: 217/782-8492 Local phone/fax: 773/769-1717/769-6901

They are completely out of touch with what parents want. This CPS report makes it clear that it's not "choice," vouchers or charters.

In 2009, 26,381 CPS students were eligible to transfer to other schools because they were "stuck" in schools deemed as failing under NCLB. 

483 students applied.

Only 276 or about one percent of those eligible actually transferred.  

Only 1 of the receiving schools was a charter school.

Bill Gates thinks that this is because parents are just too stupid or don't care. That's why he's funding fake parent groups to go around convincing folks that our neighborhood schools are all horrible and that we need more turnarounds and charters. 

Well, Bill's reasoning is as flawed as a new Windows operating system. (That's why we recommend Linux.)

The truth is, parents overwhelmingly want good neighborhood schools, not "choice." That's what national polls say. That's what this CPS report make obvious.

Our legislators need to get off the privatization train, get a clue, and get with the parents and the general public who want all public schools to succeed - and that means we need our state legislators to get off their rear ends and give us fair, adequate state school funding.  

Fill in your information and the site will automatically send your message to your representatives.

Our elected officials seem to think that they should go home early this year (to begin campaigning for re-election based on their great track record of getting things done for the state, I guess). Do you think they should go home without taking care of state school funding??? If not, send a message! NO RECESS for you until you have done your homework!

And don't forget to join the Facebook page for Raise Your Hand, the multi-school CPS parent group that has come together to fight for our children's education.

Raise Your Hand is holding a planning meeting Thursday, April 29, at 7 pm at Coonley School, 4046 N. Leavitt Street. They are hoping that every CPS school sends 2 leaders from the LSC, PTO, or other school group to this important meeting.   

While we are frustrated by these continued delays, it's encouraging to hear that the new judge is taking the case seriously.

Thanks to everyone who planned to be there - please spread the word about this change, so that we don't have too many people showing up for nothing tomorrow.

We'll let you know when we have a new date.

Here's what the case is all about.

Chicago Youth Initiating Change (CYIC), the Grassroots Educational Movement (GEM), and the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) will be co-sponsoring a press conference and picket against the proposed educational budget cuts slated for the 2010-11 school year. 

The press conference/picket is scheduled for Wednesday, April 28th beginning at 10 am at 125 S. Clark and then again at 4pm at Federal Plaza located at Dearborn and Jackson.  These organizations will holding a press conference where they will be presenting solutions on how to solve the current educational budget crisis schedule to take place in Chicago.  Afterwards, the demonstration will march to local, state, and federal government buildings in order to provide our public officials with a list of demands. 

These actions are in response to the $600 million deficit, which will drastically impact the Chicago Public School system in the following areas: ·        Increased class sizes of up to 35 students. ·        Layoffs of more than 2,700 hardworking teachers.  ·        Major reductions in after-school programs. ·        Major reductions in funding for magnet, Montessori, gifted and other specialized programs. ·        Significant cuts in Bilingual education. ·        Major reductions in full-day kindergarten programs.

Join students, parents, teachers, and community members as they take to the streets to fight to save public education in Chicago.  If you are not a Chicagoan, please still come and stand in solidarity against these educational budget cuts as this crisis is occurring across the state of Illinois. 

Please feel free to forward this information to anyone that is interested in supporting this cause. 

Another heads-up from Jim Broadway at SSNS shows why LSCs need our own lobbyist in Springfield...here's HB 6017 which passed the House unanimously back in February that would add a non-teaching staff person to every local school council.

Calls to your state senators on this are in order.

School staff vote for and are currently represented by the two teacher members. While it's not the worst idea to have non-teaching school staff as LSC members, it destroys the key parent majority on the LSC, which has been one critical element of LSC success. If the make-up of the LSC is going to be changed, more parents should be added to maintain that important parent majority. 

Where was LSC, parent or community input into this bill? 

The Senate Education Committee meets this Thursday at 3:30 pm to consider this bill alone. Committee members are: James T. Meeks, Heather Steans, Deanna Demuzio, Michael W. Frerichs, Susan Garrett, Kimberly A. Lightford, Iris Y. Martinez Dan Cronin J. Bradley Burzynski, David Luechtefeld, and Kyle McCarter.

The speed is likely an indication that Madigan intends to let this bill pass. Is this a bone they are throwing at bill sponsor Sen. Meeks to deflect him from the real issue, the failure of the General Assembly to address true school funding reform?  

Last chance to call your House representative and get him/her on the record about this bill. You may have to call the Springfield numbers. Here's why they should vote no. 

It was nice to read Mike Klonsky's letter opposing vouchers in the Sun-Times this morning. Mike was pointing out that S-T editorial writer Steve Huntley misconstrued the facts about vouchers, claiming that they worked when in fact they have not improved student outcomes. I'd thought about correcting Huntley myself, but sometimes I just get tired of being the only one carping on these issues. Thanks for the carp assist, Mike.

Here's the headline of the latest piece of propaganda that Catalyst recently posted about SAGE, the most recent incarnation of a Rev. Patricia Watkins-led astroturf "parent" group:

"New campaign urges parents to understand the poor quality of their schools"   

You know, we learn in organizing 101 to lead with a positive message -- what are you for? Maybe this is why Rev. Watkins is on her second or third version of the same group.

The "Schools Suck Bloc" - U.S. students lag Uzbekistan, etc. 

The first tip-off that this "campaign" is a front for the corporate agenda is that the event was focused on a student report comparing state and U.S. schools with "the rest of the world." 

This is a favorite exercise of anyone looking to raise the fear factor about our public schools -- OMG!!! The U. S. is lagging behind Singapore in science!!! Soon there will be a Singaporean yanking out the U. S. flag from the surface of the moon because our children are just too darned badly educated!!!

To understand how bogus these comparisons are, just take a look at this analysis from the Fair Test web site, or an article by the late Gerald Bracey, "The Evolution of the Schools Suck Bloc,"  in Huffington Post.

The Bad Fairy of School Reform

The second tip-off is Watkins herself, who has become the Bad Fairy of School Reform. She shows up everywhere to spread the educational bad news equivalent of the curse on Sleeping Beauty ("Aurora will prick her finger and die!"). Watkins is not only the head of the new SAGE group (stands for Statewide Action and Grassroots Education) but she also heads the Target Area group and the PRISE group (funded by the Gates Foundation to "educate" parents on the West Side about how bad their schools are and how much they need PRISE ally AUSL to run their schools), convened the short-lived City Wide Education Organizing Campaign, and represents us parents on the Advance Illinois board. Watkins is also a paid staffer for Grow Your Own Teachers.

Same groups, different "campaigns"

The list of Watkins' fellow leaders at another one of her groups, the United Congress of Religious and Community Organizations, is almost identical to what Catalyst refers to as a "wide variety of groups" making up SAGE, and last year's list of sponsors of the City Wide Education Organizing Campaign's Summit. Recycling? or just rebranding?

Teacher bashers

The third hint is the quote from Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a group founded by teacher-bashing Washington D.C. schools superintendent Michelle Rhee. NTP supports linking teacher pay to test scores. Daly's quote says it all: "good teachers aren't being rewarded and bad ones aren't being punished."

Maybe we should just get out the stocks and the tar and feathers.

Parents just need business to help us understand

Finally, there's Watkins' overt play for business support. According to Catalyst, she believes that "parents need to collaborate with business people and research groups." I don't have a problem working with research groups as long as they are not working directly for the business groups, But that's not easy to sift out.

"I think what's been missing is the critical voice of the parent," says Watkins. So, we wonder whyshe works with a group that opposed HB363, the bill (now law) that wanted to bring the parents' voice into facilities decision making?

The court rejected that case, saying that this was a legislative problem and that it was the responsibility of the state's elected officials to address it. They failed to take on that responsibility.

In 1992, PURE helped get a referendum on the statewide ballot to force the state to provide at least 50% of all school funding. The referendum needed a 2/3 majority to pass. It fell short by only a few tenths of a percent. 

The fight has gone on since then. The parents pictured here were with PURE in Springfield in March, 1997, making the same case as Chicago Public Schools parents are making downtown at the Thompson Center today, and that the Responsible Budget Coalition is advocating for in Springfield. 

And while this decades-long struggle for fair, adequate school funding reaches a crisis, the Tribune and others are making a full-court press to get a voucher bill passed. What's wrong with this picture?

1) Vote in the elementary school LSC elections- remember that you can vote in your local community school election, at any elementary school your children attend, and at many magnet schools. For example, Inter-American Magnet School has always been a hotbed of parent involvement since PURE's Joy and Bernie Noven helped in the school's earliest days -- and this election is no different! IAMS has a large election area - call the school to find out the exact perimeter, and VOTE!!!! Here's how!

2) Join CPS parents demonstrating for fair state school funding - Wednesday, 4/21 beginning at 9 am at the Thompson Center. Details here. Folks, our state legislators are planning to call it quits in just over 2 weeks without a plan for solving the severe budget crisis. Are we going to let them get away with it???

3) If you feel really ambitious, you can join the projected 15,000 people headed to Springfield to deliver a more personal message to our representatives: The Responsible Budget Coalition has brought together more than 200 groups to demand that the state create a fairer tax and budget system. Lots of good groups involved, though PURE and others seem to have been left off their invite list. 

4) If you still have some energy left after all of that, please call your state rep again and make sure he/she will oppose the voucher bill, SB2494. Here's why!

The meeting will be at 10 am at the Bilandic State Office Bldg - 160 N. LaSalle, Conference Room N-505.

This is a public meeting. 

The minutes of the first meeting, which Andrea passed along in an e-mail, show some promising signs. It's great to see that Jackie Leavy, the great leader of the late lamented Neighborhood Capital Budget Group, is in a key staffing position. The expert witness they called is Mary Filardo, who runs the excellent 21st Century Schools Fund in Washington, D.C. Mary has a long track record of supporting capital planning advocacy here in Chicago.

And, it's worth a lot to see comments like these placed in the public record:

Rep. Soto: Why can’t the Chicago Public Schools plan with the communities to ensure continued use of local school buildings for students from local families? It seems like CPS improves schools, then pushes out the children who had previously attended them.

Ms. Evans (CTU) remarked that she has observed schools being brought into a state of good repair by CPS, only to be closed, consolidated, put into CPS’ “turn-around” program, or turned over to charter school operators under the City’s and CPS’ “Renaissance 2010” program.

Dr. Berry (Chicago Principals' Association) agreed with Ms. Evans and Ms. Carroll that CPS’ capital spending priorities seem to prioritize schools in gentrifying neighborhoods, while letting other facilities languish without adequate investment, and questioned how CPS is choosing which schools to repair, in relation to other educational programming and school restructuring

And it's always good to get our public servants on the record admitting that they can't tell their buttresses from a hole in the ground: (CPS staffer Taylor said that she)

cannot provide information as to what happened to schools that have received facility investments, vis-à-vis CPS’ educational programming decisions, the Renaissance 2010 program or the Modern Schools Across Chicago Program (which is TIF-funded).

Finally, while we shouldn't have to pass a General Assembly resolution to get it, it will still be useful to have the information that CPS promised to provide to the Task Force: 

• List of schools that were given to charters and AUSL

• List of all schools that received facility investments, with the capital costs, over the past five years, including schools funded through Modern Schools Across Chicago.

• Chicago Public Schools’ Chief Administrative Officer Robert Runcie (and other CPS staff that deal with the educational aspect of facility investment funding) will report to the Task Force on which schools receiving facility investments were closed, consolidated, or turned over to charters or contract schools, including the sources of funding for renovations, new construction, and capital repairs.

• List of schools where the CPS “Ground Breakers” Program has operated in the past, and is currently operating.

It was reported that CPS has opened 5 new schools under the Modern Schools Across Chicago program this year and next year they will build 17, with the final 6 to be built the following year. Maybe with this task force we will be able to keep track of who is benefiting from all that capital money that CPS always says they don't have. 

The next step toward a well-deserved retirement?

Read about some of the main problems with vouchers here. Here's the list of House member contacts. You know what to do.  

I just wrote this letter in response to the Tribune's endorsement today of the bill:

It's disappointing that Steven Chapman's thoughtful analysis of current school privatization “reforms” like vouchers and charter schools (“Education reforms get a failing grade”) didn't migrate across the page. Just days after publishing Chapman's excellent essay, the Tribune editorial board is once again throwing its weight behind the pending state voucher bill and test-driven teacher evaluation.

Chapman looked at the facts, including the solid research that voucher programs do not work, and concluded that we need to look more deeply to find answers to school problems. But your editorial board chose to ignore the facts and promote a false “either or” choice of the status quo or costly strategies which have been proven to be ineffective.

How much better it would be if you looked a little deeper, as Chapman suggested, and supported education reforms with real track records of success. There are working models in our own back yard, such as the local school council-based reforms of the 1990s detailed in Designs for Change's The Big Picture, the wholistic approach described in the Consortium on Chicago School Research's Organizing Schools for Improvement, and the parent- and teacher-centered programs of Strategic Learning Initiatives.

It's time to move away from your knee-jerk advocacy for privatization and teacher bashing. Our children truly cannot wait for real school improvement to take hold across Chicago.

 

New judge and courtroom: Judge Stuart Palmer, Room 2305 Daley Center.

Here's what the case is about.

Yes, that's a Board meeting day and public participation will still be going on... that will make it a hard choice for some folks, but it is VERY important that we show our new judge that this is an important case for the community. Please come out and show your support!    

Here's a flyer for the event. They even have a Facebook page! 

Don't forget to vote in the LSC election that day, too!

Just after noon today, Florida Governor Charlie Crist vetoed the radical Senate Bill 6, that would have eliminated all tenure for new teachers and made teacher pay and continued employment highly dependent on student test scores. 

Strong opposition including massive protests grew around this bill in Florida, where Crist received more than 109,000 e-mails, the majority requesting his veto of the anti-teacher bill.  Here is an analysis from the Miami Herald.

The public reaction to this bill from parents, teachers and students signals opposition to policies in Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top federal stimulus competition and also policies being proposed in the President’s “Blueprint” for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now called No Child Left Behind.

A strong argument for term limits... doubt that Jeb Bush would have done that.

Was it a meteor? A UFO? Or just the light of reason dawning at the Tribune (Education Reforms get a Failing Grade: Neither conservatives nor liberals have a cure for bad schools)?

Of course, he immediately states that the other side's reforms (he lists lower class size and increased funding) haven't worked either. You know, "Well, we were both wrong."

But I'll let that pass and bask in the hope that this new enlightenment will take root across the page -- I expect to see Tribune board editorials any day retracting their support for Sen. Meeks' voucher bill (they loved it as recently as two weeks ago), slamming the Advance Illinois agenda for our state's Race to the Top proposal (they just came out for more charters and test-driven teacher evaluation) and demanding more accountability from charter schools (here's just one example le of the double of the double standard they have been using).

Chapman does something even better than admitting that the Trib has been wrong -- he admits that we don't know enough about what works in education and why, and cautions that imposing one-size-fits-all solutions "such as those offered by the Obama administration" is the wrong approach.

But we do know some things. There are models of success in our own back yard, such as the local school council-based reforms of the 1990's detailed in Designs for Change's The Big Picture, the wholistic approach described in the Consortium on Chicago School Research's new study, Organizing Schools for Improvement, and the parent- and teacher-centered programs of Strtegic Learning Initiatives. 

And we need to stop wasting time on all the mandates and top-down "fixes" that don't work and get busy doing a better job expanding some of the things that do work.

But you wouldn't know that if you, like many folks, had only read the headline which, at 3:20 today, read: "Surveys show teachers not opposed to using test scores to rate teaching."

Huh?

At 3:23 I posted a comment challenging the headline and suggested that this kind of thing causes people to suspect Catalyst of editorial bias.  

By 3:30, the headline had been changed to "Surveys show not all teachers oppose use of test scores to rate teaching."

Plus points for being responsive to readers. Minus points for not making any kind of sense.

But read the article. It offers some good information and places the issue in the context of fast-moving processes to begin test-based teacher evaluation in Illinois. The train is out of the station and headed for your school and your children's education. 

I know, this is the same action I suggested last Tuesday, but SB2494 has moved in the House from the Rules Committee to the Executive Committee, and has a real chance of moving on to the floor for a vote as soon as next week. Jim Broadway of State School News Service points out that it is the Democratic Hispanic and black legislators who helped pass this bill in the Senate: 

The Democrat supporters were primarily members of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus and supporters in the Hispanic legislative bloc. With the guarantee of solid GOP support in the House, the same voting blocs could easily send this bill to Gov. Pat Quinn for his signature.

What's wrong with vouchers?

First of all, they don't work. Just this week, a study of the longest-running voucher program, in Milwaukee, found that voucher students do no better than regular public school students. 

Secondly, vouchers take scarce funds away from public schools and sends them to private and/or religious schools that are not accountable to the public.

As I mentioned in my post last Tuesday, Senator Meeks has provided us with a perfect example of why vouchers will not solve school problems or serve all children. Salem Christian Academy refuses to admit students who score below the 50 percentile in reading and total math. "S.C.A. is not a school that can accommodate students with special educational needs. We attempt to enroll students who are able to achieve at grade level with a minimum amount of special assistance.

Public schools must serve students who need special assistance, and they need our help to keep the resources flowing in, not out.

Finally, vouchers distract us from the real work of improving schools for all of our children.

Call your state representative today!

Why? The ISAT is simply not a good measure of student learning. Laurel Chamberlin, the student, goes on to say, "In a scientific experiment, data are collected many times before the outcome is assumed.... Ideas of a student in elementary or middle school should be expressed not through multiple-choice questions on a standardized test but in ways that truly demonstrate the knowledge of a student."

Critical decisions about the amount and type of testing are being made right now in Illinois, in Washington DC, and across the nation as Race to the Top is implemented and ESEA is rewritten. 

Our children get it. Parents and teachers get it. Will our voices be heard? 

Neill and Guisbond point out that the Blueprint may actually widen the educational opportunity gap by getting rid of the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) yardstick, which will allow most middle- and upper-income schools to escape the kind of consequences that caused some of them to be labeled as failures under the current accountability system. AYP would be replaced by a focus on the "lowest-performing" 5% of schools based mostly on student test scores and so most likely to affect schools in low-income communities.

Fortunately, FairTest has been working hard and effectively in Washington, promoting the better alternatives laid out in the Forum for Educational Accountability platform. Your donation to FairTest is one positive thing you can do to work for better education for all children.

Everybody can do one simple thing for public education today: call your state representative and get his or her commitment to oppose SB2494, a bill sponsored by Sen. James Meeks to provide vouchers for private school tuition to a specified number of low-income students in low-performing CPS schools.

This bill has already passed the Senate! We need to stop it in the House.  

You can enter your home address on the form at this link to find your state rep's contact information. They are on spring break this week and should be reachable in their home offices.

Why should lawmakers oppose this bill?

• Vouchers take money away from the public schools which are already under-resourced.
• Vouchers give public funds to private/religious schools which do not serve all children, are not accountable to the public, and have no overall track record of better performance.
• Vouchers distract us from the real work of improving schools for all of our children.

Senator Meeks has even provided us with a perfect example of why vouchers will not solve school problems or serve all children. The admissions policy for the private religious school Rev. Meeks runs states this requirement: “Students entering grades 3rd through 8th must score at the 50 percentile or above in reading and total math on most recent standardized tests.... S.C.A. is not a school that can accommodate students with special educational needs. We attempt to enroll students who are able to achieve at grade level with a minimum amount of special assistance."

Public schools must serve students who need special assistance, and they need our help to keep the resources flowing in, not out. Call your state representative today!

A "Field Trip for Our Children’s Future" to fix unequal education funding at all levels.

When? Thursday, April 8th

Here's the schedule - join in whenever and wherever you can:

• 9:00 – 9:30:  Families Gather in front of Inter-American Magnet School, 851 West Waveland
• 9:30 – 9:50:  Teach-in and Rally (quiet, peaceful, and respectful) 9:50 – 10:30:     Board Buses to 125 S. Clark (bring $5 per seat)
• 10:30 – 10:45:  Begin Rally and March as People Arrive
• 10:45 – 12:00:  March and Deliver Demands to Chicago Public Schools, the Federal            Government, the City of Chicago, and the State of Illinois
• 12:00 – 12:15:    Rally w/ Speeches by Students and Parents

Here is a list of the students' demands.

Here's a flyer to share.

We expect that the students will bring up the recent Chicago Reader article exposing the significant salary increases CEO Huberman and other high-paid bureaucrats just took, even as Huberman was claiming that there is no money.

Only 4 schools will need to hold special elections because they will not have enough LSC members to gather a quorum. LSCs which have vacancies but which have enough members for a quorum can appoint eligible people to fill those positions.

***

In more good news, the Murray Language Academy LSC successfully lobbied CPS to get their 7th and 8th grades back.

A politically-connected Hyde Park group (is there any other kind?) had put together a plan in 2002 to turn several Hyde Park area schools into K-6 schools and feed the 7th graders into Canter, a struggling local middle school.

The LSC at Murray, a high-performing magnet school (where I was an LSC member from 2004-2009) was never completely on board with the plan, and when families began to abandon the school in droves, moving their children as early as 3rd or 4th grade to schools where they would be able to stay for 7th and 8th grades, the LSC got busy, and their efforts have paid off.

Some in the local community have tried to make this an issue of "support for Canter." Canter has done well recently under excellent leadership, but it was not the right choice for many Murray families. One school should not be pitted against another. One of the many virtues of LSC governance is that there is a body empowered to determine what is right for their school, and take steps to make that happen, 

Congratulations, Murray LSC! 

I don't usually go in for military metaphors, but I was really struck by the important point made by ret. Major Will Clark in a letter in this morning's Tribune:

Do military leaders blame their troops when a battle is lost? As a retired military officer, I know a military leader would never do that. This responsibility code does not exist for our politicians and senior education leaders.

A battle will always be lost if not focused on a clear objective. As a Vietnam veteran, I believe we lost that war because political leaders did not assign a clear and reachable objective. We were just fighting communism in the jungles. Similarly our politicians and education policy-makers are causing us to lose the war to improve education because they refuse to target a clear objective. Even worse they blame front-line teachers for that loss.

In fact, a large segment of the US public didn't respect the soldiers who fought in Vietnam and we all suffered from that mistake, one which we as a nation have clearly decided we will not make again.

But if we continue to attack our schools' front line troops in a war whose objectives, as defined by our leaders, President Obama and Arne Duncan, as "winning" higher test scores and more choice and privatization, we will, as Maj. Clark says, "be fighting in the education jungle" for years to come.

****

For more thoughtful commentary, check out this great letter by CORE's Jackson Potter in yesterday's  online Tribune edition. Jackson challenges the Tribune's support for charter schools, citing the research evidence that they do not improve education. Yep, that's what I just told them about vouchers yesterday.

Well, he might be too morally challenged for Cook County Board President Todd Stroger, but Steven Hill seems perfect for an administrative job at the Chicago Public Schools.

The Sun-Times reports that Stroger was about to hire Hill for a $127,000 job when someone thought to Google him, and found a report in last Sunday's Detroit Free Press that the FBI is investigating him for possibly diverting $57 million in assets from the Detroit Public School system.

"Hill and his assistant allegedly diverted millions in school funds to vendors who provided little, if anything, in return, the Free Press reported, citing court records.

"Hill — director of DPS risk management from 2001-05 — received luxury vehicles and other kickbacks, according to the suit the school district filed against him. Some of the vendors who benefited were friends or associates of Hill's or relatives of Hill’s assistant."

Apparently no one at the county called Hill's previous employer before offering him the job. Although Stroger spokesman Eugene Mullins still says that Hill "has an impeccable resume," they have withdrawn their offer.

OK, CPS, the guy is available. He sounds like the perfect fit for the classic CPS budget shell game of missing computers, ghost payrollers, and secret fundraising accounts.

The ACLU page provides an easy way for you to contact your state reps, who will be taking up this bill after the spring break. Now is also a great time to give your rep a call at the home office. 

Note that  such senators as Delgado, Lightford, Sandoval, Munoz and Hendon voted yes on this bill.

I just sent the following letter to the Tribune in response to their rah-rah response ("Victory for Vouchers!") to Senator Meeks' voucher bill passing the  Senate.

The Tribune once again irresponsibly touts a failed education reform, hailing school “choice” through vouchers as a good in itself, and suggesting, without any evidence, that if families shop for their children's education in the private market, public schools will improve.

Even more unfortunate is your failure to mention that the sponsor of the state senate voucher bill, the Rev. Sen. James Meeks, has a direct financial conflict of interest in this issue. His Salem Baptist Church runs a private religious school which will be able to collect voucher funds if the bill passes.

A close look at the web site of the Salem Christian Academy displays another serious problem with vouchers and other forms of school privatization that the Tribune ignores.

The school's Student Admission Procedure states “Students entering grades 3rd through 8th must score at the 50 percentile or above in reading and total math on most recent standardized tests.... S.C.A. is not a school that can accommodate students with special educational needs. We attempt to enroll students who are able to achieve at grade level with a minimum amount of special assistance."

That's the reality of school choice, and it doesn't sound so good to us.

****

Numerous efforts to reach Senator Meeks to discuss this and others of his proposals (some of which we support!) have been ignored.

The information about Salem's admissions policy came from a comment by Rod Estvan on the Catalyst blog, which I passed along last fall.

That's right. Orr only got this new sports facility, which cost $150,000, AFTER the school was deemed a "failure" and closed. 

You can watch the WGN video here.

And that's not the first time that CPS has waited until after they have labeled a school a failure, closed it and given it away before they decided to invest in the school's sports program. 

It happened at Sherman "School of Excellence," which got a running track and an artificial turf playing field, but only after CPS shut it down.  

There are a lot of other high schools across the city that would love new bleachers. They should be careful what they wish for.

Oh, and apparently they caught the thief.

As if there would be no clout list if Pickens had not kept one. 

This morning, it's CPS spokesperson Monique Bond "explaining" to the Tribune why CPS has such a hard time providing timely, adequate special education services:  "There's a point of communication breakdown where the district is not getting the information it needs from the schools."

As if special education services would simply flow to all disabled children if only the schools would communicate better.

PURE has worked with special education families for over 20 years. The REAL problem with getting services is now and has always been the central office, which relentlessly pressures principals and schools NOT to offer or provide needed services. It's just that simple.

No, the real CPS success story is that they continue to get away with their blame game, their scapegoating, and their outright, damn lies.

It would make sense to call for people like Monique Bond to be fired for misleading the public, but these Daley sycophants never stay around that long anyway. After all, there are lots of other city departments that need someone to lie about what they do, too.   

But, Illinois did not make the first cut.

Guess we were just a little too slow in selling out our children.

Giving a clear indication of where the Obama administration is going on education, the announcement was made today that only Tennessee and Delaware have been awarded Race to the Top funds in the first round of the new federal aid to education competition.

Experts' first impressions are that these two states won because of their strong commitment to tying teacher evaluations to student test scores.

My sister, Kristin Ziama, a retired Milwaukee Public School teacher and new Tennessee resident, supports this theory. She commented:

What the state of Tennessee has done recently speaks directly to the points Julie Woestehoff made in her RTTT article. To prove they have an aggressive plan to gain more Federal money for their public schools, they have proposed that 50% of teacher evaluations will be based on student performance on standardized tests. This means that schools with students that do well will receive the most money, instead of putting the money where it is needed. It also means placing an over-emphasis on standardized tests, putting the blame for students' poor performance on the teachers, and making the test, and not the enrichment of curriculum and general knowledge, the main focus of education.

I love it when my big sister says I'm right...

But that's about the only positive thing about this news. We are being told that Illinois placed fifth in the race, so it's likely that our state will receive funds in the next round, no doubt after our legislators have made even more bad decisions.

You can find links to the nomination forms and other useful information here.

Forms must be in the school offices by 3 pm tomorrow, March 24th.

(B)y the time I stood at the front of my own classroom and was finishing up my master's in education in the early 2000s, it seemed the overriding educational goal of policymakers, administrators and not a few teachers was to create lifelong achievers. And not necessarily high achievers mind you, but kids who could sit quietly and do well enough on standardized tests to achieve adequate yearly progress.

I don't really share her optimism, which is based on the addition of arts, sciences and social studies and a new goal of making every student "college and career ready" as opposed to just proficient on math and reading tests. Since standardized tests will likely remain the prime measure of any of these new goals, things are only going to continue down the path that she describes above. 

I do agree with her overall sentiment that we have lost the true purpose of education. Cepeda contrasts the federal law with the mission statements of her alma maters, for example:

Roosevelt University, which trained me as a teacher, says it is "dedicated to the enlightenment of the human spirit." Its aim is to prepare "diverse graduates for responsible citizenship in a global society." 

She adds that programs based on these kinds of goals are the only ones that will truly create new jobs and move this country ahead. NCLB or the new ESEA are dead ends that will rob our children of their future. 

Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com

What are some concerns about the Blueprint?

• Requires extremely punitive, unproven interventions for 5 percent of public schools that have been unable over time to raise their test scores.
• Relies on competitive grants, which means that millions of at-risk children will become “losers” in the race for federal funds. ESEA was originally designed as extra support for such children, and was distributed by a formula to assure that the neediest children received the most benefit. The new plan perverts this mission for the purpose of institutionalizing privatization of our public schools.
• Blames school teachers. Because the Blueprint, like NCLB, fails to address massive resource inequality across public schools, it shifts the burden of school reform once again onto the backs of school teachers who are expected somehow to compensate for society's structural injustices. The Blueprint also bases teacher evaluation in significant part on student growth on standardized test scores, a merit-pay scheme, though it acknowledges that classroom observations and other unspecified factors perhaps should be considered as well.
• Continues to rely heavily on the worst kind of standardized testing. Although the Blueprint proposes to improve tests by adding growth models and creating immediate feedback after standardized tests are administered to help teachers with instruction, no one yet has found a workable way to implement these good suggestions. Rather than use multiple measures (multiple sources of different types of evidence of student learning) promoted by hundreds of civil rights, education, and religious groups nationwide, the Blueprint relies on standardized tests which are neither intended nor designed to be the sole measurement of a child's learning. These tests have led to a narrowing of the curriculum to the specific areas on the test. Unfortunately, the Blueprint seeks to re-broaden school curriculum by encouraging states to create similar tests in the arts, the social sciences, and the humanities.
• Relies too heavily on charterization and school privatization. The largest study of charter school quality, a study conducted at Stanford University, found that the majority of charter schools do not match in quality their surrounding public schools. Many have raised concerns about whether all children have equal access to admission in charter schools, and whether children with a range of special needs are accepted or find appropriate programs in charter schools. Charter schools lack transparency in Illinois and other states; one positive proposal in the Blueprint is that charter and other autonomous schools must be subject to the same accountability systems as traditional public schools.
• Does not significantly expand opportunity to learn. The President's proposal pays mere lip service to the need to address enormous disparities in resources. The proposal includes only one of the steps we have proposed to expand resource opportunity: that "states be asked to measure and report on resource disparities and develop a plan to tackle them." However, in a Blueprint filled with carrots and sticks, there appear to be no consequences for states that ignore this request.

What's potentially positive in the Blueprint?

• Recognizes that student achievement is affected by poverty, lack of health care, and lack of enrichment activities outside the school day and during the summer by praising (though not greatly increasing funding for) the "Community Schools" concept.

• Grants flexibility for schools serving American Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Native children to ensure that programs reflect the cultures and languages of these children, and invites parents to help develop school programming in these communities (but does not offer similar support for African-American or Latino students or their parents).

• Limits interference in all but the bottom 5% of schools.

We would not have known about this meeting at all if not for an e-mail sent out by Task Force member Andrea Lee yesterday. 

The announcement she sent around includes these ironic words:

"This open meeting is for parents, community groups, educators, and members of the public interested in understanding and impacting a more fair, transparent, and accountable Chicago Public Schools facilities’ policy and legislation. " (emphasis added)

I agree with Substance, which claims that "the process by means of which members of the 'Task Force' were selected was a secret from the public that the 'Task Force' was supposed to empower."

I had applied to be a member of the Task Force representing PURE. The criteria under the law for community group representatives was "past involvement in school facility issues." I listed these credentials:

• I am a veteran LSC member and a 20-year CPS parent advocate.

• I was an appointed member of the Blue Ribbon Capital Development Task Force created by Paul Vallas in 1995. On that Task Force, I strongly advocated for exactly the kind of fair and transparent process that we are hoping to create now.

• I was also a member of the Community Capital Plan Commission, organized by Chicago's Neighborhood Capital Budget Group in 2004. This group carried out national research and consulted experts in creating a facilities planning proposal which should be of great help to the Task Force.

• Recently, PURE sent a FOIA request to CPS for a report on the impact of school closings on students which CPS was supposed to have made public. Our persistence paid off when CPS finally provided the report, although the content fell short of expectations. This is the kind of intensive, informed, child-centered monitoring that PURE is known for and that we believe will be an asset to the Task Force's work.

• PURE has an excellent communications network throughout the city, which is a critical need for a fast-moving project that must inclusive and community-based. We are committed to helping assure the broad and meaningful involvement of CPS parents and LSCs.

Although no process for applying had been made public, I sent an application letter to Speaker Madigan and Senate President Cullerton (who were each to appoint two community members) and to HB 363 key sponsors Rep. Cynthia Soto and Sen. William Delgado.

I never received a response to any of these letters. 

The only information the larger school reform community has gotten about the Task Force has come from members Andrea Lee (Grand Boulevard) and Cecile Carroll (Blocks Together), who have at least tried to bring some transparency to this supposed transparent process.

It's a shame that the dog-in-the-manger tactics of some organizations, wanting to be "in charge" and take credit for wider community victories, can lead to tactics that are no better than the ones that caused the problem in the first place.

This unfortunate secretiveness puts a shadow on any potential good that might still come out of the Task Force's work.   

PURE was part of this group in the early days, when we used to time the report card to respond to  Daley's State of the City address, which he used to give at an annual League of Women voters fundraising luncheon until they got onto his bad side (not sure why - but you can imagine how those democracy-loving ladies could irritate the little despot).

The DGAP proposals for education we started out with remain about the same, which suggests that we need to crank things up if we are going to get any of these changes:  

1. Ensure LSCs maintain full powers, and support them through adequate funding levels that provide training and supports for LSCs to do their jobs.
2. Implement a moratorium on school closings until a detailed analysis of the impacts of shuffling children is completed, and until a real plan to address the quality of safety and education for every child is in place.
3. Develop and implement a more comprehensive, holistic and fair approach to evaluate student and teacher performance in order to weed out false indicators of performance in high school, college and the workplace, which are currently produced via the Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT) and the ACT test standard.

It's great to see the strong media play this year's report is getting (Trib, Sun-Times, for example) - and, again, that suggests that the Mayor's meter may be running out. 

Zorn had called me to talk about the situation, and we had a long conversation about the current system and what might be a better alternative to the increasingly two-tiered CPS school system. I'd offered some thoughts on this subject before in response to an earlier Zorn column on vouchers. (Here's the gist of what I wrote.) In his annotated column, Zorn states that he disagrees with my "optimism" that all schools could be improved, though he leaves out my condition that all schools be given the same level of support that, say, R2010 schools receive.

But reading the various responses to Zorn's column makes it clear that few folks are really interested in thinking realistically about improving all schools. Those that think they have the answer to failing schools offer vouchers, home schooling, or fairy tales like Urban Prep -- which "lost" 50 students in order to "win" a reputation for sending 100% of its graduates to college.  

Those of us who believe in school reform instead of "magic bullets" have our work cut out for us. 

This is the 20th anniversary of LSCs, an experiment unique to Chicago to give parents and neighborhood folks a real voice in running their schools. For the most part, research suggests that LSCs work, helping schools function better and drawing resources and parents into the schools. But LSCs are only as good as the people who run for them.

Don't just take the editors' word for it. Here's Joe Moreno, newly-appointed 1st ward alderman, in the same Sun-Times issue: 

Moreno...has served as a member of the local school council at Jose Diego Academy..."What I can bring as a businessman and as a local school council member is sort of a bridge and a connection to those two entities because they really need to be working together," Moreno said.

Take a look at this list of candidate numbers to see how many have signed up to run at your local schools as of last Friday - please consider signing up yourself!  Who knows, you too may become an alderman!

The candidate numbers document is pretty confusing - the first, third, and fifth columns are 'minimum candidates needed" - the second, fourth and sixth columns are the actual numbers.  

And please also note that the new deadline is Wednesday, March 24 (not the 25th as was previously reported). Here are some PURE tip sheets to help you run a good campaign, and links to the nomination forms.

-from press release by National Education Association in response to President Obama's proposal today to overhaul the No Child Left Behind Act

And that's not the only disappointment in President Obama's "Blueprint for Reform," his administration's plan to revise the No Child Left Behind Act. I'll be commenting on more issues in the next few days. Meanwhile, here are three major changes being proposed:

• No more 2014 deadline for 100% proficiency
• No more busing/transfer options for students in so-called failing schools.
• No more mandated supplemental educational services for the same students.  

Finally, someone has put their finger on the pulse of Chicago.

Yesterday' Sun-Times published a letter from Rev. Webb Evans, a long-time African-American activist, complaining that lots of folks now have to pay to go to church. What's worse, "Church people now in many places in Chicago are coming out of a funeral service, prayer meeting, business meetings and other church programs and finding parking tickets on their cars."

Last Mothers' Day I got a parking ticket after coming out of church.

The words "Thanks a lot, Mayor Daley" went through my mind. Don't suppose that ever happened to "Sis" Daley, the Mayor's mom.  

Well, the Rev. Evans predicts that the parking meter mess will turn into another Montgomery bus boycott, and he's blaming Mayor Daley, too.

Chicagoans' level of discontent with the mayor has been simmering since the beginning of the parking meter fiasco last year, and things seem to be heating up along with our recent unusually springlike temperatures. 

A set of articles in this week's Chicago Reader captures the city's mood, beginning with Mick Dumke's "Time for a Revolution,"  which takes off from a similar parking meter comment he overheard in a restaurant. Ben Joravsky takes apart a March 8 New Yorker piece on Mayor Daley, suggesting that its author was taken for a ride, and provides a laundry list of Chicago's Daley beefs. Finally, Dumke offers a list of 10 potential challengers to the Mayor, including Miguel DelValle and the Rev. Sen. James Meeks.

Dumke's theory is that Daley will run again: "Daley is more Ahab than Nixon. He's operating on his own logic, and he's not going to change his course for anybody, even if it takes the ship down."

That certainly jibes with the experience of education activists, whose protests against Daley's Renaissance 2010 program have become an almost daily event, yet the response has simply been more of Daley's pig-headed defiance.

It's true, as Dumke admits, that the candidates running against Daley in recent elections have faired poorly, and other potential challengers like Jesse Jackson, Jr. have eliminated themselves. But he also makes a strong case that real opposition must be mounted against the Mayor in the next election (2011). We can no longer allow this little despot to run roughshod over us and our children.

So, who's it going to be?  

With the help of my eagle-eyed sister, I responded to a St. Paul, MN Pioneer Press editorial which suggested that Minnesotans should consider mayoral control of schools. Today they printed my cautionary letter which included what we think is a better idea:

"a more balanced accountability system with an empowered, elected school board running the schools and a mayor who effectively leverages his or her office to serve the students."

.

This would make 12 members at the elementary school level and 13 at the high school level, and mean that parents would no longer have a majority on the LSC. 

We can't imagine what problem Rep, Colvin is attempting to fix here. There is plenty of evidence that the current make-up of the LSC is working well.

HB 6017 is on the agenda of the same Wednesday 8 am House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee meeting with the elected school board bill.