Why Can't Chicago Shape Up its Public Schools? (Oak Lawn, Lansing: low income, renting)

[Chi-town Native]

Originally Posted by Irishtom29

I'm for doing away with magnet schools and charter schools and making all the schools decent as a matter of course, like they used to be, so that kids could simply go to the grade school and high school in their neighborhood without all this rigamarole and hoop-jumping. I see the current system as an attempt to grease the squeaky wheel rather than replace the bearing.

I'm open for suggestions on how to do that, my own notion is that first discipline must be restored and the troublemakers and bums given the boot.

Society would likely need to redefine public schooling as a privilege rather than an entitlement.

But for people looking for a good look at a similar system, see the Wire's 4th (I think) season, which focused on the Baltimore school system. It's as bad if not worse in Chicago.

[Humboldt1]

Let's just set minimum test scores to get into the magnet schools and throw out the quotas. Either you get in or you don't based upon scores. If this leads to all the schools being one ethnicity or whatever I don't care. This will just force parents who care to step up their game. Parents who don't care can continue sending their kids to the crappy schools.

The only real casualties here are for average or less than average kids from good homes who just aren't able to get into magnet programs. I see these families moving to their burbs to give their kids a fighting chance. Less concerned parents or those without a choice will either send their kids to private schools or the public options that are available.

I am sick and tired of seeing race and economics used as quotas, which keeps many of the good performers out of the magnet programs and allows some less than stellar students to get in.

[cubssoxfan]

Originally Posted by Irishtom29

I'm for doing away with magnet schools and charter schools and making all the schools decent as a matter of course, like they used to be, so that kids could simply go to the grade school and high school in their neighborhood without all this rigamarole and hoop-jumping. I see the current system as an attempt to grease the squeaky wheel rather than replace the bearing.

I'm open for suggestions on how to do that, my own notion is that first discipline must be restored and the troublemakers and bums given the boot.

Give them the Boot Camp style reform school. Maybe even away from home and the temptations of their neighborhood with mentors, structure and vocational training that gets them decent jobs.

[Drover]

Originally Posted by cubssoxfan

Give them the Boot Camp style reform school. Maybe even away from home and the temptations of their neighborhood with mentors, structure and vocational training that gets them decent jobs.

Sounds expensive, but we might as well since we'll otherwise end up housing many of them as adults anyway.

[aragx6]

Originally Posted by Drover

Sounds expensive, but we might as well since we'll otherwise end up housing many of them as adults anyway.

This is exactly right. We really don't have much to lose in trying absolutely every idea that every education expert ever has. Throw the kitchen sink and something is bound to work. If these kids do nothing with their life, they'll continue to be on the public dime long after their school days are over. Their kids probably will be too.

There are good ideas out there, that in limited situations have been working (many of those have been cited here). Try 'em all, i say. Put the money in. Building them shiny schools is not the kid of money throwing I think will work, but many alternative programs have been shown to work, and many of them are indeed quite expensive as they usually require much lower student to teacher ratios than we're used to.

Hell my suburban elementary school had 28-32 kids per class. If we hadn't had support at home, we wouldn't have learned a darn thing!

[BRU67]

Originally Posted by Irishtom29

I'm for doing away with magnet schools and charter schools and making all the schools decent as a matter of course,

my own notion is that first discipline must be restored and the troublemakers and bums given the boot.

Well, that'll at least get your student/teacher ratio down to about 1:1 in some of these schools, LOL!! But on the "back end," we'll pay big in terms of public aid, health care, crime, blight, incarceration, diminished property values, lost business revenue, and quality of workforce.

I see where you're coming from but no, you can't really do this. Cubssoxfan is right on the button. I posted in this thread or another (too lazy to look back) about Washington D.C.'s SEED program -- basically a boarding school where the troubled kid is physically removed from the negative environment he/she lives in and then subjected to positive influences and rigorous study.

The SEED Foundation

Expensive? You bettcha. Worth it? Absolutely. Widespread use of this concept would be the best money we ever spent. For every $1 we save by not doing it, we're probably going to spend $500 down the road in terms of the costs I mentioned.

[Irishtom29]

Originally Posted by BRU67

But on the "back end," we'll pay big in terms of public aid, health care, crime, blight, incarceration, diminished property values, lost business revenue, and quality of workforce.

I don't care about that BRU; one problem at a time. First worry about how to improve the system for the good kids. The bums are another problem. Tying the two problems together makes it harder to solve either one.

You believe in the benefits of gentrification; if every Chicago public school were a good school that would aid gentrification mightily.

[allen2323]

Forget about the standardized test scores for a minute, focus more on the primary purpose of any school which is to actually graduate students, start treating high school graduation as a basic function not something that only 50 percent of the kids can do, and stop trying to make going to one public high school over another out to be some sort of prestigous priviledge. That is how you improve the quality of the public schools and stop the decline that is happening in chicago overall. If you want prestige for your child then pay for it and stop trying to get tax payers to fund exclusive high schools with public money. The Neighborhoods that have the public high schools with the lowest graduation rates also have the highest crime rates. The two statistics go hand in hand. Most people in prison did not graduate high school. More high school dropouts means more victims. You really can't have a liveable area when you have thousands of grown men in that area who dropped out of high school laying aound all day looking to rob people and sell drugs, while decent people in the neighborhood are at work leaving there homes unattended. Even in many of the so called gentrifying areas you have this. And make no mistake that most of chicago is in the dumps and seriously declining. Even to the point of losing population to the suburbs.

[nana053]

We know how to change the schools, but we won't do it. First we need to stop focusing on test scores. Second we need to have clear curriculum goals including a focus on reading and writing with understanding (not just decoding). Third we need to assess students frequently with an eye to allowing them opportunities for improvement not for grades and failure. Fourth we need to make sure students know we care about their progress not about their grades, but about their real learning. Fifth, we need to create a community of learners where everyone feels safe.

http://www.sabine.k12.la.us/online/leadershipacademy/high%20performance%2090%2090%2090%20and%20beyond.p df (broken link)

Common Characteristics of High Achievement Schools
Our research on the 90/90/90 Schools included both site visits and analyses of accountability
data. The site visits allowed us to conduct a categorical analysis of instructional practices. In the
same manner that the authors of In Search Of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982) identified
the common practices of excellent organizations, we sought to identify the extent to which there
was a common set of behaviors exhibited by the leaders and teachers in schools with high
achievement, high minority enrollment, and high poverty levels. As a result, we found five
characteristics that were common to all “90/90/90 Schools.”

These characteristics were:
• A focus on academic achievement
• Clear curriculum choices
• Frequent assessment of student progress and multiple opportunities for improvement
• An emphasis on nonfiction writing
• Collaborative scoring of student work

http://www.cdl.org/resource-library/...rdReportJE.pdf

[allen2323]

And stricter laws need to be passed making high school attendance until the age of 18 mandatory under the penalty of being put under juvenile court supervision. And possibly being put under juvenile court guardianship if you still choose not to go on your own. We all already know where most of the dropouts will be headed to anyway so why treat it so lightly and allow them to dropout before 18? These kind of measures would also obviously have the effect of drastically reducing crime rates.