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12
Lessons Learned Of Failing Schools..
- CPS does not have enough space to allow
all of our public school children an opportunity
to choose a higher performing school.
- We need to identify additional important
measures that our teachers and schools think is
important benchmarks for defining improvement.
For instance, incremental improvement is good, and
a school should not feel shamed for not making leaps
and bounds in improvement. Change is often slow.
Schools should be able to develop additional criteria
that they use in identifying growth and development
in their students so that we are not relying only
on 5% annual yearly progress gains to measure how
mush a child is learning. Furthermore, what about
schools which are increasing incrementally, but
not enough by the State's guidelines? Credit must
be provided to these schools, in addition to providing
the adequate resources and facilities to ensure
this can continue.
- Only 4% of the parents opted to choose another
school of choice, a number that says a lot about
this option. What we have learned, is that many
parents don't want to bus their children out
of the neighborhood, especially because of safety
factors. Second, a school is a community,
and in many cases, despite failing scores, parents
and students feel comfortable in their respective
neighborhood schools. Many children do not want
to be labeled as a "failing student,"
or have to prove themselves should they have opted
to attend a higher performing school.
On the other hand, this number may also reflect
of the lack of time parents had to decide upon
whether or not they should send their children
elsewhere (if they were even given the option).
Many parents say that CPS' notification and the
letters informing them that their child was at
a failing school were confusing, and as a result,
many parents didn't do anything. Some parents
thought that they had no choice, and felt, instead,
that they must send their children to the receiving
schools identified. Clearly in the future, more
time and greater awareness about the NCLB
Act and this School Improvement List could help
lessen the confusion and pressure parents felt.
Other families have been telling CPS for years
that their school is cruddy, overcrowded, and
concerned about its chronic on academic probationary
status; these families have questioned CPS' intervention
strategies and resources because they have seen
that improvement is not being made, and perhaps
another approach needs to be taken to help improve
the school as a whole. But does CPS always
listen? Therefore, in many instances it was
not surprising for parents to be officially
informed of the fact that they've known for many
years-that their child's school was not performing
well. This is why it is important for CPS to
meaningfully begin talking, listening, and
involving parents in the decisions for improving
schools.
- Increasing mobility among our struggling
learners isn't healthy either. A clear, long-term
educational and facility plan for creating stable,
high-quality learning environments for these
children is lacking. Moreover, many of these schools
are in redeveloping neighborhoods, and without an
educational and facility plan, CPS may be forcing
these children to transfer schools more than
once. Instead, we need to think about anchoring
all of our neighborhoods with excellent schools,
thereby stabilizing the housing and the community
as a whole.
- CPS should have been more concerned about providing
appropriate resources, higher quality teachers,
and facility investments into these schools
so that over time, schools could have improved.
Furthermore, concerning schools on probationary
status, financial resources and intervention strategies
cannot be removed as the school barely stretches
itself to the brink of improvement; instead the
adequate resources identified for intervention must
remain for years so that achievement can be more
sustainable over time.
- These struggling schools did not occur overnight.
It is also known that resources alone cannot turn
a failing school over, and schools should be provided
quality leadership and developmental capacity to
aid in successful intervention strategies. Therefore,
the strategies MUST involve and seek to develop
and make available strong leadership and development
training for the teachers and administration
at these schools. Without this, all the resources
in the world likely to roadblock a school's ability
to improve.
- It is no surprise that many of these schools lack
the system's most qualified teachers. How
are our children supposed to learn when not enough
training is being done to further develop and train
teachers? In addition, facilities-overcrowding,
underutilization, leaky roofs, and antiquated science
and computer labs-certainly affect a teacher's
decision to remain teaching at that school.
If a teacher cannot teach to their fullest potential
and be supported, then her or his morale is likely
to be negatively affected.
- Underutilized schools are really struggling!
Is it because these are situated in neighborhoods
where demographics are concentrated and redevelopment
is occurring? Instability in a neighborhood is
going to spread into the school. How is a school
supposed to retain children if the families are
being displaced due to public housing demolition,
or perhaps being "priced" out because of rapid gentrification?
We must consider what level of funding is needed
to ensure that schools are not punished fiscally
when enrollment declines, so that they are able
to maintain an adequate level of funding for
teachers, resources, and capital investments.
We need CPS to financially support small class sizes
and small schools, particularly helpful for these
struggling "small schools."
- Facilities matter! Facilities, including
class sizes, deteriorating buildings, leaking roofs,
physically unsafe buildings, and defunct fire alarms
and intercom systems affect our children, teachers,
and administers. If buildings are in poor conditions.
or too many students make it distracting for learning
and individual teacher attention. or depopulation
in these low-performing schools force schools to
combine grade levels. or schools are educationally
inappropriate for teaching in the 21st
Century. then we will Leave our Children Behind!
- Income and racial/ethnic diversity of a
school also benefits the learning environment.
It is no surprise that the higher performing schools
are more diverse. The challenge is being
able to provide world-class facilities for all of
our children in all neighborhoods and being able
to naturally desegregate schools, especially when
many of our neighborhoods are historically and intentionally
segregated. That's why selective schools are more
often able to offer diversity, since they are not
neighborhood schools. On the flip side, this makes
it more difficult to diversify a neighborhood school
when the community demographics are not diverse.
While the City has plans to diversify neighborhoods
with mixed income housing (particularly aggressive
in public housing developments), it seems as though
the unspoken planning rule is that we must
first displace current residents in order to successfully
achieve this goal of de-concentration. What seems
to make more sense is anchoring our communities
with high quality schools, thereby becoming
a natural attractor of developers and, thus, stabilizing
a neighborhood and its housing. In the case of
the CHA Plan for Transformation, it is agreed
that concentrated poverty and public housing is
not the answer for successful community planning
and development, spurring the CHA to move towards
the goal of creating mixed income communities.
However, we are not relocating families to Lincoln
Park to create mixed-income communities, for instance,
so why must families in their economically concentrated
neighborhoods be displaced in order to create
mixed-income housing? We should invest in
the existing communities and infrastructure,
and finally give all families and residents
high quality schools and communities that
we can all feel proud of.
- It is not surprising to see that most of the 191
struggling schools exist within changing and redeveloping
neighborhoods. Schools are a part of the community
and community development must be thought of when
we plan for quality schools and education.
- Parental involvement is KEY! We know that
schools with greater parental involvement are more
likely to have higher performing schools. So we
must encourage parents to become positively engaged,
and ensure school environments are welcoming to
parents. In order to achieve successful, academically
improved schools, we must work together and improve
upon multiple focuses that create and support
the expectation for high quality education.
Facilities, class size, and community and economic
developing are integral pieces that form a high
quality school.
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