9486 in the collection
CPS enters into compact agreement with Gates Foundation
Ohanian Comment: Competing for just $40 million doesn't qualify as a major outrage any more, particularly when we're talking Chicago, the home of major malfeasance. Dig into the Substance archives and you will see that most of the major education de-forms started in Chicago. The first article I ever read by George Schmidt was in Learning, back in the 1980ies, where he wrote about Mastery Learning debacle.
Reader Comment: "We think this funding will help us leverage, not just the current infrastructure..."
In other words, "Experienced union teachers, please teach our charter schools what works so that we can open more charters for Rahm's supporters and then fire you."
Education-reform initiative aimed at bringing charter, traditional schools closer together; puts Chicago in competition for chunk of $40 million grant
By Joel Hood
Chicago Public Schools on Tuesday became the latest large urban district to sign a compact agreement with the education-reform powerhouse Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, pledging greater cooperation and collaboration between the city's charter and traditional neighborhood schools.
The agreement allows Chicago to compete for a piece of a $40 million grant from the Gates Foundation, aimed at building relationships between charters and neighborhood schools and allow for the sharing of innovative ideas.
CPS officials, for example, are taking a look at the Noble Street Charter School's leadership development program that identifies, recruits and trains homegrown talent for principal posts within the network, said Phyllis Lockett of the charter school advocacy group New Schools for Chicago. Cultivating that talent and keeping it within the system is a key reason why Noble's students have excelled academically, Locket said.
"The district wants to learn from that so that maybe Noble can expand that leadership pipeline development to help train and support potential principals (at other CPS schools)," Lockett said. "That would be a great example of how we can get all boats to rise as opposed to charters just sitting isolated, doing what they do."
With 110 schools serving more than 40,000 students, Chicago has one of the largest charter networks in the U.S. Despite their growing influence in the city, charter schools, which are independently run but rely mostly on public funding, receive only a portion of the state and federal money allocated to neighborhood schools.
CPS chief Jean-Claude Brizard said he's pushing for more equitable funding for charter schools, believing that the best ones provide opportunities for students from poor communities where low-performing neighborhood schools are the norm.
"We've got well over 120,000 kids in parts of this city who are not getting access to quality programs, whether it's a turnaround, CPS district or charter school," Brizard said.
Chicago joins New York, Los Angeles, Boston and 10 other school districts around the U.S. in signing the compact agreement. All are eligible to submit proposals to the Gates Foundation to win a share of the grant. CPS has received approximately $28 million from the Gates Foundation since 2002 to spur innovation approaches to education reform.
Brizard said part of the collaborative effort will be to bring a unified system to the district, including a simplified and streamlined application process for all schools, and common performance measurements so that parents can understand how charter schools stack up against neighborhood schools in their area.
"We think this funding will help us leverage, not just the current infrastructure, but also leverage the sharing of best practices to create these great schools across the city," Brizard said.
— Joel Hood
Chicago Tribune
2011-12-07
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-cps-charter-gates-1207-20111207,0,6333906.story
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