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9486 in the collection
School Deform Chicago Style
Ohanian comment: Get out the vomit bags. As the reporter notes, Chicago's retention-grade-skipping plan is quite unique. Note that the corporate-politico shill Education Trust, praises Chicago, failing to note the troubling retention policy.
Also note how much money university researchers raked in to become part of Daly's team. Just think, in World War II, they shot collaborators.
Six out of 10 started out below the national norm in reading. Now, nearly six out of 10 are above it. And that's true even though most of these kids are poor, coming from homes where books may be scarce and one parent may be absent.
"This goes to show that it's possible to make significant progress with poor, minority students,'' said Craig Jerald, senior policy analyst with The Education Trust, a nonprofit Washington, D.C., group focused on closing the achievement gap.
But some say it's too early to call this a success story. In fact, it's less than half the story of the first Daley Generation.
That's because, by this past school year, only 49 percent of the Daley Kids even made it to eighth grade in a Chicago public school. Nearly a fifth of the kids sat in a lower grade, having been held back at least once--often because they failed a key standardized test. And almost a third had left the school system altogether, with middle-class kids leaving at a higher rate than poor ones.
Those are some of the results of a detailed statistical analysis, performed by the University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research at the Chicago Sun-Times' request, that tracked the first generation of students to start first grade under the Daley banner and reach what would normally be their eighth-grade graduation years.
The analysis indicates many Daley Kids are doing better academically, but Daley and his handpicked school team have yet to stem the exodus of students from the system's elementary schools. And, this academic success comes at a price that cannot yet be calculated--the fate of the 6,550 kids still in the system who were forced to repeat at least one grade.
Daley and his school managers insist that "socially promoting" these ill-prepared students--moving them up despite bad grades--would have guaranteed their failure. But many experts say the final test is still ahead. They point to stacks of research showing that kids who are held back, and sit in classrooms surrounded by younger students, are much more likely to drop out in their high school years.
Following the zigs and zags
To study the Daley Generation, Consortium analyst Steve Ponisciak and executive director John Easton looked at kids in an entirely new way. They followed each student over an eight-year continuum, using Board of Education records that pinpointed each child's grade level each September.
Some of the results were startling.
The researchers found routes up the ladder they never knew existed: kids who repeated a grade, then skipped a grade and rejoined their peers, only to stumble and repeat a grade yet again. Some kids repeated the same grade three times; others repeated three different grades.
As a result, almost 1,600 Daley Kids sat in sixth-grade classrooms this past school year.
Most of these kids were held back by the most controversial hallmark of the Daley era--a new crackdown against social promotion that requires students to pass a test to be promoted after third, sixth and eighth grade. But more than a third were held back in other grades, the result of decisions made by schools with no systemwide policy to guide them.
Some of these grade patterns are so unusual that Schools CEO Arne Duncan says he now wants to closely examine them. After all, only 40 percent of all Daley Kids took a traditional route through grammar school, going from first through eighth consecutively.
Whirlwind of reform
Regardless of their current grade, over the last eight years most of the Daley Generation experienced an almost dizzying array of efforts to rejuvenate the country's third-largest school system--once labeled by then-U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett the "worst in the nation.''
Daley and his new school team brought a new energy to a once-lumbering system and showered it with new resources: a $3.6 billion construction boom, $99.4 million in extra after-school classes and $98.8 million in new mandatory summer school classes.
Paid experts from universities citywide were dispatched to the city's lowest-performing schools. Other specialists later joined them, armed with new training on how to teach reading. The whole city pitched in, with CEOs, movie stars and athletes recruited to serve as "principals for a day.''
Labor tensions were replaced by eight years of labor peace. Enrollment increased from 407,000 to 438,600, and the school budget ballooned from $2.7 billion to $4.8 billion.
Eventually, homeowners saw the Chicago Board of Education swallow up 49 percent of their property tax bills.
But under Daley, parents also knew their public schools would open each fall on time. Budget deficits that once wracked the system and threatened the opening day of school were plugged early on.
Daley Kids and destiny
Destiny has tied the Daley Generation to Daley, whatever their path. Many of the Daley Kids were born in 1989, the same year Richard M. Daley became mayor of Chicago. They started first grade in 1995, just months after a Republican-dominated Legislature handed Daley, a Democrat, the reins of the city's public schools.
Daley got direct appointment of all Chicago School Board members, who immediately began voting in unanimous blocs. He hand-picked the CEO charged with running schools on a day-to-day basis. The Chicago Board of Education became, in effect, Daley's Board of Education.
The fruit of that effort, the first Daley Generation, is being watched not only by Chicago parents and voters, but also by cities nationwide that have since handed over their schools to their mayors and followed Daley's nationally recognized crackdown on social promotion.
Donna Tisdale still remembers the excitement and promise of that September day back in 1995. She walked her two daughters past the boarded-up buildings and vacant lots of impoverished Englewood and into Copernicus Elementary for their first day of first grade.
For these kids, for this generation, Tisdale hoped, things would be different.
"I was very optimistic,'' Tisdale said. "I felt Mayor Daley was working with the city. Maybe he could do something with the schools.''
WHERE DALEY KIDS STAND
Despite the successes of Daley's plan, only 49.3 percent of the 36,069 students who started in Chicago public schools in 1995 made it to eighth grade. More than 11,000 kids left the school system entirely by 2002.
Perks, pressure fuel pupils' progress
BY ROSALIND ROSSI Education Reporter
Claudia Mazariegos is a Daley Generation success story.
For Claudia, two of the best-known hallmarks of the Daley era--new after-school classes and mandatory summer school--worked.
She says plainly why she had to attend summer school after third grade: "I flunked the Iowas.''
Like most third-graders five years ago, Claudia was solidly below the national average in reading, based on annual exams called the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, or the ITBS. Her scores put her in the bottom 11 percent of the nation.
Today, at age 14, she is now solidly above the national average. Her dream is to be a psychologist or a photographer.
Claudia's eight-year journey to the graduation stage at Roque de Duprey Elementary in East Humboldt Park reflects the new perks but also the new pressures experienced by the Daley Generation. Both helped fuel academic gains.
On her way to school, Claudia wore a new uniform that's now common in most Chicago public schools. Outside her school, she's seen the new roof and enjoyed the new play lot and jungle gym--part of a systemwide building boom. Inside the school, she has watched her classroom libraries grow with crisp new books and noticed that kids spend more time reading.
Roque de Duprey Elementary as a whole also is a Daley-era success story. The largely Hispanic school, where all students come from low-income homes, once was on academic probation--another key tool of reform during the Daley era--but worked its way off, using expert help and a new reading model.
The school has a new reading specialist, part of a recent systemwide reading push. Teachers are getting extra training and lots of advice. They can't even escape it in the faculty washroom. Suggestions on how to improve student vocabulary are taped there, just above the toilet paper dispenser. Explained Principal Gloria Roman: "It's a captive audience.''
The school library is packed with new novels, but also with stacks of test prep books titled Taking the Terror Out of the ITBS. These days, kids need to hit at least the 24th percentile in math and reading to be promoted, although they can ask that other factors be considered, too. Claudia more than topped that mark in eighth-grade reading this year, scoring at the 59th percentile.
As the Iowas reflect, "Before, I had a little trouble reading, but reading more and more makes me understand more stuff,'' said Claudia, the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants.
Claudia loves to read and often falls asleep in her small bedroom, overlooking her mother's rose garden, reading one of the 10 books she owns, including several she won in school raffles.
Claudia is among those Daley Generation kids who took the most traveled path and made it to eighth grade on time this year. Most of them, like Claudia, went from first to eighth consecutively. Others repeated one grade and then skipped another to get to eighth. But for all eighth-graders who spent the last eight years in a Chicago public school, the improvement appears impressive.
Their scores rose from 40 percent reading at or above national norms in third grade to 57 percent by eighth grade, a special analysis by the Consortium on Chicago School Research indicates. That's seven percentage points better than all eighth-graders this year, which includes those who were not among the original 36,069 Daley Generation students.
Math scores are even higher, with nearly 64 percent at or above national norms.
"In the past, we've heard people say that the longer students stayed in the Chicago public schools, the worse they do,'' said Consortium executive director John Easton, who once headed the system's Department of Research and now consults for it occasionally. "This is clearly evidence to show that the reverse is true.''
But Easton warned that bottom-scoring students have been lopped off the Daley Generation test figures, making the remaining portion seem bigger than if they were included. And that bottom group just spent the past school year sitting in a grade less than eighth.
At Norwood Park Elementary, a mostly white, neighborhood school that has never been on academic probation, Daley Generation eighth-grader Krysta Tremmel doesn't want kids who are far behind slowing her down.
"If you slack off the whole year, it isn't fair to other kids to hold them back [in class] next year,'' said Krysta, 14.
Krysta says her mom taught her to read when she was 3, and she owns probably 100 books, including those she gets every Christmas or birthday. She even makes lists of books she wants for gifts.
At Norwood Park, only five students in the last eight years have had to attend mandatory summer school, and none have been held back afterwards, Principal William Meurer said.
Yet many Daley Generation eighth-graders there worry about the Iowas.
"It puts a lot of stress and pressure on kids,'' said Kristofer Blecka, 14. "There's always that one possibility you might do bad.''
Other Consortium research indicates this pressure has helped produce better results among sixth- and eighth-graders.
"I like the pressure,'' said Krysta, who wants to be a firefighter. "It makes me do good. I know I need to pass, so I will.''
Repeating grades triggers many 'confusing paths'
BY ROSALIND ROSSI Education Reporter
At Copernicus Elementary in Englewood, Cedale Cotton joined the 49 percent of the Daley Generation to make it to eighth grade on time. But he did it the nontraditional way.
He repeated third grade and skipped sixth.
And he was not alone.
Two other Daley kids in his eighth-grade class at Copernicus, an almost all-black, all low-income school on academic probation, also repeated third and skipped sixth. Two more--a set of twins--repeated two grades and skipped two others, school officials say.
Cedale is among more than 1,550 kids in the Daley Generation to repeat and skip or skip and then repeat their way to an eighth-grade classroom this past school year, a special analysis by the University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research shows. An additional 1,300 took similar zigzags but have yet to make it to eighth because they repeated more grades than they skipped.
Such nontraditional paths apparently have increased since Daley's school managers instituted a new promotion policy, because four times more kids are now repeating grades. Kids who skipped certain grades also skipped a mandatory citywide test and the threat it carried of holding them back again. That might look like an attempt to skirt the system's promotion policy, but experts say it's hard to tell from mere grade patterns if such a decision is good or bad for kids.
"We hear this all the time--that accountability will force adults to do things that are bad for kids to game the accountability system,'' said Craig Jerald, senior policy analyst with The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit group focused on closing the achievement gap. "I would hope those odd enrollment patterns reflect decisions that are good for students.''
In Chicago, schools decide whether kids deserve to skip a grade, which can mean students will need extra help filling in missing coursework. Only in third, sixth and eighth grade does the system set specific promotion standards under which kids generally have to hit at least the 24th percentile in reading and math tests to be promoted.
That standard tripped up Cedale in third grade. He skipped a grade later and rejoined his peers, and in Cedale's case, the decision apparently was a good one.
Cedale, 14, traces his uncommon route to a one-word problem. Ringworm. "They wouldn't let me in the school with it,'' Cedale said. It took him a month to get over the scalp infection. After missing so much, even summer school didn't help him fully catch up, he says.
Cedale watched his friends go off to fourth grade while he repeated third, but there, with help from a new teacher, "I got my grades up and started learning more.''
Things really clicked in fifth, where another teacher pushed Cedale and gave him seventh- and eighth-grade material to read. At the end of fifth, Copernicus catapulted Cedale over sixth grade, sparing him from a mandatory test that could have forced him to repeat a grade once again. It put him right in seventh.
By eighth, Cedale more than mastered the standard for graduation. Although he read at only a first-grade level in third grade, his eighth-grade scores put him in the top quarter of the nation.
These days, Cedale dreams of being a computer information analyst. He says he's never been given a book as a gift; he bought all seven or so now in his bedroom at school book fairs.
Of all the Daley Kids who repeated a grade and are still in the system, only about one in five rejoined their classmates by eighth, the Consortium analysis showed.
The biggest chunk of them--nearly 800--repeated third and skipped fourth during the second year of a Board-monitored catch-up program that was later trimmed by former Schools CEO Paul Vallas and then eliminated last year by Vallas successor Arne Duncan and Chief Education Officer Barbara Eason-Watkins.
Eason-Watkins said she had no data on the success rate of the program but had heard anecdotal reports that retained kids were struggling after rejoining their peers. So she replaced the catch-up program with more after-school classes, more tutoring, new summer school for fifth-graders and reading specialists for more low-scoring schools.
Duncan said he is particularly concerned about more than 75 kids who spent three years in sixth grade after he became Schools CEO in 2001 and said he did not want kids to repeat the same grade three times. "That's a problem. We gotta look at that,'' he said.
His staff also will try to determine whether unusual grade patterns are concentrated in certain schools. Duncan said he can't tell if some schools are leapfrogging repeaters over high-stakes grades to circumvent the promotion policy. In some cases, Eason-Watkins said, schools may have failed to record the new grade levels of their summer school students by the late September grade count.
"Where there are irregularities, we're going to look at them,'' Duncan said. However, where kids repeated and later caught up, "I think retention may have been the wake-up call they needed.''
Duncan and Eason-Watkins conceded there are no systemwide standards for double-promoting pupils or retaining them in grades other than three, six and eight.
Offbeat routes deserve careful examination, said John Easton, the Consortium executive director who oversaw the analysis of the Daley Generation. "What kind of information are schools using to make these promotion decisions?'' Easton asked. "The student information system should be flashing on these kids, and somebody should be saying, 'Hey, what's going on? Get in there and find out.' "
Last year, when the Board's catch-up program was killed, the number of kids held back hit the highest level since Daley took over. Peter Cunningham, a Chicago Board of Education spokesman, said teachers and principals closest to students can always decide whether retained kids should skip a grade and rejoin their peers.
But The Education Trust's Jerald said the Board has "a moral obligation to provide those kind of fast on-ramps to help kids catch up.'' He called it "worrisome'' that the system killed a catch-up program based on anecdotal reports rather than achievement data.
Although some paths look suspicious, some nontraditional routes may hold valuable lessons, said Barbara Radner, director of DePaul University's Center for Urban Education. Radner said allowing some students who repeated third to skip sixth--and that year's high-stakes test--could provide the breather they need to catch up by the next big test, in eighth.
But other paths--such as that of a handful of students who skipped third only to repeat fourth, or repeated third, skipped fourth and repeated fifth--look like "educational mistakes,'' she said.
"The promotion policy has created a lot of confusing paths. . . . Some of them are pathways to nowhere, others seem to be pathways to progress. That's why it begs us to look closer at what's happening here.''
— Rosalind Rossi
Mayor's dramatic reforms give 8th-grade diploma meaning
Sun-Times
July 27, 2003
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-main27.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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