Download or read book The Make or Break Year written by Emily Krone Phillips and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Bestseller An entirely fresh approach to ending the high school dropout crisis is revealed in this groundbreaking chronicle of unprecedented transformation in a city notorious for its "failing schools" In eighth grade, Eric thought he was going places. But by his second semester of freshman year at Hancock High, his D's in Environmental Science and French, plus an F in Mr. Castillo's Honors Algebra class, might have suggested otherwise. Research shows that students with more than one semester F during their freshman year are very unlikely to graduate. If Eric had attended Hancock—or any number of Chicago's public high schools—just a decade earlier, chances are good he would have dropped out. Instead, Hancock's new way of responding to failing grades, missed homework, and other red flags made it possible for Eric to get back on track. The Make-or-Break Year is the largely untold story of how a simple idea—that reorganizing schools to get students through the treacherous transitions of freshman year greatly increases the odds of those students graduating—changed the course of two Chicago high schools, an entire school system, and thousands of lives. Marshaling groundbreaking research on the teenage brain, peer relationships, and academic performance, journalist turned communications expert Emily Krone Phillips details the emergence of Freshman OnTrack, a program-cum-movement that is translating knowledge into action—and revolutionizing how teachers grade, mete out discipline, and provide social, emotional, and academic support to their students. This vivid description of real change in a faulty system will captivate anyone who cares about improving our nation's schools; it will inspire educators and families to reimagine their relationships with students like Eric, and others whose stories affirm the pivotal nature of ninth grade for all young people. In a moment of relentless focus on what doesn't work in education and the public sphere, Phillips's dramatic account examines what does.
Download or read book Ghosts in the Schoolyard written by Eve L. Ewing and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-04-10 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt. But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike? Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.
Download or read book Educating Esm written by Esmé Raji Codell and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once "a pop culture phenomenon" (Publishers Weekly) and "screamingly funny" (Booklist), Educating Esmé "should be read by anyone who's interested in the future of public education" (Boston Phoenix Literary Section). A must-read for parents, new teachers, and classroom veterans, Educating Esmé is the exuberant diary of Esmé Raji Codell’s first year teaching in a Chicago public school. Fresh-mouthed and free-spirited, the irrepressible Madame Esmé—as she prefers to be called—does the cha-cha during multiplication tables, roller-skates down the hallways, and puts on rousing performances with at-risk students in the library. Her diary opens a window into a real-life classroom from a teacher’s perspective. While battling bureaucrats, gang members, abusive parents, and her own insecurities, this gifted young woman reveals what it takes to be an exceptional teacher. Heroine to thousands of parents and educators, Esmé now shares more of her ingenious and yet down-to-earth approaches to the classroom in a supplementary guide to help new teachers hit the ground running. As relevant and iconoclastic as when it was first published, Educating Esmé is a classic, as is Madame Esmé herself.
Download or read book Teacher Induction and Mentoring written by Juanjo Mena and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws together various theoretical and research-based perspectives to examine the institutionalization of mentoring processes for beginning teachers. Teacher induction, defined as the guidance provided to new teachers, is increasingly gaining traction as a key stage in promoting quality education. Major efforts have been put into reducing transitional challenges from being a student teacher to a practicing teacher; optimizing professional relationships and socialization into school dynamics; and increasing teacher retention. Mentoring has been proven to add benefits in assisting beginning teachers during the early years of their teaching career, because it provides the required knowledge and skills to face uncertain school scenarios and the complexities of practice. However, teacher induction programs are not part of regular instruction in many countries. The lack of teacher training during the induction phase might result in lower levels of commitment, professional isolation, or even attrition. This book calls for more concrete mentoring processes for early career teachers, and questions how this can be put into practice.
Download or read book From High School to the Future written by Melissa Roderick and published by Consortium on Chicago School Research. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a 2010 address to the College Board, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan laid out a vision for high school that advances the Obama administration's goal of the U.S. once again leading the world in educational attainment. There is no grade in which the magnitude and complexity of this shift becomes clearer than in senior year. Historically, senior year has been a time of finishing up graduation requirements as most students entered the work force after high school. In this new economy, most students now hope to go to college and those who are not entering college face a rapidly eroding labor market for young adults with only a high school education. This changing educational landscape means that students' coursework and activities in senior year are becoming increasingly important. If the new purpose of high schools is to be a "launching pad rather than a last stop destination," what does that mean for senior year? The bottom line is that there is much work to do if cps is to shift the focus of twelfth grade from finishing graduation requirements to preparing for college and employment or training. A central theme of this report is that there is no single answer to the question, "What is a good senior year?" Students are coming into senior year with very different needs. In order to look at differences in needs across students, the authors group students by their college qualifications at the end of eleventh grade. Thus, throughout this report, the authors focus on identifying the set of issues that educators need to grapple with for students on different trajectories. Appended are: (1) Data Used in This Report; (2) Determining Who is a Senior and Who Persists in Four-Year Colleges; (3) Variables Used in the Analysis; (4) Latent Class Analysis; (5) Identifying College Access; and (6) Methodology. (Contains 33 figures, 16 tables, and 70 endnotes.).
Download or read book Looking Forward to High School and College written by Elaine Allensworth and published by Consortium on Chicago School Research. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grades and attendance-not test scores-are the middle grade factors most strongly connected with both high school and college success. In fact, grades and attendance matter more than test scores, race, poverty, or other background characteristics for later academic success. This report follows approximately 20,000 Chicago Public Schools students as they transition from elementary to high school. It is designed to help answer questions about which markers should be used to gauge whether students are ready to succeed in high school and beyond. It also considers the performance levels students need to reach in middle school to have a reasonable chance of succeeding in high school.
Download or read book Official Report of the Proceedings of the Board of Education of the City of Chicago written by Chicago (Ill.). Board of Education and published by . This book was released on 1888 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Fight for the Soul of Public Education written by Steven Ashby and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-04 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In reaction to the changes imposed on public schools across the country in the name of "education reform," the Chicago Teachers Union redefined its traditional role and waged a multidimensional fight that produced a community-wide school strike and transformed the scope of collective bargaining into arenas that few labor relations experts thought possible. Using interviews, first-person accounts, participant observation, union documents, and media reports, Steven K. Ashby and Robert Bruno tell the story of the 2012 strike that shut down the Chicago school system for seven days.A Fight for the Soul of Public Education takes into account two overlapping, parallel, and equally important stories. One is a grassroots story of worker activism told from the perspective of rank-and-file union members and their community supporters. Ashby and Bruno provide a detailed account of how the strike became an international cause when other teachers unions had largely surrendered to corporate-driven education reform. The second story describes the role of state and national politics in imposing educational governance changes on public schools and draconian limitations on union bargaining rights. It includes a detailed account of the actual bargaining process revealing the mundane and the transcendental strategies of both school board and union representatives.
Download or read book Grading for Equity written by Joe Feldman and published by Corwin Press. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Joe Feldman shows us how we can use grading to help students become the leaders of their own learning and lift the veil on how to succeed. . . . This must-have book will help teachers learn to implement improved, equity-focused grading for impact." —Zaretta Hammond, Author of Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain Crack open the grading conversation Here at last—and none too soon—is a resource that delivers the research base, tools, and courage to tackle one of the most challenging and emotionally charged conversations in today’s schools: our inconsistent grading practices and the ways they can inadvertently perpetuate the achievement and opportunity gaps among our students. With Grading for Equity, Joe Feldman cuts to the core of the conversation, revealing how grading practices that are accurate, bias-resistant, and motivational will improve learning, minimize grade inflation, reduce failure rates, and become a lever for creating stronger teacher-student relationships and more caring classrooms. Essential reading for schoolwide and individual book study or for student advocates, Grading for Equity provides A critical historical backdrop, describing how our inherited system of grading was originally set up as a sorting mechanism to provide or deny opportunity, control students, and endorse a "fixed mindset" about students’ academic potential—practices that are still in place a century later A summary of the research on motivation and equitable teaching and learning, establishing a rock-solid foundation and a "true north" orientation toward equitable grading practices Specific grading practices that are more equitable, along with teacher examples, strategies to solve common hiccups and concerns, and evidence of effectiveness Reflection tools for facilitating individual or group engagement and understanding As Joe writes, "Grading practices are a mirror not just for students, but for us as their teachers." Each one of us should start by asking, "What do my grading practices say about who I am and what I believe?" Then, let’s make the choice to do things differently . . . with Grading for Equity as a dog-eared reference.
Download or read book When Schools Close written by Marisa De La Torre and published by Consortium on Chicago School Research. This book was released on 2009 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few decisions by a school district are more controversial than the decision to close a school. School staff, students and their families, and even the local community all bear a substantial burden once the decision is made to close a school. Since 2001, Chicago Public Schools (cps) has closed 44 schools for reasons of poor academic performance or underutilization. Despite the attention that school closings have received in the past few years, very little is known about how displaced students fare after their schools are closed. This report examines the impact that closing schools had on the students who attended these schools. The authors focus on regular elementary schools that were closed between 2001 and 2006 for underutilization or low performance and ask whether students who were forced to leave these schools and enroll elsewhere experienced any positive or negative effects from this type of school move. They look at a number of student outcomes, including reading and math achievement, special education referrals, retentions, summer school attendance, mobility, and high school performance. They also examine characteristics of the receiving schools and ask whether differences in these schools had any impact on the learning experiences of students who transferred into them. The authors report six major findings: (1) Most students who transferred out of closing schools reenrolled in schools that were academically weak; (2) The largest negative impact of school closings on students' reading and math achievement occurred in the year before the schools were closed; (3) Once students left schools slated for closing, on average the additional effects on their learning were neither negative nor positive; (4) Although the school closing policy had only a small overall effect on student test scores, it did affect summer school enrollment and subsequent school mobility; (5) When displaced students reached high school, their on-track rates to graduate were no different than the rates of students who attended schools similar to those that closed; and (6) The learning outcomes of displaced students depended on the characteristics of receiving schools. Overall, they found few effects, either positive or negative, of school closings on the achievement of displaced students. Appended are: (1) School Closings and New Openings; and (2) Data, Analytic Methods, and Variables Used. (Contains 5 tables, 12 figures and 53 endnotes.)[For the (What Works Clearinghouse (wwc) Quick Review of this report, see ed510790.].
Download or read book The Public School Advantage written by Christopher A. Lubienski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.
Download or read book A Political Education written by Elizabeth Todd-Breland and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.
Download or read book The Good High School written by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award winning book by the noted Harvard educator which examines six schools that have earned reputations for excellence.
Download or read book Organizing Schools for Improvement written by Anthony S. Bryk and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1988, the Chicago public school system decentralized, granting parents and communities significant resources and authority to reform their schools in dramatic ways. To track the effects of this bold experiment, the authors of Organizing Schools for Improvement collected a wealth of data on elementary schools in Chicago. Over a seven-year period they identified one hundred elementary schools that had substantially improved—and one hundred that had not. What did the successful schools do to accelerate student learning? The authors of this illuminating book identify a comprehensive set of practices and conditions that were key factors for improvement, including school leadership, the professional capacity of the faculty and staff, and a student-centered learning climate. In addition, they analyze the impact of social dynamics, including crime, critically examining the inextricable link between schools and their communities. Putting their data onto a more human scale, they also chronicle the stories of two neighboring schools with very different trajectories. The lessons gleaned from this groundbreaking study will be invaluable for anyone involved with urban education.
Download or read book The World Book Encyclopedia written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An encyclopedia designed especially to meet the needs of elementary, junior high, and senior high school students.
Download or read book Illinois Schools Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
