Chicago News Cooperative: School Plan to Engage Parents Arouses Skepticism

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s new public schools team announced Wednesday that members were delivering on their promise to help parents navigate a system long known for its bureaucratic complexity by creating a Chief Community and Family Engagement Officer, which they say will make the nation’s third-largest school system become more parent-friendly.

Research shows that parents’ relationship with a school district is vital to students’ success, but in Chicago, parents have long been left out of the equation, said Julie Woestehoff, executive director for Parents United for Responsible Education, a parent activist group.

“It’s a bureaucracy,” Ms. Woestehoff said, “and a bureaucracy has walls and gates and doors, and they like to keep them all tightly closed, but parents need to be inside.”

The district does not dispute the problem. “C.P.S. does not have a very reliable system in place to communicate directly with parents,” said Becky Carroll, a district spokeswoman.

But how to make the connection with parents, especially those not active in school affairs, has long been a question with few satisfactory answers.

Jean-Claude Brizard, the public schools’ new chief executive, said in addition to creating the position, there will be staff dedicated to community outreach in each of C.P.S.’s 19 networks of schools. The new entity may also work with existing community engagement structures, such as Local School Councils.

In the past, the Office of Local School Council and Community Support took responsibility for much of the district’s parent and community outreach. Last year, the office had a budget of $3.1 million, with 17 full-time staff members downtown but none elsewhere. That office, Ms. Carroll said, will report to the chief community and family engagement officer, who will also oversee officials in each network office.

“I think there’s a cultural shift that needs to happen within C.P.S. so that it’s more of a proactive engagement with parents and the community rather than reactive,” said Patricia O’Keefe, an organizer for the parents group Raise Your Hand.

Mr. Brizard, who conducted “listening tours” with parents during his first two months on the job, said that their most common complaint had been about the difficulty in getting information from teachers and administrators, and that the new system should help.

“Most parents are not interested in accessing downtown, they’re interested in accessing their school,” he said. “Very often the interface they have with principals and teachers and school staff, I think, is an indication of the larger bureaucratic issues we have.”

Many are skeptical that Mr. Brizard and his team can make the necessary changes.

“The system’s response when there’s a problem or an outcry about something is always to appoint one person in central office or one person in each area to take care of it,” said Donald Moore, executive director of Designs for Change, which promotes community engagement in educational policy. “But the important thing to point out is we’ve never seen that make much of a difference.”

Cherice Taylor, a parent and chairwoman of Chicago’s Head Start policy committee, is one of hundreds of parents who use the district’s parent resource center. She is angry that the district decided last month to move the center — for the fourth time — without consulting those who use it.

“They keep talking about how they want parents involved,” Ms. Taylor said, “but what you’re seeing and what they’re saying are two different things.”

Parents have limited outlets for expressing their concerns and often have to muster a certain level of knowledge and clout to get attention. They can attend a board meeting, which typically requires waiting in line for two hours just to speak for two minutes at the lectern. If they want to change something, they can organize other parents in a lobbying effort, as Raise Your Hand did two years ago to protest state budget cuts.

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Chicago News Cooperative: Supporters of Education Bill Seek to Replace Money Lost in Budget-Cutting Process

In the final days of the session, lawmakers stripped more than $500,000 from the proposed budget that was intended to help implement Senate Bill 7, a sweeping education overhaul that would streamline the process of firing poorly rated teachers. By eliminating the money at the end of May, lawmakers put a crimp in the bill they had approved overwhelmingly a few weeks earlier and which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had praised as a national model.

Mr. Quinn included the money in his budget, but the House erased it and the Senate agreed.?

“It’s not that the House doesn’t care — they do care — but it was just a question of priorities and having to make cuts,” said Jessica Handy, spokeswoman forStand for Children, an advocacy group that helped write the bill.

The money is not significant compared with the state’s overall operating budget of $34 billion, but it would have allowed the state to move forward more quickly with a private firm to overhaul public teacher and principal evaluations.

Now the bill’s supporters, including Mayor Rahm Emanuel, are turning to?Race to the Top, a federal grant program that rewards states for innovative education policies. In June, federal officials announced an additional $700 million in Race to the Top money, with $500 million earmarked for early childhood education. The remaining $200 million is available to nine states that did not receive anything in the previous two rounds of grants, including Illinois.

School-reform proponents are confident that they will win enough grant money to cover Senate Bill 7’s costs, Ms. Handy said. The grants are noncompetitive this year.

“A lot of it depends on Race to the Top,” she said. “I think we’ll be getting it this time.”

?Under S.B. 7, evaluation of Illinois’s public school teachers would be tied to student performance, and those measures would be uniform throughout the state. Ms. Handy and Illinois State Board of Education officials said the money dropped from the bill was essential to finance the training of principals, deans and department heads in the new evaluation system.

Race to the Top winners will be announced this fall with grant awards totaling $10 million to $50 million, according to the United States Department of Education. A grant would be more than enough to finance S.B. 7 fully, Ms. Handy said.

If Illinois is snubbed again, Ms. Handy said her group would ask lawmakers for a special appropriation.

Kristen McQueary covers state politics for The Chicago News Cooperative and Chicago Public Media. kmcqueary@chicago

newscoop.org

Rebecca Vevea contributed reporting.

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Chicago News Cooperative: A Federal Lifeline for Hard-Pressed School Districts

Since the money came after the school year started — too late to hire new teachers — the district went in another direction. Farmington officials decided to leave the money untouched. Unsure about whether the state will come through with what it owes the district, school officials decided to wait and watch the budget process take shape in Springfield over the next few weeks.

If the state falls even further behind on payments to schools, the federal money from the Education Jobs Fund will be used as a small safety net, said Mark Doan, Farmington schools superintendent. “If the state comes and says we don’t have the funds, at that point, I’d turn around and say we’ll use those Education Jobs funds,” Mr. Doan said.

After the Education Jobs Fund was announced in August, the federal government and Gov. Pat Quinn encouraged districts to quickly spend their portion of the $415 million. But, technically, districts do not have to use the money until Sept. 30, 2012.

By Dec. 1, only about 20 percent of school districts had spent all their federal jobs money, according to Illinois State Board of Education reports. In addition, as of Dec. 10, Illinois schools still had $300 million remaining of the $415 million assigned to them.

Many districts said they planned to use the money this fiscal year, but had not yet submitted the paperwork. Others said they might stretch the money into the next fiscal year.

The Education Jobs Fund program highlights just how difficult the fiscal situation is for Illinois schools. When the federal government sent Illinois the money to save teachers’ jobs in September, the tough choices had already been made and staffing plans had been put in place. But as the state did not pay school districts the money it owed them, some schools started to look at the federal money as a small lifeline.

In southwestern Illinois, Sparta District 140 used its $526,000 to cover the September and October payroll for teachers, Superintendent Larry Beattie said.

“We were running out of money,” Mr. Beattie said. “We’re all getting short on cash because of what happened last year” with the state falling significantly behind on reimbursing school districts.

Using the federal money for payroll expenses allowed the district to avoid other cuts, he said.

Earlier this month, Christopher Koch, the state schools superintendent, sent local school officials some good news: Districts would not have to sue the State of Illinois to get the money owed to individual districts for the 2010 fiscal year, which ended six months ago. In early December, Illinois used proceeds from the sale of tobacco revenue bonds to pay off an outstanding $368 million it owed to the schools.

Schools are now waiting for at least $706 million in late payments for the current fiscal year. When the state is late on payments, districts must sometimes borrow to pay their bills, adding to their own financial hardships. Next year may be difficult because no large federal spending packages are on the horizon, and Illinois is constrained by a projected budget deficit of $13 billion, according to the governor’s office.

Chicago Public Schools, which has $104 million of the state’s total allotment of Education Jobs Fund money, is using its money to pay teachers to keep high school classes the same size, restore bilingual education positions and create special-education jobs, said Frank Shuftan, a district spokesman.

In south-suburban Blue Island, the timing worked out better than it did for many other districts. There, Cook County District 130 will use its $877,000 in Education Jobs Fund dollars this fiscal year to pay the salaries for 10 teachers, as well as the costs for three new counselors for its middle schools, said Allan McDonald, the district administrator for business services.

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Chicago News Cooperative: Economist’s Plan to Improve Schools Begins Before Kindergarten

J. B. Pritzker, a prominent Chicago businessman, says he wakes up each day mulling the best way to get a return on his investments. The most valuable resource he can find is “smart people with character.”

It explains why, last week, Mr. Pritzker, a liberal Democrat, introduced a person he described as a University of Chicago supply-side economist at a gathering that might have benefited mayoral candidates concerned about Chicago’s public schools performance.

At the gathering, James J. Heckman, who has won the Nobel in economic science, offered a provocative idea for reducing spiraling budget deficits and strengthening the economy: investing in early childhood development.

Mr. Heckman marshals ample data to suggest that better teaching, higher standards, smaller classrooms and more Internet access “have less impact than we think,” as he put it at the Spertus Institute. To focus as intently as we do on the kindergarten to high school years misses how “the accident of birth is the greatest source of inequality,” he said.

He urges more effectively educating children before they step into a classroom where, as Chicago teachers tell me, they often are clueless about letters, numbers and colors — and lack the attentiveness and persistence to ever catch up. Matters are as bleak with many students entering the City Colleges system.

Mr. Heckman is not really a supply-sider, but he is big on return on investment, just like Mr. Pritzker, who sponsored the Spertus event with the McCormick Foundation and is also a contributor to my wife’s nonprofit group.

He contends that high-quality programs focused on birth to age 5 produce a higher per-dollar return than K-12 schooling and later job training. They reduce deficits by reducing the need for special education and remediation, and by cutting juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancy and dropout rates.

With charts and references to long-term studies, Mr. Heckman underscored why families matter and attributed the widening gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged to deficits in skills and abilities that begin with inadequate early childhood development.

One slide juxtaposed achievement test scores with a mother’s education. If you come from a single-parent home with a mother who dropped out of school, your scores lag far behind throughout your academic life.

Test scores may measure smarts, not the character that turns knowledge into know-how. “Socio-emotional skills” or “character,” which we don’t often measure, are critical, and include motivation, the ability to work with others, attention, self-regulation, self-esteem and the ability to defer gratification.

There are few more influential thinkers than Mr. Heckman on the impact of social programs and methods used to assess them.

“He’s one of the great labor economists of all time, a pioneer of empirical analysis of labor markets, human capital and education,” said Austan Goolsbee, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a University of Chicago colleague.

In the mayoral race, only the freshly certified (to run) Rahm Emanuel and Gery Chico offer extensive plans for education reform. Mr. Emanuel’s ideas strike some nonpartisan folks as more innovative, but Mr. Chico puts early learning front and center.

To their credit, both encourage parental participation, though that’s a complex topic. It’s especially knotty for poor parents who don’t have computers, easy transportation or time to be involved in their child’s school.

Finally, each seems more tactical than strategic, with neither arguably offering a compelling answer to a simple question: What exactly is the purpose of a Chicago public school education?

Many politicians jabber about “preparing our children for a global high-tech economy.” That’s a projection of the present onto a future we stumble to imagine, let alone predict.

But if Mr. Heckman is correct, the purpose of education is what it has always been: to develop a well-rounded, knowledgeable and adaptable person; to create upward mobility through smarts and character.

Imagine more young adults going off into the world to make it better — and fewer coming home to sleep on the couch. If a candidate forced a real debate on such a vision, and a plan to pay for it, parents might pony up even in tough times.

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