Archive for February, 2010
Lice again
Sorry I’ve been late with approving comments. Lice have swept through my son’s 1st grade class, jumping from head to head and plunging parents into a frenzy of emails and nerdy lice-product researching and testing.
I would love to see a slow motion video of how these creatures make the jump from head to head. Do they see a human head coming in and start preparing like “Get ready to jump ship!” ?
Honestly, I am almost ready to just give up and live with the little buggers in itchy harmony. The combing, the washing, the picking. Hours a day of that could be spent wasting in front of the TV or computer!
My current dilemma is what to do about my son’s blue blankie that he sleeps with every night. It is a ball of string that is one vigorous wash cycle away from falling apart. I’m wondering whether I can microwave this every night to kill any offending creatures?
Oh, and a P.S. – If you’re the guy I was sitting next to on the Metra train today, talking about my blog (yes, I randomly accost strangers and direct them to CPSObsessed.com,) don’t worry, my head is clear.
Prescott 2nd chance
Thanks to 2 readers who posted this news about Prescott tonight. Wow, I’m actually surprised…sounded like a done deal. I’m impressed that CPS recognizes the schools where parents are working to grow enrollment (basically free marketing and labor for CPS!) I just wish CPS didn’t have to make everyone go through such agony to reach final consensus! Jeez! I’m sure now the Alcott people feel jerked around….
Post 1:
hey hey!! 299 just reported:
Last Minute Reprieve For Prescott and Marconi
“Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Ron Huberman announced today that he is removing William H. Prescott Elementary School, 1632 W. Wrightwood, from the school actions list that is to be submitted to the Chicago Board of Education tomorrow, Huberman also said he is also suspending a proposal regarding the consolidation of Guglielmo Marconi Elementary School, 230 N Kolmar.
“Huberman said CPS officials have received substantial input from the Prescott School community regarding plans to increase the school’s enrollment for the next school year. Prescott was proposed for closing because of under-enrollment. The school has less than 200 students and a design capacity to accommodate 600.
“The school community at Prescott has put forth a variety of plans on how they would improve enrollment, and we are going to give them the opportunity to do that,” Huberman said. The success of those efforts will be reviewed this fall, he said.
well what do you know. He kept Hamilton open too…..GOOD FOR HIM!!!!!!
As a parent who was majorly invested (and still am) in helping my own neighbohood school increase enrollment for the past 4 years, I know what great lengths parenst go to in order to get people interested in their school They believe in it, and it’s great for their communities when so many get involved.
I am so glad to see that their efforts paid off (in both schools).
Post 2:
Looks like there was a reversal of the closing decision at Prescott. Congratulations to all who worked on keeping it open. Where does Alcott HS go now?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-school-closing-20100223,0,941728.story
Prescott Closing – So this helps explain it….
The is not officially confirmed, but I just read on NPN that the new Alcott High School will be housed in the current Prescott building.
Prescott has been a school mired in controversy during the past year or two. They scooped up a principal whose contract wasn’t renewed at Ravenswood Elementary School. The guy came across VERY well in school tours and hada desire to make quick changes in his schools. But quick change in CPS can ffulle feathers and piss people off. And even if you *get* to make the changes, ideally you still want to have the teachers and parents feel like they’re on board with him. Rumor has it that this wasn’t his strong point.
This past year he tried to make some serious changes at Prescott which some parents fully supported whereas other parents and teachers were supremely pissed off. Naturally there are valid points for each side, but to me, when you’re looking at a typical CPS school with poor test scores and declining enrollment (as Prescott had been) then somebody needs to step up and shake things up.
In any case, despite the controversy and in-fighting, and well-intended efforts to make some changes to draw more neighbors in…. it was too late. SPC slated the school for closing due to low enrollment. I believe the parents tried to fight it to no avail.
And now I see why. It probably makes sense to get the Alcott HS in there, but the scary thing is to think about the planning that was going on, probably without Prescott’ s knowledge. Up on the north side we talk about the need for new high schools, but to get these CPS isn’t necessarily going to build nice new buildings like North Side College prep. They’re going to look for existing underutilized space.
Parents need to act fast if their local school is shrinking or has consistently low enrollment for one reason or another.
Little Rant about the Teachers’ Union
I’ve been meaning to post this story for a while and finally have time. Just an interesting tidbit from the trenches.
My mom has worked for a few year substitute teaching in the CPS high schools. She was always willing to go to even the worst schools so she was called quite often to teach. I need to have her write a post about it. It’s utterly depressing the lack of skills these kids have (OK, I’m officially old to be calling teens “kids.”) She often comments half-jokingly that my 6yo son can write better sentences than half the kids she sees. I think even worse is the random smart kid who is out of his element but has no other options. Many of the schools have daycare centers for the girls with babies (which most either have or are pregnant.) Subbing is a pretty easy gig because most of the teachers don’t leave actual lessons, but just instruct the sub to have them read or work on something independantly.
So for a couple years, my mom would call in each night and get an assignment in the morning. I think one year her daily rate was $120 (that’s 6 hours) and then went up to $150 which is a pretty good set-up.
So this year, September comes and she calls each night. Nothing. And more nothing. It wasn’t until December that she finally got a call (in the thick of illness season.) After getting her paycheck for that day, she’s found out that her daily rate has gone up to $250, due to Union rules.
So if I’m a principal and I can choose between a $120/day teacher or a $250/day teacher (or even $90 which is what I think the new ones start at) who do you think I’ll pick? So the work has totally dried up. My mom has continued not to be called again this year and would be perfectly willing to work for the $150 again and actually WORK rather than get nothing. But Union rules is Union rules people. The Union really thought that by installing hefty raises each year that those teachers would still get work? It’s just one of those things that doesn’t make sense to me.
Good question….
A reader posted this question – anybody got info?
As the test result letter date draws nearer….I’d love to understand the ’subtests’ on the gifted portion and how it works into acceptances. Is there anyone who REALLY knows?
I know for sure that there are sub-sections of the gifted test (at least on the reading/language portion.) We don’t see those scores, but CPS has them and somehow uses them to rank kids who have the same test score. So there are certain sections that have more importance in determining your rank order on the list to get into a program.
The year we got in, a neighbor’s son and my son must have scored the exact same on these subsections because we kept getting the same offers and calls at the exact same time.
So I’m guessing that there could be kids who both score, say a 130, but one child is actually ranked higher among the 130 kids than others. If you believe the article I posted today about the iffiness of testing 4yo’s, then the value of specific sections (among kids who can barely read!) is pretty comical.
Interesting Article about Gifted Testing
A couple people sent me this great article about gifted testing in NYC. It may feel a bit long to read online, but try to slog through it. There’s some good points covered about the pros/absurdities of testing kids at age 4 for a program that lasts for years. I’ll include some of my favorite quotes below.
http://nymag.com/news/features/63427/index1.html
“Early good testers don’t make better students,” he tells me, “any more than early walkers make better runners.”
OK, true. But I never thought that having my kid test into a gifted program meant he was going to be an intellilectual “runner” per se. I don’t know or care if he’s going to kick ass in high school and college (in fact I’m guessing not, but if he DOES test ahead at age 4, I feel like that DOES mean he can/should work ahead at ages say 5-7. As should plenty of other kids in CPS who score high but don’t get a spot in a gifted/classical school.
About the different tests used by different schools (public vs private:)
As W. Steven Barnett, co-director of Rutgers’ National Institute for Early Education Research, notes: “Odds are they’re all going to have kids do something with triangles.”
Triangles, eh?! Duly noted.
Oh, and can you imagine having to pay $275 to take some dumb test to get your kid into a private school (where I’m sure the odds are really slim of getting in.)
In 2006, David Lohman, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, co-authored a paper called “Gifted Today but Not Tomorrow?” in the Journal for the Education of the Gifted, demonstrating just how labile “giftedness” is. It notes that only 45 percent of the kids who scored 130 or above on the Stanford-Binet would do so on another, similar IQ test at the same point in time. Combine this with the instability of 4-year-old IQs, and it becomes pretty clear that judgments about giftedness should be an ongoing affair, rather than a fateful determination made at one arbitrary moment in time. I wrote to Lohman and asked what percentage of 4-year-olds who scored 130 or above would do so again as 17-year-olds. He answered with a careful regression analysis: about 25 percent.
OK, well that’s depressing. But at least takes some of the pressure off that comes when we get those gifted scores. So there’re plenty of kids now who don’t test at gifted levels who will down the road.
They follow with this interesting point…
To have some mechanism that can find, during childhood, a quarter of the adults who’ll test so well is, if you think about it, impressive. “The problem,” wrote Lohman, “is assigning kids to schools for the gifted on the basis of a test score at age 4 or 5 and assuming that their rank order among age mates will be constant over time.”
Appelbaum, McCall’s co-author, puts an even finer point on the stakes. “No university I know,” he says, “would think of using a 4-year-old’s data to decide who to admit.”
Ok, true again. But no colleges ARE doing it that way. Are they?!
Rather than promoting a meritocracy, in other words, these tests instead retard one. They reflect the world as it’s already stratified—and then perpetuate that same stratification.
About testing and the Nature/Nurture factor:
“Instead of giving IQ tests, you could just as easily look at Zip Codes and the education levels of the parents to determine who gets the better schooling—you get a very high correlation between IQ and socioeconomic status in the first seven or eight years of life,” says Samuel J. Meisels, assessment expert and president of Chicago’s Erikson Institute, the renowned graduate school in childhood development. “Giftedness is a real thing, no question. But giftedness can be extinguished, and it can be nurtured.”
And that, my friends, explains why race and or socio-economics are used by CPS to assign the spots. And why some kids will be getting an edge this year since 40% (?) of spots will be given out on test scores alone.
The article points out that unfortunately, there isn’t an obviously better way to do the selection (especially in schools with slim budgets.) It involves observation and teacher input which just isn’t feasible in CPS.
And finally, the author concludes with this great blurb:
But my money’s on the marshmallow test. It’s quite compelling and, apparently, quite famous—Shenk talks about it with great relish in The Genius in All of Us. In the sixties, a Stanford psychologist named Walter Mischel rounded up 653 young children and gave them a choice: They could eat one marshmallow at that very moment, or they could wait for an unspecified period of time and eat two. Most chose two, but in the end, only one third of the sample had the self-discipline to wait the fifteen or so minutes for them. Mischel then had the inspired idea to follow up on his young subjects, checking in with them as they were finishing high school. He discovered that the children who’d waited for that second marshmallow had scored, on average, 210 points higher on the SAT.
God, really? Assuming it were Smarties (picky eater hates marshmallows) there is NO WAY he’d be able to resist them. Please conduct this test at home and report back on your child!
Radio show tonight… talk to Ron!
Next Show: Wednesday February 17th 2010 at 7PM C.T.
PHONE: (312) 591-7878 TEXT: 780780 or send EMAIL
A job I wouldn’t want in a million years….
Huberman’s.
I mean seriously, is there any way to succeed? It’s almost comical — cuts the budget and expect improvement. Sure, why not?
Thanks to blog reader Hopeful for sending in the link to the Sun Times article today that sums up Huberman’s first year.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/2022002,CST-NWS-huberman01.article
Some key points:
Talking concession with unions, including furlough days — at $10 million in savings per day — and trimming 4 percent teacher raises. A “last resort” would be boosting class sizes to 31– a move that would trigger 580 teacher layoffs and save $40.6 million, Huberman says.
There is speculation that teachers might strike if such a thing happens. Not a pretty thought, but jeez, look at the numbers. I’m so curious to see if any of the above actually happens.
Data-junkie Huberman and his staff studied the hallmarks of 500 CPS students shot over five years to develop a “predictability model” that identified roughly 1,200 other students most likely to be shot.
The result was a two-year, $60 million proposal announced last September. It will bring advocates, mentors and jobs to the most at-risk kids, school-written “culture of calm” plans to 38 violence-prone high schools, and citizen safety patrols to dangerous streets.
I love that he’s a data junkie and it’s cool that he came up with this plan. But it is just utterly depressing that our school system has to spend $60 million on an anti-violence initiative instead of education. I can’t even comment. Everything I want to write about that sounds politically incorrect and makes me sound like a cranky old person.
School area officers are now bringing performance management to principals. During monthly meetings, a half dozen principals share data on their schools. The goal is to break principal “isolation” and share what works, Huberman said.
“It’s meant so much to me to hear what’s happening at other schools,” said Julian Principal Careda Taylor. “I like that.”
But some principals find the sessions “abusive” and “embarrassing,” said Chicago Principals Association President Clarice Berry. “Principals are telling us it’s enormously time-consuming. They have to sit through a cohort of six schools.”
Uh, I’m hearing time-consuming. Two principals have told me it is a royal pain in the butt. I suspect that Ron’s ideas may be good in theory but may be getting distorted in the bureaucracy of CPS. Just a hunch.
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