CPS says it won’t lay off elementary teachers

June 28, 2010 11:55 AM | No Comments

I don’t know why it cracks me up that this family contacted the Tribune’s Problem Solver because a magnet school wouldn’t let both their twins in.  (One got in via the lottery, the other didnt.)  The Problem Solver handles things like ComEd sending you a bill for $20K or a repair place refusing to give your car back.

So I find it funny that these people thought the Problem Solver could call CPS and make things happen.  I also admire their moxie for doing it.  Hey, why not?

They do point out an absurdity in the current system — Magnet schools will allow siblings into the school (only younger, I assume) but this does NOT include a twin!  CPS “defends” itself by saying that they’re still figuring things out so they just put a 1 year policy in place.   But still, if class sizes are really going to rise, wouldn’t it make sense to let twins in first and THEN add other kids?  Wouldn’t it?!?!

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/problemsolver/ct-biz-0617-problem-king-obrien-20100617,0,6874234.column

Just so people can see what’s going on in the world of CPS, the school my son attends is offering half-day Kindergarten for free and asking parents to pay for full day.  There are 2 neighborhood classes and one gifted class and the half day is offered as an all-or-nothing deal, which I think makes sense.  Yes, I know that CPS *may* be paying for full day K for the gifted program (and who really knows for sure?)  But I think it’s only fair to make it equal.  Both programs bring resources to the school that benefit each other.

Unfortunately, the timeframe in which to raise the money for full day was reallly short.  In the past, CPS would sometimes let the parents pledge the money and they could raise it by the Fall.  If they didn’t get it, CPS would take the position away.  But in the current economy, it appears that CPS wants that cold cash in hand.  Now.  You want full day Kindergarten, you pay now people!

Our school needed to raise $125K within a few weeks.  By June 15th.  As of now, they still need $45K.  I ain’t lookin pretty.  I don’t know if some people are holding out to see if the money is really needed?  If they can get away without paying?  If 45 families will be willing to put in an extra $1000 each to make it happen?

Obviously the difficulty is that now everyone can or will or wants to pay, so the bill can end up being pretty high.  This also makes it weird for letting in people from outside the neighborhood.  You can’t REQUIRE them to pay, but who wants to let in outside freeloaders?  (Eek, I sound like the state of Arizona — but it seems to make sense here!)  I’m thinking 3 classes would be about 80 kids so if everyone paid, that would be about $1600 per family.  I think they asked for $2000 per family, which means that only about half the families have paid.  Or some paid less.

Such a weird situation.  I’m curious to see what happens.

UPDATE: They’ve done it!  Hit the deadline just $2K short of the required.  Hopefully some out-of-district family can buy their way in and make up the difference (just kidding.)  But the school has approved full day K.  That was an impressive effort.  That will need to be repeated again next year.  Sigh.

Hey guys, someone just asked whether the lotteries were broken out by Tiers (meaning 4 lists per school.)

I know the Magnet lotteries were by Tier.

We the neighborhood school lotteries supposedly also done by Tier?  That seems like it would start getting really complicated.  And almost impossible to determine since neighborhood schools, by nature, aren’t balanced on socio-economics.

What are your impressions?

Raise Your Hand for Fair School Funding – Phase II 

Thanks in part to the 153,000 emails generated by visitors to Noto37.org over the past 8 weeks, Illinois legislators made only modest cuts to the IL education budget.  But Ron Huberman and CPS still have a $275 million hole in the FY 2011 CPS budget.  How to plug it? Or more importantly a long term solution to constant financial shortfalls.  The Raise Your Hand coalition believes that the answer lies in the city’s TIF program, which diverts millions of property-tax dollars away from schools and into economic development.  Through this petition (http://ilraiseyourhand.org/petition-to-daley), we’re asking Mayor Daley to reform the TIF program and restore sustainable property-tax based funding to schools across the city of Chicago.  Won’t you join us?  Here’s how you can help:
 
1.      Attend the next rally at City Hall – Thursday June 17th @ 10:30 AM Go to ILRaiseYourHand.org to link to our FaceBook group

2.      Sign the online petition http://ilraiseyourhand.org/petition-to-daley
3.      Print the same petition in hard copy and collect signatures at your child’s school (easy to do during pick-up and drop-off)

I just traveled by car (14 hours with a 7yo – thank you to whoever invented Nintendo DS!) to Cleveland this past weekend for a family event.  My cousin who I stayed with is a teacher so we had a lot to talk about.  She’s one of those people who made a mid-life career change to teaching and she works in a Cleveland Charter school.

Anyhow, first of all, the headlines in the Cleveland paper were all about the teachers’ union and how there is pressure for them to accept concessions to avoid laying off a bunch of teachers.  There was talk about class sizes of 45 (and they call 37 scare tactics?!)   It was largely the same story as we have here.  I did see a chart in their paper comparing the length of the workday of teachers around the country and Chicago was right around average (not a wide range, really.)  But it did make me wonder whether I’m just getting old and boring and I’m finally paying attention to articles about things like teachers’ unions?  Or whether this issue is really hitting some tipping point in our society right now due to the economy, changing demographics, changes in union sentiment, etc.   Is this really the first time in years that this has been a huge issue all over the country?  I know it’s going on in New York as well and I assume other states.  One of the big topics in Cleveland is the idea of tenure vs performance when choosing who gets to keep jobs.  Which leads me to my next topic….

Performance is, of course, measured by test scores since there isn’t any other objective way to do it in a big school system.  My cousin, working in a charter school, does not get any kind of tenure benefits and the principal is VERY test-score focused.  The teachers get a bonus of several thousand dollars a year for meeting goals of raising test scores.  There are 2 fourth grade teachers in the school who kick ass every year and always get the bonuses and tons of public praise from the principal. 

My cousin teachers 5th grade, so she has these kids the year after the 2 “awesome” teachers.  This year when the kids were doing their standardized tests, they inquired why she wasn’t helping them.  When she said she can’t they explained the way that their previous teachers would walk around and look at their answers and give them a thumbs up or thumbs down until they finally got the thumbs up on the question.  They told of a few other subtle ways that the teacher would nudge them along during the test.   She asked the other 5th grade teacher to subtley ask her class about it.  And yes, that teacher would put a little pencil dot next to questions that she wanted the kids to ‘rethink.” 

So… cheating clearly is going on.  My cousin took the issue to the principal who said he was “mad that she hadled it this way” and said should have gone to the teachers herself.  He *did* tell them that “if you cheat this year, you’ll be fired” but nothing is set in place to monitor them in any way. 

So now my cousin is faced with the liklihood of showing DROPPING test scores from this same cohort of kids.  She was actually friends with these 2 cheating teachers beforehand and still can’t believe they do it.  But you have to imaging that the pressure of test score performance makes otherwise sane people find ways to “help” their kids that they may not even thinking of as actual cheating.    I know in the book Freakonomics, the author had identified teachers in CPS who had filled in answers for the kids at the end of the test.  Clearly it goes on.  It’s just hard to hear about a real case that involves someone I know who believes in doing things the right way.