"What are we going to do tomorrow"

It has been a whirlwind few days.

On Friday we celebrated 20 years of AmeriCorps with a fantastic

Picture for our Noble Pritzker alumni
on the White House lawn

event on the south lawn of the White House. President Obama and President Clinton gave remarks and a new class of 75,000 AmeriCorps members were sworn in to join the ranks of the more than 900,000 total members since 1994. Afterward there was a small reception for many of the individuals who worked on the original legislation for AmeriCorps in the early 90s - Treasury Secretary Jack Lew (who was a staffer at the time for President Clinton and helped start the program) spoke as did President Clinton to thank those in the room for their part in creating a legacy of public and community service.

It was wonderful and humbling to be a part of both events, to be in rooms with men and women to whom I am incredibly indebted, whose work has given me opportunities to serve.

But, what has stuck with me from the last few days wasn't the events at the White House, it was something said on the stairs in a lobby of a nondescript office building a short walk away.

Fellow board member Lisa Garcia-Quiroz
introduces Phyllis Segal to receive recognition
from the CNCS Board of Directors. 

On Thursday night members of the national service community gathered in the atrium of the CNCS headquarters to share stories on the eve of the 20th anniversary. There was a short program to honor Phyllis Segal for her service on the board of CNCS as well as her commitment to national service in general. Additionally, Phyllis' late husband Eli had helped shepherd the original AmeriCorps legislation through congress and became the first CEO of the agency that oversaw AmeriCorps.

As Phyllis gave remarks accepting a board resolution in her honor she related the following:

"People have been asking me what Eli would think about where we are now, if this is what he envisioned 20 years ago. Would he have been surprised at how large AmeriCorps has grown? And, I think this is exactly what he envisioned. This is exactly what he expected. I think he would have continued though and the next thing he'd say is, 'but what are we going to do tomorrow?'"

Me with fellow current and former CNCS
board members Hyepin Im, Laysha
 Ward, and Phyllis Segal

There was a lot of pomp and celebration over the last few days - all warranted given the more than 900,000 who have served in AmeriCorps, the billions of hours of work that has helped develop communities, increase economic opportunity, and improve educational outcomes.

But, if there is any message in the 20th anniversary of AmeriCorps, it has to be this: what are we going to do tomorrow?

#ICYMI: Announcement next @NationalService public board meeting

Recently released:

The next public board meeting for the Corporation for National and Community Service will be on Tuesday, March 11th at 2:30-3:30pm EST at the DC headquarters.

There will also be a live call-in conference line, I'll post those details as soon as they are available.

If you have any questions or concerns to surface at the meeting please feel free to call in during the public comment portion, or to post them here or email me.

I have been lucky to meet many members of the service community in the past few months and made commitments to be as responsive, accessible and transparent as possible.

I look forward to hearing your ideas about how we can continue to grow national service,

-Matt

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I still miss you, baby.

Whirlwind of posts this week - from charter school boundary proposals, to a debate on the equity in school funding, to tips on grading efficiency, to a discussion of local school councils and apathy and how many CPS high schools prepare students for college. Whoa.

The joys of a three day weekend enabling time to think and write.

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Chicagoans don't care about @ChiPubSchools: On #LSC elections, apathy and a challenge to do more

Headline of recent DNA Info story.

Chicagoans don't care about their local schools.

Is that the issue? Apathy? Is that why only 700 people have thus far signed up for 6,000 potential elected Local School Council seats? Or, is there something more...

Certainly more individuals will sign up as we approach the Feb 26th deadline, but a look at the results from the last election doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

McAuliffe elementary's results are pictured below, in a school with more than 650 students the leading vote getter walked away with 15. This is one of dozens of examples, click around on this map, attempt not to be depressed.

Check out other results here.

Now, maybe LSC races aren't the sexiest elected positions in the world - they don't set taxes, they don't pass laws, they don't control district budgets. But, they do hire and control principal contracts - a wildly important role for the success of a school. They do approve budgets. They can become active and help to set policy and vision for a school.

The initial conception of the LSC during the Harold Washington years in Chicago was to return schools to local control after years of a recalcitrant board entirely controlled by the elder Mayor Daley that was unresponsive to the needs to smaller communities. In the first election more than 17,000 people ran for 6,000 slots. LSCs were a resounding success.

So, why are so few people interested in running now? Is it apathy?

Dave Meslin has an eloquent take on this in his 2010 TEDx talk. The basic argument: if your design doesn't call on people to engage, they won't. My argument, right now Chicago Public Schools is not calling on Chicagoans to engage - so, they aren't.

I mean LOOK at this beauty, don't you just want to jump off your couch and get involved right now?? 

That's right folks, if you are interested in becoming involved in your local school you only need to search through 24 hard copy .pdfs, print them out, read them all, and physically walk or mail them to a designated office. At that point, someone will maybe get back to you in a few days.

Sarcasm aside, what would an actual, earnest, well-run campaign to engage communities in schools look like?

So, a challenge to graphic designers, public relations professionals, mad men - reimagine this call to action. 

And further a challenge to Chicagoans, if you care about your city, if you care about the future for children of our city at an absolute bare minimum, go vote in your LSC elections on April 7th and 8th. 

The educated citizen has an obligation to serve the public. He may be a precinct worker or President. He may give his talents at the courthouse, the State house, the White House. He may be a civil servant or a Senator, a candidate or a campaign worker, a winner or a loser. But he must be a participant and not a spectator. 

- President Kennedy, May 18th 1963

Is school funding fair? What does equitable funding look like?

That is the question that starts of this Ed Week article looking at a state-by-state report card on school funding by Rutgers.

The conclusion of the article, and the survey is "no", of course. But, I think when considering policy the more interesting question that needs to be asked is, "What would be fair?"

Certainly the cost of living differs drastically from Idaho to Chicago, and even within states there is a wide disparity in the amount of funding required to deliver an education. So, to what should the level of necessary education funding be tied to, a certain percentage of state GDP? A number related to cost of living as gleaned from the prices of consumer goods?

Should the level of equitable funding be tied to individual schools or students or districts? Would we consider it equitable if the average spending on the west side of Chicago with significant poverty rates were $20,000 per child while the average public spending per child in affluent Winnetka would be $12,000?

What does an egalitarian society seek in an imperfect situation like this? Acknowledging the fact that each child who walks through the door on their first day of school does so with very different backgrounds and preparations depending on family structure, home life, nutrition, healthcare etc. What role does school funding play within that complex dance of working toward a more equitable society?

There are certainly policy questions to be asked about how funding streams reach schools - property taxes vs. vice taxes vs. sales taxes etc. But this question of what are we aiming for in terms of levels of funding deserves attention and debate.

(site update) Added @Disqus comments to the site

Off topic - FYI if the site looked a little weird recently, I was adding a new comment system from Disqus.

A big thank you to those who have taken the time to respond to my posts and put their own thoughts out there (Cy, Jess!) - it makes the conversation much more interesting and, I think, productive.

Hopefully the new system will encourage for more interaction on the site with nested comments (you can reply to someone else's point), the ability to vote comments up and down.

Looking forward to continuing the discussion...

- Matt

Charter schools & neighborhood boundaries - are we not thinking creatively?

The market approach to schools. Maybe one of the most charged phrased in education policy and ed reform at the moment.

But, are we looking at the controversy all wrong?

Critics of a market approach to education point to the fact that parents don't actually have that much choice as to where their students attend. Also, that so far the invisible hand hasn't moved the market in support of "higher performing" schools.

Further, students from the area immediately surrounding charter schools are not guaranteed admission so critics would say that parents can't effectively/definitively choose*.

Critics see this as a charter school's ability to cream the best students from all over the city. Even though (in my very anecdotal experience) 90% of the students that attend charter schools because they are living geographically close**.

Conversely, neighborhood schools are required to take all students within an attendance boundary. And, with the exception of magnet schools, students attending from outside the attendance boundary is exceedingly rare.

So, how about an idea.

It would likely require changes in statute, and is extremely unlikely to happen. But, hear me out:

1. Amend statute to read that every public school student in the city of Chicago has guaranteed admittance at the nonselective high school closest to their home geographically. Essentially, attach guaranteed attendance boundaries to charter schools.
    
2. All schools - traditional neighborhood and charter - are required to hold a lottery if there are empty seats after the geographic preference has been filled. Essentially, for vacant seats any student from anywhere in the city could attend any neighborhood school. If there are too many interested students, a lottery is held.

Advantages:

1. For parents and students - guarantees that the school closest to home is always an option.
    
2. For parents and students - creates more options if they want to pursue them, if there are seats available in a north-side Lincoln Park neighborhood (or wherever) school a student from west Lawndale (or wherever) has the option to attend.
    
3. For utilization/avoiding school closings - if a school is doing well but enrollment is declining because of demographics in a neighborhood, students can elect to attend said school maximizing utilization and retaining.
   
4. For fans of market-based reforms - theoretically gives parents a more equitable market place of options to choose from, increases competition by adding all non-selective schools as options. 

Potential pitfalls:

1. Lack of proactive transparency on the part of district would make it difficult for parents to make decisions.
    
2. If timeline of application/lotteries is unclear or not system-wide it could create uncertainty and chaos on budgeting and planning process (this seems surmountable to me with some foresight and planning).

So, what am I missing? Why won't this work?

 

* For the uninitiated charter schools allow students from anywhere in the district to attend, if there are more students than available space in the school the school holds a lottery.

** Side note: would love to see that metric, average distance travelled to attend each school.

Pro tip #5: Cut down on grading time, use a tabata timer

There are some great books out there on improving teaching practice, pedagogy, history of education, ed policy etc. But sometimes the day to day minutiae can detract from grand plans, and what you really need are tips and systems to improve efficiency:

The problem: grading takes for. ev. er.

The pro-tip: use a Tabata timer to ensure equitable time spent on student work and improve your own work-life balance.

Steps:

1. Decide on the amount of time you are going to spend per essay (or quiz or test etc). Maybe 4-5 minutes depending on the rubric and how quickly you read.
   
2. Use a tabata timer like this one, or download an app for your phone that does the same thing.
   
3. Include the "work" time for reading/commenting on the student work, "rest" time is for actually recording the grade on a rubric, and the cycles is the number of essays you need to get through.

The screen shot below shows a class of 25 essays at 5 minutes per essay with 10 seconds to record scores on the rubric. As you can see, the time adds up quickly. But, at least now you have an idea of the overall time requirement.

Benefits: the timer keeps you on task, allows you to block schedule out the grading, equalizes the time per essay and hopefully frees up some time in your schedule for other things. 

Caveat emptor - this is a part of an occasional series, these are all small ideas, none are earth shattering, but they have been helpful to me. Have other pro tips? Feel free to share in the comments.

How many nonselective @ChiPubSchools prepare kids for college?

Catherine Deutsch from the Illinois Network of Charter Schools has a column up at Catalyst Chicago extending the debate raised by Daniel Hertz' original analysis of the Chicago Public Schools market.

Check out the full article here: Catalyst Chicago

Most interesting addition to the conversation (in my estimation) is this chart:

While certainly the ACT is not even close to a full or complete stand-in for measures of true intellectual and academic growth one thing is certain - that without a 21 cumulative ACT score even applying to most universities is a bridge too far, let alone acceptance. 

We can, and we should have a larger discussion about the true aims of a high school education, and how we should measure those aims, and the stakes of testing. We can and we should have a discussion of what it means to be college ready and what criteria universities should use for admissions decisions. We can and we should have a pedagogical discussion about the best ways to help students grow academically within their high school years.

But, at the moment a sad fact remains in Chicago: for students who enter high school behind there are only four non-selective schools in the city that consistently (on average) move them across a threshold for college application - and that is far too few.

Pro tip #4: Give students access to everything. All of it. Use @GoogleDrive

There are some great books out there on improving teaching practice, pedagogy, history of education, ed policy etc. But sometimes the day to day minutiae can detract from grand plans, and what you really need are tips and systems to improve efficiency:

The problem: Students are absent, miss work, and in general lose papers.

The pro-tip: Stop reprinting, stop removing the responsibility from the students - give them access to everything. Everything.

Steps:

1. Use GoogleDrive to sync your folders of worksheets / handouts / PowerPoints / lesson plans - whatever you use in class.
   (side note - you should be doing this anyway if you have a computer at school and home - stop lugging something home that can digitally sync via the cloud)
   
2. Go to drive.google.com and find the folder you want to share. Click anyone with link can view. Do not allow those with link to edit unless you want all of your handouts to "accidentally" disappear.
   (another side note, just put quizzes and tests in a separate folder and don't share that one with the students.)
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
    
3. Using TinyUrl.com (or another URL shortener) copy and paste that long GoogleDrive link in. Choose a much shorter name.
   
   
   
4. Put that link on the board (or email it to your students using the addresses you collected from a GoogleForm)

Voilà - now students have access to all the class materials. This is made even easier if you use something like OpenClass because students can then click on the link directly from their home screen.

Now, no excuses if a student is out for a day sick, or if they lost a paper. Responsibility is on the student to make up work.

Caveat emptor - this is a part of an occasional series, these are all small ideas, none are earth shattering, but they have been helpful to me. Have other pro tips?Feel free to share in the comments.

Favorite Quote: Tell me a story

Make me laugh. Make me cry. Tell me my place in the world. Lift me out of my skin and place me in another. Show me places I have never visited and carry me to the ends of time and space. Give my demons names and help me to confront them. Demonstrate for me possibilities I've never thought of and present me with heroes who will give me courage and hope. Ease my sorrows and increase my joy. Teach me compassion. Entertain and enchant and enlighten me.
Tell me a story.

- Dennis O'Neil

When I was an undergrad writing major one of my professors at Pitt, Peter Leo, shared the above quote with our class. To this day it remains one of my favorite quotes. While its purpose was intended for the writers who pass it each day walking in and out of the Marvel headquarters where Dennis O'Neil was a writer, I think its application is especially potent for teachers as well.

It is something I try to keep in mind on the (few) days I lecture in world history. The story of our class is the story of our species, our humanity - or at least a piece of it. I think Mr. O'Neil hit the nail on the head when he describes the purpose of that story.

* Edited 4:44pm: Added Peter Leo's name as my professor.

A third way for college athletes, pay for play and the @NCAA

The efforts of a Northwestern football player to form a union have been in the news recently, reviving the debate of whether college athletes deserve to be paid and if so how much.

Certain things are clear:

1. Universities make a lot of money off of high profile college sports (usually basketball and football but occasionally others).
    
2. In almost all states the highest paid public employee is a coach of one of these sports (see chart above, thanks Deadspin).
    
3. The college athletes that participate in those sports who do not end up going pro (the vast, vast majority) do not see a benefit proportional to the value they deliver to the university.

So, a proposition. What if instead of arguing for the current pay of players, instead the NCAA creates a retirement system. Hear me out. The basic tenets:

1. A university must commit to delegating a percentage (for hypothetical sake, let's say 10%) of revenues from athletic events into a trust.
    
2. Student athletes who graduate from the institution then have a stake in that trust upon reaching the age 55 (again, arbitrary and hypothetical).
    
3. Student athletes who leave to go pro before graduating (I'm looking at you Jonny Manziel, Jameis Winston et al) do not receive access to funds, decreasing the number of applicants to the pool and increasing the anticipated pay out for those athletes that stick it out.

Are there a lot of cracks to be filled in, of course. But, a plan like this would increase the fairness of the existing system, while incentivizing graduation and compensating players for their role in a massive money-making organization without compromising the "integrity" of the idea of amateur athletes.

Pro tip #3: Stop collecting info via email, behold GoogleForms

There are some great books out there on improving teaching practice, pedagogy, history of education, ed policy etc. But sometimes the day to day minutiae can detract from grand plans, and what you really need are tips and systems to improve efficiency:

The problem: You need to find any amount of information from a group of people larger than 5.

The pro-tip: Stop emailing. Start using GoogleForms.

It truly amazes me that some teachers/administrators will email a group of 40-50 adults for, say, t-shirt sizes or lunch preferences, or for phone numbers and then manually copy and paste it all into an Excel or Word doc. This is absolute lunacy.

As a rule of thumb, any repetitive action is ripe for a life-hack to increase efficiency.

The much (much, much) easier way to collect data is create a single GoogleForm which will tally all results.

Advantages:

1. You can send the forms via email (embedded) no links to click.
2. You can standardize the way information is submitted (t-shirt sizes from a drop down menu instead of: L, large, bigger than average etc.)
3. With students you can easily see who has submitted so far.

We have used GoogleForms for the mundane, like collecting contact info from team members and students to more creative parent surveys during registration at a community night.

GoogleForms will not only collect everything so it is easily readable and sortable, it will also crate pie charts and graphs based on responses - making it incredible easy to send out top-line data to administrators or team teachers.

Still don't understand, quick video here:

PS - there are 80 more ideas for how to use GoogleForms in the classroom here.

Caveat emptor - this is a part of an occasional series, these are all small ideas, none are earth shattering, but they have been helpful to me. Have other pro tips?Feel free to share in the comments.

Pro tip #2: Magnetic hanging wall folders are kryptonite to paper disorganization

There are some great books out there on improving teaching practice, pedagogy, history of education, ed policy etc. But sometimes the day to day minutiae can detract from grand plans, and what you really need are tips and systems to improve efficiency:

The problem: Paper management. Enough said.

The pro-tip: Magnetic hanging wall folders.


120 students X 5 school days in a week X 3 handouts per day = (conservatively) 1,800 sheets of paper each week. Not to mention students handing in assignments, missing days of school, picking up papers late. Nor, also differentiated assignments, multi-part packets, gallery walk items etc. Let's just say conservatively 1,800 sheets of paper per week are flowing through your classroom. That is a lot to keep track of.

Fundamental idea here is: make organization visible. If something is clearly labeled "Missed Work, Tuesday" it is difficult for other things to live in that wall folder. Further, it gives students access to the materials and frees you from needing to a) constantly reprint b) manage each student's papers on top of your own.

(the missed word bins in my room, I also use the folders for classroom magazines and extra credit submissions)

Note: if you teach sophomores you'll need to explain that the magnetic folders are, in fact, not load bearing. This will come up yearly.


Caveat emptor - this is a part of an occasional series, these are all small ideas, none are earth shattering, but they have been helpful to me. Have other pro tips?Feel free to share in the comments.

Serving with @CityYearChicago for Martin Luther King Day of Service 2014

Me, Mayor Emanuel, Congresswoman Schakowsky,
Alderman Joe Moore (49th)

On Monday morning I was lucky to celebrate the Martin Luther King day of service at Sullivan HS in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood with City Year.

I spoke for two or three minutes right after the Mayor on behalf of the Corporation for National and Community Service thanking volunteers for committing to serve and asking them to call on others to serve as well.

The awesome crowd at Sullivan - so many
people coming out to volunteer!

All in all it was an absolutely fantastic day, more than 700 people came out to volunteer including more than 100 students from Sullivan and dozens from Kilmer elementary school across the street. Together we painted murals throughout the entirety of the two schools. Really just a wild amount of work being done inside the school in a single day. I'd imagine the school had a very different feel as students walked in yesterday - the gym covered in freshly painted Sullivan logos, the hallways with inspirational quotes from Martin Luther King and Maya Angelou and Marianne Williamson and so many others.

Just wonderful to see so many people coming out to support their local high school and working together with the principal and the students to make it a better place.

A few pictures from the event below:

Speaking, with principals of Kilmer and Sullivan in the background

Volunteers painting quotes above the lockers in the Sullivan hallways

Me, working on a Sullivan HS logo for the gym.

Me with Alderman Joe Moore admiring the (almost finished product)

Great day overall, so much respect for what City Year was able to plan and implement, I know the Sullivan HS principal was immensely grateful, and I am hoping the kids enjoyed the school the next day.

There are a bunch more photos from the event here: CityYear Chicago Flickr

A book endorsement: American Pharaoh - Richard J Daley's Battle for Chicago

If you really want to understand Chicago, or at least better understand it - I strongly recommend reading American Pharaoh

by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor.

I mentioned the book on the blog a few weeks ago, and only just finished it now (to be fair it is 624 pages and it has been a busy few weeks). The book deals with the entirety of the first Mayor Daley's life, from his upbringing in Bridgeport, through his rise to power, his impact on the city - both positive and negative.

The book does a good job of providing multiple perspectives on the most controversial aspects of Mayor Daley's tenure at the head of Chicago politics and policy - the '68 convention, anti-war protests, integration fights in the schools, public housing, response to Martin Luther King's Chicago campaign, his influence on national presidential politics etc.

It certainly isn't a light read, nor is it a page turner in the vein of Candice Miller's (fantastic) River of Doubt, but it feels good to finish. At the end, I'm left with a more comprehensive understanding of the political and social reality that has led to the city I live in today.

Pro tip #1: Hide quiz answer keys as comments in Microsoft Word

There are some great books out there on improving teaching practice, pedagogy, history of education, ed policy etc. But sometimes the day to day minutiae can detract from grand plans, and what you really need are tips and systems to improve efficiency:

The Problem: you lose answer keys for quizzes OR spend a lot of time making quizzes only to realize you forgot to put in an answer key while you made it OR you are reusing quiz questions from year to year and you know you had that answer key somewhere....

Pro tip: as you write the quizzes in Microsoft Word insert comments on the correct answers.

Advantages:

1. Easy to hide from students, just click Review > Final (to show again click Review > Final: Show Markup)
2. Keeps track of your answer choices between school years
3. Easy to move answer choices around to create multiple versions of the quiz/test - just copy and paste, the comment will move with the answer choice.
4. Easy to pull up if a student misses a quiz and needs to make it up in office hours (all digital instead of shuffling around papers on a desk)

Caveat emptor - this is a part of an occasional series, these are all small ideas, none are earth shattering, but they have been helpful to me. Have other pro tips?Feel free to share in the comments.

How I raised more than $7000 for my students and you can too.

Let's face it. School funding in the U.S. is completely inadequate at the classroom level.

If you want your students to have an enriching, well-rounded, experience the unfortunate reality is that the school budget doesn't usually cut it. What this means in practice is teachers going above and beyond to make it happen.

Here are a few tips that might help:

1. Use DonorsChoose for classroom projects

You already know it's there. You've been meaning to get around to putting up a project... whatever that means. Here's the deal: it is easy. To put up a DonorsChoose project you need to...

1. Pick out what you want (the site added Amazon as an option a few months ago. Now virtually everything is available, they also have some more niche retailers for specific academic projects)
2. Describe what you are raising money for, provide examples of the impact.
3. Hit publish.
4. When the materials arrive have your students write thank you notes and send them in.

Advantages of DonorsChoose - built in fundraising base (people go on the site to support teachers and students already), matching grants can effectively cut your fundraising goals in half or more. It is a 501(c)3, so all donations from friends and family are tax-deductible.

Total amount raised: $5000+ over the past five years.

2. Use Fundly for open ended fundraisers, trips

Fundly is a much more open-ended than DonorsChoose as a platform so you are more flexible with how and when you use the money. This is fantastic for events/projects with open-ended or variable costs (like field trips). However, with a bit more freedom comes a bit more risk for the donor (and no tax break). Basically you can tie Fundly to any bank account, and no one is going to have oversight on how you actually spend the money once it is deposited. As a result Fundly lacks the already present donor base of DonorsChoose and rarely if ever does Fundly have matching campaigns etc.

At Pritzker we raised more than $2000 last year to fund a trip to a national championship ultimate tournament in Cincinnati, OH. We are hoping to repeat the success this year raising another $2000 to go to Ames, IA for the  same tournament.

Advantages of Fundly - allows extensive ties to social media which automate a lot of your fundraising campaign (someone donates and it will automatically tweet/share on Facebook). Also, Fundly allows sub-campaigns, so you can set an overall goal for your team/club/classroom etc. but then individual students, or parents can set up an even more personalized campaign which feeds into that overall goal.

Total amount raised: $2500+ over the past year

3. Tell a story

As Simon Sinek elegantly puts it in his viral TEDx talk - no one buys what you do, they buy why you do it. Quite frankly your family and friends don't exactly care what you are raising money for in your classroom - they do care why you are doing it. What will the project or resource accomplish?

For example: we recently raised $300 for a portable ultimate field so we can roll it out on the public park and play on a regulation space. Fantastic for drills, great for learning the game - but that isn't why people give. They gave because that plastic roll-out field represents a(n only quasi-metaphorical) level playing field.  The project enables my students to compete with the same resources as upper-income suburban and private school students from around the city with whom we compete.

4. Use your network, real first and social too - and students. Not coworkers.

Once you post a new project you have to work to find donors (obviously). The first few projects you start might warrant emails to family and friends, a few keys:

• Tell the story, the why (see above).
• Be as concise as possible. Your project description on the website will have the details.
• Include the donate link multiple times (those fundraising emails from political parties have it right!)
• Include an ask - "If you are able to support my students, even $5 would be a huge help. If you can't, maybe forward this email to a friend who can or post to Facebook/Twitter." 
• Don't email your fellow coworkers/teachers - they are all raising money for initiatives too. Plus, they will see the project when you post to social media.

5. Write the thank you.

About a week after every birthday and every Christmas my mom would require me to sit down and do the most tedious of chores. I couldn't play with the present until the "chore" was done. Thank god for that lesson. Gratitude is the most important aspect of this process, first because without your donors your students don't end up with a rich, diverse education. Second, because without gratitude it is unlikely that anyone who donates will do so again. Unfortunate as it might be, with the current state of classroom funding in the U.S. it is likely that you will need everyone that donates now to do so again in the future. Write the thank you.

What tips do you have? Anything work well for you in the past?

Market theory and Chicago Public high schools

Daniel Kay Hertz has a great post up at his website (that was tweeted by WBEZ and reproduced on Catalyst) regarding the market trends for Chicago Public Schools high schools. The major charts of the piece are reproduced at right: basically that when one looks at the district as a whole it appears at least at face value that students and families are choosing to move from schools with lower overall ACT scores to ones with higher ACT scores.

However, when Hertz breaks the data down between charter and non-charter CPS schools things get murkier. Students in general are choosing "better" non-charter schools as opposed to "worse" non-charter schools. But, within the subset selection of charter schools students and families are statistically choosing randomly.

There are a few issues with the way the analysis was done (as I understand it).

1. Including selective enrollment schools in the pool of data will skew results to make it look like there is not much self selection for students to move to the top schools in CPS. This is, of course, patently false. If a parent were able to just choose that their student go to Northside (with a 29) or Whitney Young (with a 27), they would. That is, of course, impossible though because each has an admissions rate of about 12%.
    
2. Using ACT growth over three years would be a much better measure. Comparing the overall end scores on the ACT doesn't as much measure the quality of education received at the school (for a moment ignoring the side debate of test-as-imperfect-indicator-of-learning) as it does measure where the students end up. This sounds a bit tautological, and it is, but take an example: if a student enters Roberto Clemente (neighborhood CPS HS) at a 12 and ends at an 18 - that is a fantastic amount of growth and speaks to the skills acquired during the first three years of HS. On the other hand, if a student enters ASPIRA at a 17 and improves to an 18 over three years, at least by the measure of the test, not as much has been learned.
   
   So, it would be interesting to do a similar analysis on Hertz' dataset sorting by three year cohort growth from freshman EXPLORE to junior or senior year ACT scores. If the market approach is working well, parents and students would presumably move to the neighborhood and charter schools which provide the most growth.
    
3. High school is (with few exceptions) geographically constraining. Some of the explanation for an increase in "lower performing" schools could be the fact that the nearest reasonable alternatives were also "lower performing" schools. In other words the perceived cost-benefit trade off of an hour long commute each way for marginally better (say, 1-3 points) school might seem unattractive. Which would then result in increased enrollments with less attractive schools (test score wise) but more attractive geographically.*
    
4. The ending ACT data has a long tail and isn't always at the forefront of a parent's decision making process, especially for newly started schools. With 48 new high schools in the last 10 years many parents are choosing to send their students to programs without records or results until three years later. Doing some back of the envelope math here, 48 schools multiplied by 4 classes that will enter each of those buildings before ACT scores are published/publicized would result in 192 cohorts of students/families selecting a school based on imperfect or partial data. So, while it may appear that parents/students who chose charter school X or new neighborhood school X made an irrational choice, for 192 sets of those families judging that choice requires a level of hindsight bias. 

Overall Hertz brings up some interesting analysis though, and at a minimum this is a start to a conversation, and an important one. Assuming that some of the mitigating variables could be explained away or solved in the near future (better access to information for parents etc), if the trends identified above to persist it would be a serious blow to the entire philosophy of market-based portfolio management for large urban districts.

The underlying larger takeaway should be this - not all neighborhood public high schools are awful, not all charter schools are fantastic. Far from it on both sides, those who paint either groups with such a broad brush do a disservice to the most important constituency here - the parents and students who need to make a real, difficult and impactful decision of where to spend their high school years.

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* Might be interesting to compare increases and decreases in enrollment with a variety of other factors to see if some have a higher correlation with increased enrollment, such as a the aspects of the 5-Essentials survey.

Correction: an earlier version of this post said that WBEZ had reproduced the Hertz piece, they had in fact only tweeted a link. Apologies for the confusion.