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.

---

* 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.

Random endorsement: mobile bike-lane light

A completely random endorsement - bought this bike light for my dad for Christmas (and then one for myself as well). It uses lasers to make a bike lane around the sides of the bike so even when you are riding on a road without lanes it provides a bit more buffer. Also, it only requires 2 AAA batteries. And that it was only $11.

Rode my bike around today feeling much safer (or at a minimum, much more visible).

Check out ->  5 LED Bicycle Rear Tail Red Bike Torch Laser Beam Lamp Light