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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.