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.