Community Renewal Society

Chicago voters overwhelmingly back Mayor Rahm Emanuel's push to extend the school day, but far more of them side with the teachers union than the mayor on overall efforts to improve education, a new Tribune/WGN-TV poll shows.

Sizable majorities of Chicago residents as a whole (86 percent) and public school parents (92 percent) agreed with if teachers are going to teach longer hours, they should be paid more for it.

Chicago Teachers Union officials are calling Marc Wigler “a spy,’’ a “stool pigeon” and a “rat’’ following his April 24 ouster for life from the union for allegedly feeding a top Chicago Public Schools labor official information about an internal union meeting. Wigler was accused of sending CPS labor relations chief Rachel Resnick a 50-bullet-point email, detailing what CTU officials told union delegates during a special meeting the evening before, CTU officials say. Wigler, who earned $85,000 last year as a resource teacher working in multiple schools, declined to comment Tuesday. (Sun-Times)

Some parochial schools in Chicago will close because of the NATO summit May 20-21. But, Chicago Public School officials plan to hold classes at schools near McCormick Place. (ABC 7 News)

The State Board of Education has given preliminary approval to a nearly $1 million contract with the consulting firm that former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas heads. According to documents posted on the board's website, the contract would call for Vallas Group to work on "coordination of interventions in low-performing school districts."

Reading In Motion released the results from a study revealing that a combination of music-based curriculum, coaching of teachers and small-group instruction can raise the number of kindergarten students who are reading at grade level to 92 percent, compared to 63 percent without these components. The study involved six Chicago Public Schools and 550 students. In the first year, teachers got 63 percent of their students to grade level in reading, using their standard methods. The same teachers were able to get 92 percent of their students to grade level the following year with the use of Reading In Motion’s program which incorporates all three components – music, teacher support and small group instruction. (Press release)

IN THE NATION
Under a new pilot program, kindergartners could help put Georgia at the forefront of a growing movement to make student surveys part of how teachers are rated. Students in every grade will participate in the program, and, depending on its results, the state may incorporate the feedback into teacher evaluations as early as next year, when it will join other measures such as student test scores. (Washington Post)

As a response to the Department of Education’s $10 million funding cut to the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, advocates held a briefing on Capitol Hill Tuesday to defend the program’s strong track record and share data showcasing the program’s positive impact on underserved students. Founded in 1986, McNair prepares low-income, first-generation and minority undergraduates for careers in academia. (Press release)

The National Center for Education Statistics is rechecking data on about 5,000 high schools after faulty information from the federal agency led to erroneous rankings for the high schools on U.S. News & World Report's "Best High Schools" list. (Education Week)

The Logan Square Neighborhood Association is establishing the Logan Square School Facilities Council to make sure no closed-door decisions are made at the Board of Education about the future of Ames Middle School.

Three elementary schools currently feed into Ames (Mozart, McAuliffe and Nixon), but starting next year Mozart will keep its 7th graders, and 8th graders the following year. LSNA says this decision was made behind closed doors, without local principals or the network chief being made aware of the decision until it was a done deal. LSNA learned later, from the CPS website, that a public meeting was held March 12 regarding the decision, but the organization can find no one who was aware of this decision. LSNA is concerned that enrollment at Ames will drop, making way for a closing or co-location. (Academically, Ames is not at risk for turnaround or closing.) LSNA has a very strong history at Ames. The school was built as a result of an LSNA school overcrowding campaign in the mid-'90s. The LSCs of Ames and surrounding schools have all voted to endorse the Logan Square School Facilities Council.

Deborah Campbell, a 7th grade science teacher at Josephine Locke Elementary School in Chicago, left Monday to work with scientists studying the ecosystem in Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary off the coast of Georgia. She plans to incorporate this experience into her lessons to better engage students in the sciences. Through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Teacher at Sea program, Campbell is  will spend11 days working on a ship, living the life of a field scientist. Campbell will be blogging about her voyage. You can read her posts here.

Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey filled in for union president Karen Lewis on FOX Chicago Sunday. A lot of the decision centered on teacher pay, a recent poll gauging teachers' willingness to strike, the union's reaction to school closures and the union's upcoming pep rally.

State education officials stepped up involvement in North Chicago public schools last month, announcing plans to replace the locally elected school board. (WBEZ)

IN THE NATION
Education Week is doing a special series on education advocacy groups and the influence these emerging interests are having over education policy and practice, particularly at the state and local levels. This week's content includes three stories, a video and an interactive game related to "The Changing Face of Education Advocacy." Read the entire series here.

"Degrees of Debt," a new series by The New York Times, examines the implications of soaring college costs and the indebtedness of students and their families.

It appears that DCPS is finally prepared to comply with the early retirement provision of the contract it signed with the Washington Teachers’ Union. The 2010 collective bargaining agreement says that teachers with good evaluations and 20 years of service who lose their jobs in the annual “excessing” process are eligible for early retirement with full benefits. (The Washington Post)

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) recently made a critical decision that many schools systems are making around the country: to move massive amounts of student data to a more cost-effective storage system of computer servers often referred to by technology experts as the “cloud.” On its surface, the decision seems rather benign. Cost savings…check. Ease of use…check.  Streamlined services…check.

But in digging deeper, there are significant security and privacy concerns that this decision raises that present real and potential dangers to the students, teachers and administrators in CPS.

Consider just two examples among many:

You are a student using the school-provided email service. Without logging off of your email account, you decide to click on a web browser to conduct research for a school report on birth control in developing countries. Without your express consent, the commercial provider of the email service collects and stores your search history and the content of your emails. Later, you are surprised - and mortified - when you receive a targeted pop-up advertisement for reproductive services.

Or consider a student who suddenly finds himself inundated with foreign-language emails and social media messages – some harmless, but some loaded with viruses that can destroy his computer – all because of a data breach on a server in a country temporarily storing that student’s supposedly secure data.

These scenarios aren’t far-fetched. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff recently warned of the threat of off-shore cloud data breaches that poorly-secured cloud hosting can make more likely. Breaches like this can happen when school districts outsource their data and related services to cloud computing companies, particularly cloud companies that focus on monetizing user data for advertising purposes.

Cloud vendors need tough vetting

There are tremendous benefits to cloud computing, not the least of which is that it promises significant savings to cash-strapped districts by allowing them to outsource their email services, data storage and collaboration technologies. Doing this cuts district costs for servers, hardware, software and technology support and permits them to invest more in key priorities like teacher salaries.

But districts moving to the cloud, like CPS, must insist on the proven security and privacy provisions that most private-sector cloud customers demand. Security risks, already visible in an Internet-connected world, are magnified in the cloud. One issue is that school employees – hired and overseen by school administrators – will no longer control school data. Cloud computing vendor employees will have access to children’s field trip photos, parent-teacher email exchanges, student and teacher dates of birth and social security numbers, and on and on. And sometimes, these employees may make use of sensitive data for their own purposes, as occurred in 2010 when a Google employee was reportedly fired for accessing a minor’s call logs, chat transcripts and contact lists.

While employee malfeasance is also a risk with school-based databases, the loss of control over those who manage school data in the cloud is a security wrinkle that schools must address. Before moving to the cloud, districts should ask cloud vendors several questions, including: Will student data be stored in countries with lower privacy requirements than the U.S.? What information is mined by advertisers? How are employees of cloud vendors with access to student data vetted and supervised? Will all information that a student flows through a third-party vendor’s platform be unavailable to advertisers? Hopefully, CPS asked these questions when choosing their cloud vendor. If they were not asked, we have to ask ourselves, why not? Our children’s privacy and data is at stake.

Privacy issues that do not arise in school-based server environments can quickly become apparent when schools resort to the cloud. In particular, cloud vendors’ mining of school data for commercial purposes can be a very unwelcome intrusion for students, parents and educators alike. Schools should demand assurances from cloud vendors that school information stored in the cloud will not be data-mined, used for targeted advertising or sold to third parties. While schools can never be sheltered entirely from commercial ads, they should not become marketing free-fire zones simply because they have opted to embrace cloud computing technology.

There are clear advantages when districts migrate to the cloud, with cost savings being a significant impetus. However, schools should not ignore new and more complicated data security and privacy issues presented by this appealing data management option. When making vendor choices, however, there is no free lunch. What is not paid for in dollars is instead paid for using the currency of our children's private information. Do we really want to trade our children's private lives for cheap email?  

Jon Bernstein is the president and founder of The Bernstein Strategy Group, a Washington, D.C.-based education technology consultancy.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a $2 million stipend for companies willing to hire City Colleges of Chicago graduates.

Lake Forest College graduated the first class from its Chicago Scholars program, which targets CPS students.
The program, begun five years ago, offers a full-ride scholarship for high-achieving CPS students. (Tribune)

The Chicago Teachers Union says 90 percent of teachers and other employees surveyed in schools last week believe the district’s contract proposals will “harm students and lower the educational quality of (their) school.” The union says teachers voted in a nonbinding “contract poll” held at Chicago schools Thursday and Friday. (WBEZ)

IN THE NATION
In the broad resegregation of the nation’s schools that has transpired over recent decades, New York’s public-school is one of the most segregated. About 650 of the nearly 1,700 schools in the system have populations that are 70 percent a single race, a New York Times analysis of schools data for the 2009-10 school year found; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic.

The founders of two Houston charter schools have prospered while putting their relatives on the payroll and doing business with their own private companies at taxpayers' expense. (Houston Chronicle)

San Francisco Unified School District teachers have voted to authorize a strike in response to a stalemate in contract negotiations with the district, union officials said Friday. (KTVU.com)

Thousands of teachers in training in California can remain in their classrooms and be regularly assigned to low-income and minority areas at least through mid-2013, because Congress approved it, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a $2 million stipend for companies willing to hire City Colleges of Chicago graduates.

Lake Forest College graduated the first class from its Chicago Scholars program, which targets CPS students.
The program, begun five years ago, offers a full-ride scholarship for high-achieving CPS students. (Tribune)

The Chicago Teachers Union says 90 percent of teachers and other employees surveyed in schools last week believe the district’s contract proposals will “harm students and lower the educational quality of (their) school.” The union says teachers voted in a nonbinding “contract poll” held at Chicago schools Thursday and Friday. (WBEZ)

IN THE NATION
In the broad resegregation of the nation’s schools that has transpired over recent decades, New York’s public-school is one of the most segregated. About 650 of the nearly 1,700 schools in the system have populations that are 70 percent a single race, a New York Times analysis of schools data for the 2009-10 school year found; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic.

The founders of two Houston charter schools have prospered while putting their relatives on the payroll and doing business with their own private companies at taxpayers' expense. (Houston Chronicle)

San Francisco Unified School District teachers have voted to authorize a strike in response to a stalemate in contract negotiations with the district, union officials said Friday. (KTVU.com)

Thousands of teachers in training in California can remain in their classrooms and be regularly assigned to low-income and minority areas at least through mid-2013, because Congress approved it, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. (San Francisco Chronicle)

In the ongoing battle between the Chicago Teachers Union and CPS over a new contract, CTU announced Friday that the first large-scale poll of its members found that more than 90 percent think the current proposal will "lower the quality of education in the city."

But CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll fired back, accusing the CTU of putting out misleading information about the details of the proposal in an attempt to fire up the base. “If I were a CTU member, I would be disappointed,” she said.

The CTU also announced that it is planning a massive rally at 4:30 p.m. on May 23 at the Auditorium Theater. Once gathered, the group plans to march to district headquarters. The Board of Education holds its monthly meeting on May 23.

CTU delegates distributed the poll to members on Thursday. CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey said the union would not reveal how many of the 25,000 members took the poll, or release specific results for each of the four questions asked. He said the purpose of the poll was to “get a temperature” of how members feel and to see how the logistics of such a poll would work.

The poll did not ask the members whether they would vote to authorize a strike, though one of the questions was whether the union should reject the board proposal. After negotiations broke down, the CTU asked to call a fact-finding panel, which is now in the process of meeting. The fact-finding panel is one of the final steps of a lengthy, legally required pre-strike process set out in Illinois law. The fact-finding panel's report is scheduled to be completed on July 16.

Sharkey admits that the poll was designed to elicit specific “yes, no” answers to questions. He said the strongest reaction came to the question of whether members think the board’s proposal would harm students and lower the quality of education in schools.

Another question asked whether members think that  CEO Jean-Claude Brizard should resign. Carroll called that question “unfortunate.”

Sharkey said the union is not releasing the poll results for the Brizard question. With the recent resignation announcement of the chief education officer, he said there’s already too much instability in the district.  

Along with taking the poll, the union used the opportunity to present its summary of the board’s proposal. Carroll said many of the characterizations were inaccurate. On Thursday, CPS posted to its website its own fact sheet.

One example is that the union said CPS is offering a “one-time 2 percent raise with lanes and steps frozen; nothing in years 2, 3, 4 and 5 unless we agree to test-based merit pay and the elimination of lanes and steps.”

CPS negotiators have not included any proposal about a test-based merit pay system, Carroll said. Instead, the proposal is to have CPS and CTU come together next year to create a mutually agreed-upon compensation plan, she said.

Brizard has talked about a “differentiated compensation system” that would look at a number of factors, including student growth measures, she said. 

Union delegates say they are having no problem convincing members that the board’s proposal is bad for them. Sue Garza, a union delegate at Addams Elementary School, said all 58 members at her school came to a meeting Thursday morning and they unanimously said CTU should reject the board’s proposal.

“We just want our job to be validated,” she said. “We feel disrespected.”

Last week Chicago Public Schools issued to all principals an elaborate memo outlining how all teachers were being required to "verify" the students they had taught in the previous year — even down to estimating how much of the "learning" these students did should be attributed to the individual teacher, Substance News reports.

To understand more on how this verification process might work, Catalyst contacted CPS. Here are our questions and their answers:
How will the weight given to students' scores in the "shared," "some" and "most" categories compare with students who were taught entirely by that teacher?
Student scores will be weighted in a teacher's growth calculation based on the length of time the student was in a class and the amount of instructional responsibility a teacher has. For example, if a student receives pull-out support half-time in reading, 50 percent of that student's growth will be attributed to the classroom teacher and 50 percent to the pull-out teacher.
How will CPS deal with students who aren't claimed by any teacher, and with other discrepancies and conflicts in what teachers self-report?
Once teachers complete the roster verification on June 4, each school will have a review and approval period where the principal and/or his/her designee will review the verification that's been completed to ensure every student is accounted for. The system we are using flags for review any student who isn't fully accounted for.
How will you prevent teachers from claiming they had no responsibility, or less responsibility, for low-performing students?
See the answer to the question above. Also, teachers will be responsible for student growth, not student absolute performance, so there isn't an incentive to exclude low-performing students.

Not surprisingly, Rahm Emanuel and CPS CEO Jean Claude Brizard have signed on to be part of the national Time to Succeed Coalition. Announced Thursday, the coalition headed by the president of the Ford Foundation and the chairman of the Center for Time and Learning aims to make more time in school the norm among student in the United States, especially those who are growing up in poverty. The coalition agenda does not specify whether the time in school should be extended by adding hours to the school day or days to the school year. It also doesn’t specify the ideal amount of time that students should be in school. Leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have signed onto the coalition. However, on a conference call AFT President Randi Weingarten made it clear that she was most interested in seeing the time in the current school day used effectively. Further, she said that teachers should be “fairly compensated” when schools decide to extend their days. Others on the conference call, including Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker agreed. Chris Gabrieli, chairman of the National Center on Time & Learning, said that extending the school day works best when teachers collaborate with the schools. The Ford Foundation also announced that it is committing $50 million to support school districts moving toward more time. (Catalyst)

Illinois’ average eighth grade science scores were stagnant and stuck below the national average, results of the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress released Thursday showed. (Sun-Times)

This being National Teacher Appreciation Week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel recalled his favorite teacher, Larry Grote, a retired New Trier West High School history teacher. To see Emanuel discuss his favorite teacher as part of the Teaching Channel’s “My Teacher, My Hero,” go to the video posted here.

The Chicago Teachers Union polled its 25,000 members Thursday on questions involving the school board as part of what one official called a "dry run" for a potential strike vote. The poll asked if members believe the district's contract proposal should be rejected and whether Chicago Public Schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard should resign. Poll results would be out Friday, the union said. (Tribune)

Yet another partner is planning to join with CPS to make the learning experience "more relevant." Citizen Schools, "a hybrid kind of program that works with schools to provide 6-8 extra AmeriCorps fellows in schools during the day —recent college graduates—and then a three-hour after school program four days a week," is coming to town, the District 99 blog reports.

IN THE NATION
Fewer than one-third of American 8th graders are proficient in science, but most students are improving, and achievement gaps are closing between students who are black or Hispanic and their white peers, a special administration of the test known as “the nation’s report card” shows. (Education Week)

American eighth graders have made modest gains in national science testing, with Hispanic and black students narrowing the gap between them and their white and Asian peers, the federal government reported Thursday. (NYT)

District of Columbia officials are moving closer to allowing charters to grant admissions preference to families in surrounding neighborhoods. (Washington Post)

Polk Bros. Foundation CEO Sandra P. Guthman and Executive Director Nikki Will Stein will retire at the end of December. The foundation then will merge the two positions into one leadership role—Chief Executive Officer of the Foundation. For two decades, Guthman and Stein have led the foundation in providing grants to nearly 800 local nonprofit organizations. Guthman will continue to serve as board chair through November 2018.

Jay Travis is now a program officer at the Woods Fund of Chicago. For more than a decade, Travis was the executive director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), one of the city’s oldest grassroots organizations.

Butch Trusty has been named senior program officer for the Joyce Foundation’s Education Program, and Jason Quiara is the foundation’s new Program Officer for Education. Both will join the staff in June. Trusty currently is a manager with The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit strategy consulting firm in New York City. He has worked with a wide range of nonprofit and philanthropic organizations focused on education reform and policy change, including two large urban school districts; the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; the Education Equality Project; and the NAACP LDF. Quaira is from Jobs For the Future, a Boston-based national nonprofit organization that helps states strengthen their education and workforce development policies. As Senior Project Manager for state policy development and advocacy, Quiara has led a multi-state initiative aimed at improving secondary and postsecondary education outcomes for low-income and minority students.

Warren Chapman, vice chancellor for external affairs at the University of Illinois Chicago, is moving over to Columbia College, where he will serve as senior vice president, overseeing the transition to a new president in two years and responsible for marketing, communications, media, planning, compliance and research. Chapman is a member of the Catalyst Editorial Advisory Board and the board of Community Renewal Society, the publisher of Catalyst.

Attallah Wilson, a senior at Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, and Stevie Bailey, a senior at Chicago International Charter School (CICS) Longwood, were winners of the 7th annual citywide business plan contest sponsored by the Future Founders Foundation. Attallah won in the products and services division for Stick and Zips, a product that helps keep opened food fresh. Stevie won in the technology division for 10 Trey Records, an online music production company for aspiring artists and producers.

Gabrielle Lyon and Paul Sereno, co-founders of Project Exploration, have been named 2012 National Afterschool for All Champions by the Afterschool Alliance for their dedication to afterschool programming.

Monique Blakes, a first grade teacher at Oscar DePriest Elementary School; Elizabeth Luna, a kindergarten teacher at Murray Language Academy; and Susan Stephan, a first and second grade teacher at Norwood Park Elementary have been named Golden Apple Excellence in Teaching Award recipients for the 2011-2012 school year. The three CPS educators are among 10 recipients of the Golden Apple Awards for Excellence in Teaching and were selected from a pool of 560 nominees from throughout the Chicago metropolitan area.

Fund for Teachers awarded 34 Chicago teachers $155,000 in grants to travel the world this summer. When the school year concludes, they will embark on learning adventures that they designed in 17 different countries. Since 2005, 317 CPS teachers have leveraged $1.2M in Fund for Teachers grants to inspire authentic learning in 218 schools across the city.

SPRINGFIELD -- The Chicago Teachers Union and other charter critics spoke out strongly in opposition to a proposal that would increase the funding that school districts must provide for charter schools, squaring off against supporters who want equal funding with traditional public schools.

The Illinois House Executive Committee voted 10-1 to approve the proposed bill, which is still far from a done deal. It still must pass the full House, make its way through the Senate committee process and win majority support in the Senate before it can be delivered to Gov. Pat Quinn for his consideration.

House Speaker Michael Madigan filed HB 4277 in January as a “shell bill,” void of content. But Madigan handed sponsorship to Rep. Daniel Burke (D-Chicago) last week and waived procedural deadlines that have killed most other bills that originated in the House and have not yet reached the Senate.

The vote came despite a furious campaign by the union and other organizations that fear the bill will divert millions of dollars away from neighborhood public schools. But already in Chicago, the district is moving toward equal funding for charter schools through its district-charter compact, which calls for equalized funding, more charter accountability and other measures. Cities that participate in the compact, an initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are eligible for a pot of $20 million in implementation funding that the Gates Foundation will dole out over the next several years.

Opponents of the bill also pointed out that, while charter schools would receive an equal share of a district’s tax dollars, the neighborhood schools would not share in the corporate and philanthropic contributions that charter school organizations often reap.

HB 4277, as amended, would require districts to provide at least 95%--up from 75%--of the district’s per capita student tuition to charter schools, multiplied by the number of students enrolled in the charter. Student tuition is the dollar amount a district would charge a non-resident student and is based on the district’s operating costs per student. CPS operating costs are $13,078 per pupil, according to the district’s 2011 state report card.

Burke argued that the bill is “an issue of fairness,” adding that his main concern is the disparity in the salaries of teachers, which are often lower in charters than in traditional schools in which teachers are CTU members. “They start out fairly equal, but by five years [on the job] you see a great difference in their salaries,” he said.

Advocates for charter schools sought to reinforce Burke’s fairness argument. Opponents pointed out that neighborhood schools already suffer from lack of funding, a situation that would worsen if the bill becomes law.

Elizabeth Purvis, CEO of Chicago International Charter Schools, claimed that charters “are part of the public school system.” CIC schools serve 9,000 students in Chicago and Rockford, she said, with 86% of them from low-income families and 95% of them minorities.

Charters must hire state-certified teachers and meet all state and federal requirements, maintain financial stability and meet any local regulations, she said. “Over 50,000 students in public charter schools [in Illinois] deserve equal treatment under the law,” Purvis said.

Meanwhile, the union charged that the bill would “force school districts to divert more funds from neighborhood public schools to charter schools. While public schools are funded almost entirely by taxes, charters receive private money from corporate privatization proponents.”

“Now is not the time” to increase charter funding “to the detriment of our neighborhood schools,” CTU Political Director Stacy Davis Gates told the committee, referring to the $700 million budget deficit that CPS says it faces in the FY 2013 budget.

Gates also cited national research showing charters have “not been particularly effective” at educating students and that they often “exclude English language learners and special education students.” A widely-publicized 2009 Stanford University study found that only 17% of the nation’s 5,000 charter schools reported academic gains “significantly better than traditional public schools,” while 37% performed worse and 46% made “no significant difference.”

Illinois Education Association lobbyist Jim Reed objected that HB 4277 would affect agreements reached in negotiations between charter schools and their school district boards. A spokesman for the Raise Your Hand organization complained that neighborhood schools in Chicago are already underfunded, citing large class sizes and the lack of music and art instruction.

HB 4277 will not achieve the parity in teachers’ salaries that Burke desires, the Raise Your Hand witness said. “We’re not against equalized funding … [but] there’s no guarantee [in the bill] that the money will go to salaries.”

Jim Broadway is founder and publisher of State School News Service.

A new report, "Community Response to School Reform in Chicago: Opportunities for Local Stakeholder Engagement," from Public Agenda collected the insights of Chicago parents, public school teachers and school reform thought leaders to track community wide response to school reform in Chicago.

Here's the first article in an ongoing Catalyst Chicago series that will follow minority teacher candidates through their student teaching experience, job hunt and first year in the classroom. This installment introduces Michael Vargas, a participant in the Grow Your Own program, an initiative that aims to build diversity in the profession by training candidates who have ties to communities of color.

Gov. Pat Quinn surprises Elizabeth Luna, a kindergarten teacher at Chicago’s Murray Language Academy, with a  Golden Apple Award for Teaching Excellence. (Sun-Times)

The Illinois House Executive Committee voted 10-1 Wednesday afternoon to approve a bill that would significantly increase the amount of funding that school districts have to provide for charter schools.

Parents and staff of several Chicago public schools met with police Wednesday night to discuss their concerns about possible disruptions during the upcoming NATO summit. Several schools near McCormick Place and in the so-called Loop Red Zone could be affected by security arrangements for the NATO summit, being held at McCormick Place on May 20-21. (CBS Chicago)

Substance News takes a look at CPS' expansion of its communication staff, using information obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request. In October 2011, CPS had 12 people working in "Communications." By February, 18 people were working in "Communications." Of those 18 people, 15 have been hired since June 2011. Substance raises the point that "CPS declared it was too poor to pay contractual raises" and has made most of the hires—many paid more than $100,000—without putting them in a Board Report, which then become public record.

A school teacher convicted of computer tampering for changing the grades of Antioch High School football players has been charged with forgery for allegedly defrauding her new employer. (Tribune)

West suburban Morton High School District 201 board voted Wednesday to censure a fellow board member for a racist post on his Facebook page, despite calls from hundreds of parents in Cicero and Berwyn requesting his resignation. The school board members publicly admonished board member Michael Iniquez, who also apologized for his actions at the board meeting. (Sun-Times)

IN THE NATION
School districts have resorted to hiring debt collectors, employing constables, and swapping out standard meals for scaled-back versions to try to coerce parents to pay off school lunch debt that, in recent years, appears to have surged as the result of a faltering economy and better record-keeping. (Education Week)

A charter school organizer said he's "ready to roll" with the first charter school in St. Louis County if the Legislature allows charters to open statewide. (Tribune)

Jay Bookman, a columnist and blogger at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in a post this week, ends with this thought on the roots of the cheating scandal that rocked the Atlanta public school system:
"Here in Georgia, for example, state leaders have insisted that standardized testing be used as the educational equivalent of an industrial quality-control system. They produce a standardized model, and the tests determine how closely students conform to that model as they come off the assembly line.

Yet at the same time, we are told, the one-size-fits-all public-school industrial model must be dynamited to make way for a more experimental, let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach to education via charter schools and even vouchers. There’s a fundamental incoherence between those two messages that leads me to suspect that we really don’t know what we’re doing, and in fact are using schools as a battlefield in a deeper social struggle that we do not wish to acknowledge."

SPRINGFIELD - The Illinois House Executive Committee voted 10-1 Wednesday afternoon to approve a bill that would significantly increase the amount of funding that school districts have to provide for charter schools.

The vote came despite a furious campaign against the bill by the Chicago Teachers Union and others who fear the bill will divert millions of dollars away from neighborhood public schools.

HB 4277, as amended, raises the minimum support for charter schools from 75% to 95% of the district’s “per capita student tuition, multiplied by the number of students residing in the district who are enrolled in the charter school.”

The tuition is a dollar amount that a district would charge a non-resident student to attend a school in the district. It is based on the district’s operating costs per student.

Rep. Daniel Burke (D-Chicago), chairman of the committee, sponsored HB 4277 and the amendment that turned the bill essentially into an income producer for charter schools. Although charter school laws apply statewide, by far most charters are a part of CPS.

Burke said the bill is aimed at achieving “equal funding for our charter schools, equal funding with the public schools.” It is “an issue of fairness,” Burke argued, adding that his main concern is the disparity in the salaries of teachers. “They start out fairly equal, but by five years [on the job] you see a great difference in their sala4ries.”

In a last-minute effort to get its members and supporters to lobby legislators against Burke’s bill, the Chicago Teachers Union argued that it would “force school districts to divert more funds from neighborhood public schools to charter schools. While public schools are funded almost entirely by taxes, charters receive private money from corporate privatization proponents.”

Jim Broadway is founder and publisher of State School News Service.

Student teacher Michael Vargas steps confidently to the front of his middle-grades social studies class at Talman Elementary to start a lesson that will require his students to analyze the impact of events leading up to World War I.

Why did America initially decide to stay neutral, he asks?

“Because they didn’t want to get involved in what wasn’t their business,” one boy says.

“Because they were supplying both sides,” says another.

Staying out of the war was the plan, Vargas says. “We’re going to find out about why that didn’t work very well.” He points out parallels between the presidents then and now: Woodrow Wilson’s re-election slogan was “He kept us out of the war,” President Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to end the war in Iraq. Geography played a role, too. Americans didn’t want to get involved in a war across the Atlantic Ocean in Europe.

But America was pulled into the conflict anyway, leading eventually to the law that created the draft for the first time. “So that’s like the jury duty of war, I guess,” one boy says.

Vargas draws another parallel to current events. A draft wasn’t necessary after the attacks of September 11, 2001, because so many Americans signed up for the now-voluntary Armed Services, including three of his friends.

Outside of class, Vargas explains that his goal as a teacher is to establish a dialogue with students and encourage them to use critical thinking skills to apply, analyze and evaluate information. He also wants them to understand history from the perspectives of different ethnic groups that are sometimes overlooked in the history books.

“When we are talking about the pioneers and the West, I make it a point to have them see it from the perspective of the pioneers as well as the Native Americans who already occupied the land,” Vargas says. “It’s more about the how and the why [of history] than the what.”

At 33, the tall, former school security guard is at ease in front of students and about a decade older than the typical student teacher about to graduate from college. Vargas is also Latino, the most under-represented group among CPS teachers. As more young white teachers flood into the district, Latinos are still just under 15 percent of the teaching force. Yet Latinos are now the largest group of CPS students, at 44 percent of the student population.

At Talman last year, only seven of 19 teachers were Latino and just one was male, according to state teacher service records for the 2010-2011 school year. Enrollment at Talman, a small, high-achieving neighborhood elementary school in Gage Park on the Southwest Side, is 96 percent Latino.

Delia Rico, education director at the Latino Policy Forum, notes that statewide, just 5 percent of teachers and school administrators are Latino. The shortage, she says, is partly due to a spiral effect: Latino students often fall off-track academically in middle school, then end up dropping out of high school or college. Some students attend community college, but never transfer to 4-year schools.

Many schools of education aren’t doing enough when it comes to preparing teacher candidates to work with minority students, Rico adds.

“Where they are falling short is in addressing the understanding of culture, the value of language, the understanding of [the] life experiences that children bring with them to the classroom,” Rico says. Student teaching is a particular concern, since placements are not necessarily in communities where teacher candidates could practice these skills.

Teachers who don’t understand children’s cultural background may not recognize the importance of having books in their students’ native language, or materials that reflect that culture, Rico says.

The Latino Policy Forum plans to work with teacher preparation programs to increase awareness of the importance of cultural competency in the teaching force, and to incorporate more coursework on English language learners for all teachers.

*          *          *

Grow Your Own Teachers, the program that Vargas joined, was created in 2005 to bring more diversity to the teaching profession by supporting candidates—including parents—who live in and have ties to communities of color. In fiscal year 2012, the program received $2.5 million to fund 15 partnerships between community groups and universities to recruit and train teacher candidates. Gov. Pat Quinn recommended no increase in funding for the 2013 fiscal year.

The ability to relate to students and to draw on community resources to help them, are important components of teaching success. A strong relationship between communities and schools, which Grow Your Own aims to foster, is one of the five “essential supports” for school improvement identified by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.

Universities, which are generally responsible for assigning student teachers to schools, make sure the Grow Your Own candidates get assignments in their own neighborhoods.

In a small-scale evaluation of the program—covering six Grow Your Own graduates—principals reported that they performed as well as other beginning teachers in the classroom, with classroom management and teaching content knowledge emerging as strong points. The study, which was done by education research firm OER Associates, will be updated soon with data from the current school year.

The Grow Your Own teachers told evaluators that their background and life experiences help them to understand and respect students. They also reported that, as parents themselves, they value family involvement in schools.

Candidates typically take three to seven years to complete Grow Your Own, since the program targets adults—most from ages 30 to 50—who are working full-time and have families. Half of candidates have household incomes under $30,000. Given these challenges, nearly half the candidates drop out. Some are counseled out.

“We have recognized that for some candidates, Grow Your Own will not work out because they are juggling so many responsibilities and don’t have a lot of financial leeway,” notes Anne Hallett, director of Grow Your Own Illinois.

Since its launch in 2005, only 54 candidates have graduated. But by December, that number is expected to almost double, to about 100.

*          *          *

Vargas grew up around 53rd and Wolcott in New City, near Gage Park. At school, his teachers were mostly white and from upper-middle class backgrounds. “They never knew where I was coming from,” he says.

His teachers talked about spending summer vacations at family cabins. Vargas’ family “was eating” but had almost no extra money.

 “I have known what it is like to live in a small apartment with 10 people,” Vargas says. “My goal is to push that these are not excuses, they are tools--reasons [to] put effort in to greater understanding and using different perspectives.”

Vargas’ family later moved—his brother had been beaten up by African-American boys in the neighborhood who mistook him for white, he says—to “a cruddy house” at 54th and Lawndale. Vargas was enrolled at Peck Elementary. Again, the teachers were mostly white, with a student body that was a mix of 2nd- and 3rd-generation Latinos who did not speak Spanish, plus African-American children who were bused into the neighborhood.

When Vargas was 20, his first child was born. He had to work, but attended Daley College, a community college that is part of City Colleges of Chicago, on and off. When he found out about Grow Your Own, he re-committed himself to his goal of becoming a teacher. Eventually, he transferred to Northeastern Illinois University and enrolled full-time.

Getting his degree was no picnic. Vargas worked full-time as a school security guard, and had to hold down a second part-time job to make ends meet. Sometimes, he worked part-time at a third job in an after-school program.

The schedule was grueling. Often, Vargas would arrive home from Northeastern at midnight four or five days a week, then have to wake up at 5 a.m. to get his three kids ready for school and go to work.

“I tell my students, I didn’t do [college] when I was supposed to, so this is the price I have to pay,” he says. “If I really want it, I have to go after it.”

Vargas credits support from his wife, who is also studying to become a teacher, and from his parents and in-laws, with helping him to get through the program.

His supervising teacher at Talman, Theresa O’Rourke, notes that Vargas’ background is an asset.

“Because of his age and experience of having worked in a Chicago public school, he’s familiar with that, as opposed to just coming in from a university,” O’Rourke says. “He has a pretty good understanding of some of the social and economic needs of the student population.”

*          *          *

Vargas says he’s pleased at how much latitude O’Rourke has given him to try out his own style of teaching.

“I am basically occupying space in someone else’s room. It’s like the equivalent of sleeping on someone’s couch,” he notes. “She kind of allows me to do my own thing.”

Not everything has been easy, though. Vargas’ biggest challenge has been figuring out how to handle students who just don’t speak up in class.

“I forced them,” he says. “I told them I want to hear from someone I haven’t heard from yet. They did it in the beginning out of the need to participate. They did it later because they are starting to understand what this means.”

One way Vargas builds understanding is by helping students see the connection between the Spanish and English versions of vocabulary words. “When it derives from the same root, you’ll see the ‘Aha,’ ” he says.

Vargas’ presence has already sparked a small ripple effect. Margarita Ortiz, a parent worker in Vargas’ class, says that his example has sparked thoughts of becoming a teacher herself. (Ortiz participates in a program that provides small stipends and training for parents to work in schools.)

Ortiz rarely speaks in class, mostly assisting with paperwork and helping students who need it.

“I am scared of speaking in front of a lot of people,” she says. “[Vargas] is just starting, but he has that confidence in him. Seeing him is great motivation.”

Northside College Prep is the top ranked Illinois school on the just-released U.S. News and World Report list of the best high schools in the country. In all, four Chicago high schools held the top spots on the state list.

On the nationwide list, California schools dominated with 97 in the top 500. New York also fared well with 68 in the highest gold medal category, and Texas had 46, with two of the top three in the Dallas Independent School District.

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis appeared on WTTW's "Chicago Tonight" on Tuesday to talk about a possible teachers' strike, pensions, longer school days and school reform.

Barbara Bowman, who is stepping down as CPS chief early childhood education officer after past eight years, joined WBEZ's "Afternoon Shift" for some lessons about her life and the lessons she's learned inside and outside the classroom.

Columbia College Chicago President Warrick L. Carter announced Tuesday he will retire in 2013, one year earlier than planned. A video posted on YouTube in March that showed Carter telling a student to "shut up" during his State of the College Address drew almost 18,000 hits.

IN THE STATE
The principal of Naperville’s Washington Junior High School has been named Naperville Unit District 203’s assistant superintendent for secondary education. (Daily Herald)

Gov. Pat Quinn said Tuesday that he's found a way to plug a $73 million budget gap that would have cut off funding for child care services for low-income families across Illinois. (Tribune)

IN THE NATION
Schools should become a major focal point for preventing the spread of obesity in the United States, suggests a new report issued today by the Institute of Medicine. (Education Week)

The Los Angeles Board of Education votes to require grades of D or better in college-prep classes starting with incoming ninth-graders in the fall, raising requirements to a C for the Class of 2017. The Class of 2016, next year's ninth-graders, will be the first in the nation's second-largest school system who must take those courses needed to apply to a four-year state university. (Los Angeles Times)

California's public schools may be facing unprecedented levels of pressure as they try to teach an increasing number of children in poverty with fewer employees and a continual threat of cutbacks, a report finds. (Mercury News)

Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked consideration of a Democratic bill to prevent the doubling of some student loan interest rates, leaving the legislation in limbo less than two months before rates on subsidized federal loans are set to shoot upward. (NYT)

CPS will begin handing out kits for the Kindergarten Readiness Tool assessment sometime after the next week, says district spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler.

However, in a sign that changes could be on the way, Ziegler says that the district is “currently determining in what capacity” it will be used. “We are currently assessing how best to make it an even more valuable tool for preschool teachers,” Ziegler says. The assessment has previously come under fire from teachers who say it eats up too much classroom time and assesses children on material some believe is too advanced.

Loyola University plans to ban the sale of bottled water in its cafeterias and retail locations. Campus leaders believe Loyola is the first Illinois college or university to eliminate the sale of bottled water, though student activists throughout the country have rallied behind the issue this past school year, citing environmental concerns about the use of plastic bottles as well as awareness about ensuring fair access to drinking water globally. (Tribune)

Alexander Russo reflects on last week's NewSchools summit in San Francisco, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel gave a speech. NewSchools is a nonprofit venture philanthropy based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on transforming public education.

A 12-year-old Illinois boy earns perfect SAT math score.

D.C. mum on federal response to No Child Left Behind waiver bid.

Today is National Teacher Day, when thousands of communities take time to honor their local educators and acknowledge the crucial role teachers play in making sure every student receives a quality education. For more information, visit the NEA's website.

Child care for Illinois’ infants and toddlers is lower-quality than that provided for preschool-age children, according to a Catalyst Chicago analysis. While that’s typical around the country, it is cause for alarm because a child’s youngest years are the most critical for brain development.

The state is making a number of efforts to improve the quality of care for young children, but several of them have not caught on.

Data from state classroom quality ratings that took place in July through December 2011 shows that ratings of infant and toddler classrooms were significantly lower in program structure (such whether there is adequate time for free play, group activities accommodations for children with disabilities), interaction, activities, and language use. Catalyst Chicago obtained the ratings from the Illinois Department of Human Services through a Freedom of Information Act request. 

Debra Pacchiano, director of continuous quality improvement at the Ounce of Prevention Fund, says that the lower interaction scores may be because it can be more difficult to meet the social-emotional needs of infants than those of preschoolers, who are less demanding.

“With children at this age, it’s all about reducing stress, [and] raising the level of attachment, predictability and comfort,” Pacchiano says. “The demands, physically and emotionally, are that much higher.”

The language score disparity may be because it’s harder to follow the attention and decode the cooing of an infant.

“You want to be able to see teachers in a very warm, responsive and attuned relationship,” Pacchiano says. “It’s not about [telling the child] look at this … it’s about joining in your attention with what the infant or toddler is focusing on.”

All that may be difficult for infant-toddler teachers, many of whom have low levels of education, to manage. But research shows that high-quality interaction is key for developing a young child’s attachment to a caregiver, ensuring the child feels secure in his or her environment. And a child’s youngest years, from birth to age 3, may be even more critical than what comes later.

“Unless you are that responsive, attuned caregiver, very quickly the child learns ‘you don’t make sense to me and I don’t make sense to you.’ You can very quickly see babies and toddlers kind of shut down,” Pacchiano says.

Nationwide, it’s typical for infants to be in the lowest-quality child care environments, she says.

The Illinois Department of Human Services rates child care programs with the ITERS (Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale) or the ECERS (Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale), depending on the age of students involved, as part of its optional Quality Counts rating system.

But the rating program, which aims to improve quality by giving higher state child-care reimbursement rates to programs that meet certain quality standards, has been slow to catch on.

Just over four percent of all the state’s 16,500 licensed child care programs currently participate. (Illinois has about 5,500 child care centers and 11,000 licensed child care home providers, according to a 2011 fact sheet from the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.)

Among infant-toddler programs, 400 have received 3-star ratings, which require (among other things) a score of at least 4.25 on the 7-point rating scale. But the benchmark for a high-quality classroom is a rating of at least 5. And 93 more infant-toddler child care programs – 12 percent of those that have applied – have failed to earn even a one-star rating, which requires score of 3 (or “minimal”) on the rating scale.

In 2008-09, the state also created a special credential for child care workers who work with children up to age 3. That requires a high school diploma or GED, work experience or classroom observation, and a handful of college classes (or an equivalent amount of non-college trainings). So far, just 176 teachers have earned it.

When CPS unveiled its new teacher evaluation system, one question was still unanswered: How would the new evaluations—which by law must take student test scores into account—affect special education students and their teachers?

Now, CPS’ plans are taking shape:

• Students with disabilities who take the Illinois Alternate Assessment, an alternative test, will not be required to take the tests given to other students (the elementary NWEA test and the high school EPAS) that will be used to calculate teachers’ value-added scores. These students will continue to take the IAA and their teachers will be assigned a school-wide value-added score. The district is also assigning school-wide scores to teachers of non-tested subjects, such as art.

• Special education teachers whose students do not take the IAA will be evaluated based on regular value-added test scores. “We anticipate that the value-added model will take into account the number of students and students’ various disabilities,” spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler says. “CPS will continue to work with our value-added vendor to determine the best and most fair way to control for students’ disabilities.”

• Special education teachers will administer the new “performance tasks” the district is developing, which are supposed to offer a more holistic picture of learning than test scores. In cases where a disability may prevent a student from completing a task, the district will provide guidelines for administering a task that is at the student’s level.

• During performance tasks, as well as NWEA and EPAS testing, students with disabilities will be eligible for accommodations.

The Chicago Teachers Union, which opposes the use of value-added scores, says the plan for special education teachers is flawed.

“In many cases, NWEA or EPAS may be appropriate. However, it may be inappropriate for more than just the 1 percent of students who take the Illinois Alternate Assessment,” Quest Center Coordinator Carol Caref says.  “It remains to be seen how the adaptations work in actual school settings.”

A new report by the National Education Policy Center that focuses on charter schools' financial performance concludes that many well-known charter school networks spend more money than comparable, regular public schools.

CPS last week launched a new website designed to, it says, "provide the public with timely and factual information about the collective bargaining process as negotiations continue between CPS and its seven employee union organizations." The page contains links and info regarding the state education reform law known as SB7. There's also a downloadable timeline on the collective bargaining between CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union.

IN THE STATE
North Suburban High School District 214 passed a staff professional development and evaluation plan on Thursday that includes student performance in teacher evaluations. (Daily Herald)

IN THE NATION
A nonprofit organization created by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers will be the nation's first union-affiliated authorizer of charter schools. (AFT.org)

A Los Angeles charter elementary school with low test scores gets a reprieve. (Los Angeles Times)

The D.C. public school system will be eliminating more than 300 jobs. Teachers were notified that they have until August to find other positions in the school system. (NBC Washington)

Andrea Densham has been named executive director of the Childcare Network of Evanston. She replaces Martha Arntson who is retiring. Previously, Densham was the principal of Densham Consulting and the Vice President of Public Health and Government Affairs for Prevent Blindness America.

Whitney Young High School’s Decathlon Team finished 2nd in the 2012 U.S. Academic Decathlon National Tournament. Students from schools in 32 states competed. Last month, the team won first place in the Illinois High School Association Decathlon. Team members included Kathryn Farris, Lucy Zhuo, William Ahrenholz, Anji Bei, Imara McMillan, Audrey Rowe, Riley Kleve, Phoebus Sun Cao and Gary Mei.

In a wide-ranging discussion Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed down the NewSchools Venture Fund-Aspen Institute Summit on Education Innovation Wednesday in San Francisco. During a speech and interview, Emanuel repeatedly said he was not in favor of charter schools, or turnaround schools, or magnet schools, but whatever schools get results.

"I'm for educational excellence," Emanuel said. "Any one of those jockeys that get us there, I'm for it."

In releasing its one-year and five-year capital plans late Wednesday, CPS stressed that the district is first trying to meet critical health and safety requirements and support student learning at the same time that it faces a deficit next year of up to $700 million. CPS also unveiled a new website with links to summaries of the plans, as well as an  interactive map, with links that allow users to download a dataset that includes detail by school, ward and area network, although not by fiscal year.

In a series of three “Teaching, Learning, and Power” discussions held at Chicago Public Media's Community Bureaus throughout March 2012, the Project on Civic Reflection, through their special program called the Teachers’ Inquiry Project, partnered with WBEZ to create opportunities for teachers to explore the conditions that make learning possible. Click here to listen to the conversation.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard appeared on WTTW's "Chicago Tonight" on Thursday to talk about the district's budget deficit and contract negotiations.

Chicago Public School lunchroom workers will receive a 2 percent raise for at least two years and see a five-year freeze on converting “cooking” kitchens to “warming kitchens” under a deal announced Thursday. (Tribune)

IN THE STATE
The Illinois Senate voted Thursday to end the abuse-ridden legislative scholarship program, which for more than a century has enabled lawmakers to dole out free college tuition to the children of campaign donors and other political insiders. (Sun-Times)

Former Grayslake Elementary District 46 board member Michael Linder, whose engineering consultant contract with the school system came under scrutiny earlier this year, has resigned that position. (Daily Herald)

IN THE NATION
More than 400 Texas school districts have signed a resolution to take a stand against the current testing system in which every Texas public school is graded. (KXAN)

In recent weeks, teachers at dozens of schools have made efforts to reach out to parents about issues ranging from the longer school day and school funding to class sizes to teacher pay.

The latest efforts represent a new target for outreach, as the Chicago Teachers Union has long collaborated with the city’s grassroots parent groups. Julie Woestehoff, the director of Parents United for Responsible Education, noted that her group was founded by parents who wanted to support the last teachers’ strike, in 1987, and believed that “politicians and bureaucrats weren’t doing their job.” Woestehoff spoke at a panel held for DePaul University teacher candidates on Wednesday.

Organizing parents is part of an effort to strengthen the union’s position as it faces an ongoing battle with CPS administration over how the district is implementing the longer school day, as well as contentious negotiations over teachers’ next contract. The current contract expires on June 30 and teachers could move to a strike authorization vote as soon as this spring.

The union and the district are currently in fact-finding, one of the final steps of a lengthy, legally required pre-strike process.

But good relationships with a community organization don’t necessarily “trickle down to the school,” says CTU organizer Matthew Luskin.

As the CTU seeks to expand its school-level outreach to parents, controversy over the longer day has bred an increasing number of parent organizations. Both 19th Ward Parents and Parents For Teachers (formed specifically to advocate for teacher issues) are part of the Coalition to Organize Democracy in Education, which is pushing for an elected school board. So too are the CTU and the older Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, a longtime ally of the union.

Raise Your Hand, which took root several years ago in response to a school funding crisis, does not back CTU. But “we want to make sure that outside of whatever’s happening with these political entities, parents and teachers don’t end up having a soured relationship,” co-founder Wendy Katten says. “We want to encourage people to keep the dialogue open.”

To that end, Katten appeared on a panel at a March event for active union members. Representatives from the group are participating in three education forums organized by other groups around the city this month, two of which focus on teacher-parent collaboration. The second, on Saturday, May 5, is sponsored by Teachers for Social Justice.

Raise Your Hand is also in the early planning stages for a forum of its own on parent-teacher dialogue, which will likely be held several weeks down the line.

Luskin says the union is trying to show that its contract organizing efforts are “part of a real debate around the direction of the school system and school funding.”

“There’s a real challenge around funding, resources and attention to [neighborhood] schools,” he adds.

This winter’s uproar over school closings and turnarounds, opposed by many parents and teachers, laid the groundwork for the current outreach by giving teachers experience collaborating with parents, Luskin says.

“I think it helped build a lot of confidence among our members that people aren’t against us,” Luskin says. “Parents trust their child’s teacher… more than an appointed member of the Board of Education.”

Contract organizing committees, which Luskin says have now taken root in hundreds of schools, have been tasked with outreach. The efforts have ranged from teachers showing up to local school council meetings – CTU gave teachers a sample letter to send to LSCs about the importance of a “better school day” – to a parent night at Nettelhorst Elementary featuring a talk by union President Karen Lewis.

Teachers have also presented their views at principal-organized parent meetings about the longer school day. That’s what kicked off organizing efforts at Prieto Elementary. In late February, bilingual program coordinator Andrea Montgomery – a union delegate – offered to share the CTU perspective in one such meeting.

“When I told the parents about merit pay and the 2 percent raise and the other issues [with the longer day], they were outraged,” Montgomery says. There were about 75 parents at that meeting. It was a Monday.

The group started brainstorming ideas for action and settled on the idea of getting a bus to take parents to the school board meeting two days later. A total of 21 parents showed up.

Parents attended the March board meeting as well. “If we are going to have a longer school day, we need the funds to hire more teachers and prepare our teachers,” Prieto parent and bus aide Raiza Rodriguez told the board. The group organized a multi-school town hall meeting about the longer day in late April.

Now, members of Parents For Teachers come to meet with Prieto parents every Monday morning to strategize.

Montgomery credits a positive school climate with building parent support for teachers. “The bottom line is parents believe in their hearts this is their school,” she says.

And, she argues parents will be supportive if a strike vote is called.

“They said, ‘If you walk, we walk,’” Montgomery says. “They have been 110 percent behind us.”