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New mayor
Next year, Chicago will get a new mayor. What should be the next mayor's top priority in order to improve education in Chicago Public Schools?
Next year, Chicago will get a new mayor. What should be the next mayor's top priority in order to improve education in Chicago Public Schools?
The next Mayor of Chicago should call for a mandatory meeting with all administrators from across the city to develop a vision for the schools. Chicago Public Schools aren't the best and should seek to become the greatest. Have the administrators from all over in a mandatory meeting about how they can make this school system a lot better. It is time that the leaders come in with the mayor. Putting them together will cause great ideas to come about during this special meeting. It doesn't matter whether your school is failing or excelling. Having all the leaders of our schools in one meeting will cause a better system alone.
Another great point the next Mayor should cover is how to bring about unity with the schools from all parts of the city. Chicago Public Schools is viewed as one when looked at nationally by other public school systems. Being the third-largest school district means our city needs better-quality schools that provide the best education.
The Mayor should promote eduction as a higher priority and have a vision to enhance the neighborhood schools to become more challenging and academically competitive. I am now a first-year student at Morehouse College and a product of neighborhood schools that didn't prepare me for the rigor here in college. Making the public school system better should be a number one priority for the next Mayor.
For educators, this is the most significant mayor's race since Harold Washington's election in 1983.. For one thing, it marks the first time in the last 15 years that Mayor Daley will relinquish his one-man rule over the schools. Since there's no chance that mayoral control will be ended in the near future, the race to replace Daley will be extremely high-stakes. It will bring educational issues back to the front burner and mean a changing of the guard at CPS. It also means that Ron Huberman is now a lame duck CEO with little chance to push his and current board initiatives down into the schools from now until February, 2011.
The race takes place at a time when Daley's policies have come under heavy criticism, including from his own business community. Renaissance 2010 has quietly disappeared from view. Members of Huberman's team are forbidden from even uttering the phrase. The CEO's secret grading system of schools, recently published in the Tribune, shows, to quote the Trib headline, "CPS schools failing by own standards." What the recent Civic Committee report called, the "dismal failure" of Chicago's overblown reform, has national repercussions now that Arne Duncan has turned Ren10 into his national reform model, replete with massive school closings, teacher firings, and testing, testing, and more testing.
Here's hoping a progressive candidate will emerge from the pack to take on machine favorites Emanuel and Dart. To make a difference, he or she will have to commit to 1) ending the arbitrary and devastating closing of neighborhood schools and replacing them with privately-run charters; 2) stopping the mass layoff of thousands of teachers and promising to use the federal edujobs funds to hire back those who have already been riffed; 3) restore the authority of the elected Local School Councils in matters of principal selection and control of school discretionary funds; 4) use TIF money to restore lost school programs and positions rather than a handout to big business; 5) end the testing madness. And that is just a start.
Oh, and by the way. Even though my phone has been ringing off the hook, Rahm and Sheriff Dart can rest easy. I am not throwing my hat in the ring.
School reform is sweeping the nation, the state, and the city with varying degrees of success. In Chicago, we definitely need more community engagement in the school improvement process. Schools do not operate in a vacuum; they are a part of a complex community system. Thus, improvements cannot be sustained without all integral parts working together. We need robust parent and community enagement in Chicago reforms. The new mayor should incorporate the parents' voice in district decision-making amd make community engagement in the school improvement process his/her top priority.
It is time to begin the managed dismantlement of the entire CPS system. Where is it written that the city needs a massive "system" to educate its children.
The entire concept should have been seen as a debacle from the beginning.
Chicago needs to devolve the entire system down to nothing more than setting the necessary standards, with the parents choosing choosing the schools.
90% of the money should follow the child, with the remaining 10% split between accrediting schools and paying independent agencies for assessment.
We talk about "too big to fail," yet ignore the reality that large city school systems are too big to succeed. Any intellectually honest person following Chicago education knows that no amount of reform or money will improve Chicago schools.
This is an entity designed to consume tax dollars, not educate children.
This is what the future should look like...
http://asoraeducation.com/
www.khanacademy.org
www.mindbites.com
Sustaining this system is akin to spending $1000/month at a boutique auto shop to repair a broken down $500 beater.
1 Mayoral candidate runs on that platform, and it gets him to the run-off against the fools who think this system can be salvaged.
There are at least a dozen issues impacting our schools that would make good sense to be top priorities for whoever is elected Mayor of Chicago. Our schools are faced with unprecedented challenges, including community violence, being overcrowded and under-resourced, the impact of the economic recession on students and their families...the list goes on and on. In my opinion, one of the best strategies to address these issues would be by investing significant resources in the Community Schools Initiative at Chicago Public Schools. This Initiative merges so many community assets (CBOs, Human Service Agencies, Universities, parent and student leaders, business leaders, etc.) into partnership with local schools and the district as a whole to develop comprehensive strategies to address many of these needs. The new mayor would go a long way to improving the school's and community's collective capacity to develop answers to the systemic problems we face by fully investing in community schools as a necessary improvement strategy.