Chicago Teachers Strike

[artdutra04]

I grew up and went to school in a city that would be considered an urban, mid-size (population 60,000), inner-city area where 65% of the students were on free or reduced lunch and scores on standardized tests were much lower than surrounding (richer) towns.

The largest factor that I witnessed affecting the grades of students was the socioeconomic conditions of the student's home life. Students from middle class (or better) families were significantly more likely to be in honors courses, be involved in sports or extra-curricular activities, complete their homework and show up for school, and overall get better grades.

The biggest reason that I witnessed as to why the students from "the projects" did not do as well as those from nicer neighborhoods was attitude and the culture they were brought up in. Many of the students from the projects wanted to be rich and famous but did not understand the connection between their education and their desired success.

They rarely did homework, thought school "was stupid" (very common attitude), and overall didn't care about much about learning, education, or hard work. Many of their parents had similar attitudes, and never enforced rules or made them do homework growing up. These students grow up in that atmosphere, saw school as stupid, then fail classes and/or drop out, and then repeat the cycle with their kids.

It's a vicious cycle that continues unless something is done to break the loop, which is where an exceptional teacher/coach/etc can open the student's eyes to the world outside the bubble they've lived their entire life in.

Thus, I think there is plenty of room for improvement in our education system.

I believe that tenure is both a tremendous asset to good teachers but also can be a crutch for bad teachers. Tenure protects good teachers from being fired for [rightfully] failing a student when the parents of said student come in to yell at the school for failing their "smart" kit. Tenure also protects teachers from being fired for "bad test scores" if they are stuck with all remedial classes one school year.

Performance based bonuses and higher pay for more difficult classes are two things that should be more common. In order to attract the best possible talent, teaching in an inner-city school should pay more than teaching in a rich suburban town. Inner city classes are also much more difficult to teach for when most of the students do not care about school.

Also, I believe performance based bonuses would help reward individual teachers. However, this needs to be done VERY carefully, otherwise it could have unintended results. The performance based bonuses should only measure that teacher against that particular school/school district's average over the last X years. This way, teachers who are exceptional at lower-performing schools get rewarded.

But measuring the performance is difficult; putting too much emphasis on standardized test scores makes the teachers spend too much time teaching to the test instead of teaching what is useful knowledge.

At the same time, I also believe their needs to be rigorous national standards to which every state is gauged against, rather then let every state set their own goals. When you tie education funding to test scores, and when you let states develop their own tests, you WILL see states purposely relax their standards to increase their test scores to get more funding. To an outsider, it will look like their schools improved, but they really only hid the problem through stupid shenanigans.

Another topic that really needs to be addressed is the very content of what we are teaching. I personally feel that there is way too much emphasis on memorizing facts and figures instead of analyzing and thinking critically about things. I think we should teach foreign language courses from elementary school through high school. I think students should have to take more match and science courses. I think history classes should focus more on analyzing why events happened and what were their repercussions rather than memorizing names and dates. In English courses, I think there needs to be more emphasis on critical thinking skills, such as understand when they are reading facts and when they are reading opinions. There should also be more emphasis on effectively communicating, debating, and arguing topics.

Thus, as with most things in life, this is difficult to sum up in short sound bites and doesn't fit into an exact black-and-white narrative used by many politicians.



TLDR; You are lazy. Go read everything above. Nuances cannot be summarized into sound bites.

[connor.worley]

I may be biased, but I think my school (High Tech High) really does impart a quality education on the vast majority of its students. We do a lot of things differently; some people think we're strange. Here's a video about the philosophy. Sounds sort of familiar, doesn't it?

[Nemo]

Great post, Art. I think it's a nice window into the way a rational person can mentally approach a complicated mess like our education system. Anybody interested in having conversations with other humans about addressing societal problems might note a few things from that post: he doesn't focus his energies on assigning blame, he doesn't make any naive claims about the way the world works, and he clearly recognizes the multifaceted and complex nature of the situation.

[Rangel]

Coming from an inner city school where the 95 percent of the population is on free and reduced lunch I can relate to what Art is saying. My interpretation may be a little different since the majority of our school is Hispanic and probably half of our students in the school are undocumented. One of the first things that catch my eyes is the different culture. I came from a moderately wealthy middle school to a very down under high school so it was very easy for me to notice the different. The first thing I noticed is the difference in parenting. It seemed to me that the majority of my friend's parents were harder on them in the moderately wealthy middle school then my lower class high school. This is because of a lot of issues such as parents working longer hours and being more tired at the small amount of time they are home. This reason though is a lot harder to fix than any of the other reasons there may be.

As far as how to fix the other problems, its also a political thing. I'm sorry but having even 30+ students in a class is hard. A budget needs to be increased to have more classes and there needs to be a cap on how many students can be in one class. In my opinion as well teachers should be paid a lot more and be looked at as great in society because they are teaching the future engineers, doctors, scientists, and heck even politicians. A teacher needs to be looked at as one of the highest figures in society and they should be. Of course that's not to take away from volunteer mentors as they are teachers as well and should fall into the same height of admiration.

On a side note the moderation of teacher evaluations needs to be moderated as well. We had a new evaluation system last year in our school that evaluated teachers on the number of kids failing and if they taught on what is essentially a script or teaching to the test. So teachers got docked as a result of getting a higher number of kids that don't care more than the other teachers, they were criticized for teaching kids valuable skills such as critical thinking or just simply thinking. This much evaluation led to the eventually quitting of some of the best teachers we had on campus and a lot more retirements than usual. The best people to come up with evaluation methods are the teachers themselves in my opinion. That's how this year our school has a new attendance and grading policy which has been working fantastic in my opinion at least. Those were the main things I see as a student anyways.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

The Chicago school system is getting a bad rep based on the variety of neighborhoods, schools and the students and families. You are not hearing about the magnet schools needing to evaluate bad teachers. You are hearing (in an off handed way) that there is a distinct difference in test scores, quality of education and percentage of students moving to higher education. It is difficult to teach students that have so much outside influences against learning. One of the things that talking about economic differences doesn't address is the malnutrition some of these students have lived with for their whole lives. It is impossible to use the same teaching skills with these students that work well with well nourished brains and bodies. There are a number of FRC teams in Chicago schools and I talk regularly with the teachers on those teams. They have a really difficult time working against these outside pressures. But what is really never discussed is that some of those teachers choose to teach in those schools in attempt to make it better for everyone. To evaluate one of those teachers on test scores and reading level alone does nothing for the students they help through life each day.

[IKE]

Originally Posted by Ether

Can someone name 2 metropolitan areas in the US where the secondary education system is "working"? If not, how about internationally? And what is the cost per student per annum, and what are they doing differently from Chicago?

http://www.forbes.com/2003/02/14/cx_bs_0214home.html

This article lists 4 cities above Chicago, but reading through the article these are the Top 10 of a whole lot of cities (hundreds).

This is a great report on a state basis for cost per pupil. Total revenues and what not.
http://www2.census.gov/govs/school/10f33pub.pdf
It also does a break down of costs associated with Instruction vs. Support Services vs. Other Costs.
Overall it appears to be about 60% going to Instruction, 34% Support Services and 5-6% Other.