January 27, 2010
CORE attended another monthly Chicago Board of Education meeting to support the school communities devastated by the announcement of their schools being closed, phased-out, consolidated, or turned-around.
CORE Candidate for Financial Secretary, Kristine Mayle, spoke out against the 15 years of educational experiments made possible by mayoral control of Chicago’s schools.
From Chicago Breaking News:
Teachers worry that [school]closings disrupt the learning environment and the connections students have with teachers, harming their education.
Kristine Mayle, a former teacher at De La Cruz Academy Middle School, which closed last year, said the board should look at the research and realize that their leadership needs to change.
“Our current reforms are not working,” said Mayle, who now teaches at Eberhart Elementary School.
CORE members Norine Gutekanst (Whittier Elementary), Jesse Sharkey (Senn High School), Earl Silbar, and Xian Barret also spoke out against the failures of Renaissance 2010 and mayoral control. Barret, a teacher at Julian High School, asked Huberman why he isn’t sticking to promises he’s personally made to him.
CTU President Marilyn Stewart brought up the fact that a number of schools that will be closed were a part of the TAP program, and was disappointed that this did not stave off their closing. The TAP program is a merit-pay system that the Board and the Union had agreed could be used in “failing” schools to keep them open. The program was ushered in as a backdoor deal without a vote by Union membership or by the House of Delegates.
Click “read more” to read Mayle’s testimony.
My name is Kristine Mayle and I’m proud to be a CPS teacher and a member of CORE.
As you know, the Consortium on Chicago School Research released a study late last year that showed that there was no evidence to prove that Renaissance 2010 and all of its experiments made possible by mayoral control-reconstitutions, re-engineerings, closures, and charters have done anything to help the students of Chicago. The Consortium’s most recent work[1] highlights what they call Five Fundamentals that do spur success in Chicago schools, and they have 15 years of data to back it up.
These five things run counter to parts of the Education Department’s school improvement agenda, the things we’ve seen in CPS: charter schools, “innovation,” replacing principals with “New Leaders,” etc. The study shows that if the five factors are all in place, schools do improve.
These factors are:
1) Strong principal leadership that focuses on instruction and is inclusive of others in the work, as opposed to our current, top down leadership that dictates to principals instead of trusting them to lead.
2) A welcoming attitude toward parents and a formation of connections to communities.
3) Development of professional capacity—treating teachers like professionals and giving them good professional development and collaboration time.
4) A safe, welcoming, stimulating, and nurturing environment for all students.
5) Strong instructional guidance and materials, not forced curricula
When all five of these supports were working in tandem, the Consortium found that schools improved. In an article from “Ed Week,”[2] Dr. Eason-Watkins was quoted as saying, “schools that adopted the model and the five fundamentals have improved.”
Dr. Watkins, as an educator, I implore you to stand up for our students and tell the members of the Board what we know is true: the current reforms aren’t working. Let’s adopt this Five Fundamentals model, which has been proven to help our students.
[1] Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago by Anthony S. Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart Luppescu, and John Q. Easton http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9780226078007
[2] “Scholars Identify 5 Keys to Urban School Success” by By Debra Viadero http://www.edweek.org/login.html?source=http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/01/27/19ccsr.h29.html&destination=http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/01/27/19ccsr.h29.html&levelId=2100
