Andrew Broy (Eastern North Carolina ‘95) is President of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools. Ten days before the strike started, he blogged about what it would take to solve the strike threat in a post that originally appeared on Catalyst-Chicago. We have reblogged it in full with permission.
With the unfortunate news that the Chicago Teachers Union has set a strike date for September 10, we are in desperate need of creative solutions. The core problem is easily stated: The Chicago Public Schools does not have any additional revenue. In an attempt to balance the budget this year, it raised property taxes to the maximum extent allowed by law and drained all its reserves.
In this fiscal climate, teachers want a raise that the district cannot afford.
Photo Credit: MisterJayEm via Wikimedia Commons
Editor's Note: This week, our hearts and minds are with the people of Chicago, who are experiencing the city's first teachers' strike in 27 years. As Wendy wrote this summer , Pass The Chalk aspires to be a forum for "engaging in candid discussion and debate about the biggest issues surrounding education today." In that spirit, over the coming days we'll be featuring a range of perspectives on the strike and what it means for teachers, students and families in Chicago. We encourage you to join the dialogue on our Facebook page and on Twitter @PassTheChalk.
It’s Thursday morning, and Chicago’s 617 public schools should be welcoming their 350,000 students back for their second (and in some cases third) week of classes. Kids should be filing into classrooms, opening their books, and getting to work. They should be practicing sight words. They should be annotating, multiplying, and experimenting.
Photo credit: Jean-Christian Bourcart
Lindsey Rohwer (Chicago‘06) has been teaching for seven years.
Editor's Note: This week, our hearts and minds are with the people of Chicago, who are experiencing the city’s first teachers' strike in 27 years. As Wendy wrote this summer , Pass The Chalk aspires to be a forum for "engaging in candid discussion and debate about the biggest issues surrounding education today." In that spirit, over the coming days we'll be featuring a range of perspectives on the strike and what it means for teachers, students and families in Chicago. We encourage you to join the dialogue on our Facebook page and on Twitter @PassTheChalk.
NO ONE wants to strike.
No teacher wants to interrupt the school year. No one wants students to not have a safe place to go. No parent wants to scramble to find childcare. This is the last resort.
Photo courtesy: Lindsey Rohwer
I like to win. So does my alma mater—Louisiana State University (LSU)—where suffice it to say, our 90,000+ fans in Tiger Stadium expect the LSU Football Team to be Southeastern Conference champions ever year … and if we had our way, national champions every year as well. You can expect that we will absolutely demand to win when we play Alabama this November 3rd; both because we always plan to beat Alabama, and because of a recent national championship game for which we intend to be vindicated.
LSU football. Photo by JustDog (via WikiCommons).
How does LSU football win? The team recruits the best players, holds those players to the highest standards, and demands continued performance from them day in and day out. Everyone works together to build a team that can deliver against opposing teams—who are made up of the best athletes held to those same high standards from all across the country. In short, LSU football raises standards for performance daily.
During my sophomore year in high school, there was a period of three months where I genuinely wanted to be a trucker, much to the chagrin of my educator parents. It may have been typical teenage angst, and it was certainly the fact that I had been reading a lot of Jack Kerouac, but I romanticized the idea of endless open roads and distant horizons and baseball games playing on half-working pit-stop television sets.
Now I cross the country for an entirely different reason. Over the past year, I’ve visited a dozen cities to talk to teachers in and outside our organization about improving our leadership framework. And I always start these conversations with the same question: “What are your ultimate aspirations for our students?” Invariably at some point a debate ignites about whether we should really be striving to ensure every single one of our students goes to and through a four-year college.
During a recent conversation with the teachers in Champaign, Illinois, someone made a statement that I’ve heard many times before: “Not all kids want to go to college. We should embrace free will.”
It isn’t that I disagree—my Teamster-aspirations fifteen years earlier are testament to that—but I’m always disturbed by this sentiment. The night before, I had seen the graphc above on Andrew Sullivan’s blog depicting job losses in the recession, based on a new report by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
Vanessa Descalzi is manager of national communications for Teach For America.
The day my TiVo filled to capacity with Bravo shows, and typing “P” autofilled my browser to Perez Hilton, I finally admitted that my tolerance for the superficial was unusually high. Yet I’m still stopped cold when Teen Moms grace the covers of my favorite supermarket magazines. This week, one young woman is spilling all about her battle with drug abuse—at the same time she’s launching a memoir and hawking spaghetti sauce branded with her toddler’s face.
The young women of 16 and Pregnant. Photo from MTV.
With nearly 7% of girls between ages 15 and 19 becoming pregnant, the U.S. boasts the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world. The vast majority of these girls don’t have endorsement deals to fall back on—often, a simple support system is stretching it. I witnessed this firsthand while teaching just outside Washington, D.C., a city that has seen its teen pregnancy rate climb 78% in recent years. My first year I taught Ivette, a tenth grader whose baby face belied the fact that she had a baby of her own. Two years later I supported my 13-year-old student through her pregnancy scare.
Many of my friends and family members own an iPhone or a smartphone or an iPad. We all know that there are apps available to help you with everything—whether it’s starting your car or checking your bank account. For teachers, there are apps that can help with all aspects of teaching, including connecting academic content to the real world, keeping in touch with parents and families, and grading papers and assignments.
Here's a roundup of five apps that I believe will benefit educators, families, and students.
Photo by Mono (Own work) GFDL 1.2, via Wikimedia Commons
1. Dash4Teachers
(Price: $4.99, 5 stars – 13 ratings; iTunes link)
Several teachers in New Orleans, including Aliya Bhatia, created this app that focuses on parent contact and home visits. Dash4Teachers allows teachers to log student behaviors for 1 to 100-plus students, their initial contact with parents, and follow-up communication with families. Aliya emailed me about it: “This spring, I was really frustrated with my parent-contact systems and [ended] up building an iPhone app for teachers to connect more easily with students' families. I, along with teachers at the school where I intern, have been using Dash4Teachers for the past few weeks to coordinate home visits. It has been a godsend and keeps track of all the data I need to make informed calls to parents.”
2. BrainPOP
(Price: $0 - $6.99, 4.5 stars – 4,445 ratings; iTunes link)
BrainPop is an amazing animated video tool that can be used in the classroom via a projector, SmartBoard, iPad, or mobile device for on-the-go learning with an accompanying quiz. This app features a learning video for the day and a daily quiz. The full version of the app, with more than 750 videos, is $6.99. BrainPop Educators features lesson plans and other teaching tools for educators on a variety of subjects from grammar to physics. There is also BrainPop Jr for K-3 teachers. Their main site offers free materials and videos at http://www.brainpop.com/. After a free lesson on the Harlem Renaissance, my kids had enough background knowledge to fully participate on a trip to the Apollo Theater. Jahyra squealed, “I know that answer, we just had a lesson on it and that question was on the quiz!”
Chanté Chambers is a managing director of recruitment at Teach For America, responsible for ensuring that the organization meets ambitious recruitment goals at historically black colleges and universities.
I had just spent two hours with my mentee at the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum in Washington, D.C. De’Angela, soon to be a college senior, and I were exploring the history of African Americans, the inexplicable forms of injustice and inequity that we’ve historically worked to overcome, and the sense of urgency we felt around improving educational opportunities for communities of color. To have such an emotion-filled discussion in such a historical place was almost surreal—and then a friend sent me the announcement of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans.
The picture of President Obama surrounded by African American community leaders and advocates, collectively determining to change the course of education, or lack thereof, for black and brown faces in this country, left me speechless. It also led me to reflect on my dissatisfaction with our education system.
President Obama signs the executive order for the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans. Standing (from left) are Patricia Coulter, chief executive officer of the National Urban League of Philadelphia; Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill.; Rev. Al Sharpton; Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP; Ingrid Saunders-Jones, chair of the National Council of Negro Women; Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pa.; Kaya Henderson, chancellor of D.C. Public Schools; and Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza.)
Class 5-04 at P.S 62. Inocensio Casanova School in the South Bronx included students with wildly differing skill levels: there were 4th graders who struggled to read basic sight words like “the” or “went”— due to learning disabilities; there were also students who read above a 5th grade reading level. I was their general education teacher, and our classroom was an inclusion classroom, where students with special needs are educated in the same classroom as non-disabled students. The truth was, many of my students were struggling, whether due to an actual disability or years of gaps in their learning of reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. My job was to provide my students with the support they needed to succeed no matter where they were academically, socially, or mentally.
The parents and families of my special education students worked hard to make sure their kids completed their homework and did well on assignments. Those families attended scheduled and unscheduled parent/teacher conferences, and encouraged their kids to apply the skills that they were learning in school to the real world. My colleagues and I also did our part: we attended workshops, classes, and actual role plays of conversations on how to best support students with special needs—and their families.
This week, federal accountability results were released from schools all across Texas, and more schools and school districts failed to meet the standards for adequately yearly progress than met the standards. One common explanation is the implementation of a new state assessment system—the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness—which is more rigorous than the previous Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. While this is likely one part of the story, I think another important factor is what we do and do not expect of our students, and how we account for their passions.
Photo credit: Stanislav Freidin
On the cusp of another school year, I’ve been spending a lot of time with our 80 starting corps members. Before diving into the incredibly challenging, high-stakes work of teaching, they watched a TEDx talk by human-development expert Peter Benson about how young people thrive. Benson talks about the value of “spark,” an animating energy that gives life hope and purpose. I was challenged to remember my spark when I was in elementary, middle, and high school. I recall that I wanted to be an ichthyologist, to share the sea with sharks. At some point—maybe coinciding with high school biology and an AP course that seemed to take all of the fun out of the miracles of life—I lost that spark.
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