Well, since you asked …
I’m often asked — by friends, television hosts, people I’ve just met — whether Chicago’s public schools have gotten any better after decades of reform. I know they’d like a simple yes or no, but I find...
View Article‘In decline since the ’70s’
In a wide-ranging interview earlier this summer, Pedro Noguera, a leading national voice on urban education, told Catalyst that these days “education is largely reproducing the inequities in society.”...
View ArticleTwenty-five years by the numbers
In the past two and a half decades, the number and types of schools in the Chicago Public Schools have risen dramatically even as enrollment has declined. The face of the student body and teaching...
View ArticlePublic schools losing the public?
Peter Cunningham is the executive director of Education Post, a Chicago-based non-profit communications organization. Previously he worked in the U.S. Department of Education. Does the public have...
View ArticleFrom timid to tough
As with many parent activists, Margarita Vasquez’s involvement in her children’s schooling began slowly with the basics, encouraging them to do their homework, to study and not to drop out, as she had...
View ArticleLocal School Councils: ‘Catalysts for change’
Of the all the reforms that have swept through Chicago Public Schools in the past 25 years, the creation of local school councils is one of the few that persists. Although their authority has been...
View ArticleAll in the family
Sabrina Jackson says she never really wanted to send her children anywhere but the school down the street, Perkins Bass Elementary. It’s where she attended when her family moved back to Chicago’s...
View Article‘Considerable unsung progress’
Elaine Allensworth is the Lewis-Sebring Director of the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research and a managing director of the Urban Education Institute. With budget cuts, union...
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