When our City Council votes to pass a crummy budget, they force crap down our throats in the same way they tell us to eat the crap they serve in our city’s school lunchrooms. But we get used to the crappy food, the same way we get used to the crappy budget proposals.
Tag: CPS
Parents Don’t Appreciate a “Vaccination Awareness Day” That Doesn’t Really Help Get Kids Vaccinated
The canceled classes on Friday, November 12 feels like another instance where CPS and the City of Chicago have passed the buck, shifting the burden of planning and forethought from an institutional responsibility to individual parents and families.
We Don’t Give a Damn About Equity Initiatives Without Intentional Investment in Our Kids
It’s been a year since this piece was written and since CPS chief education officer (then chief equity officer) Maurice Swinney committed to developing the CPS Black student achievement task force. In that year, there’s been significant leadership transition, with Pedro Martinez stepping in as CEO, and it’s recently been announced that Patti Salzmann will replace Swinney as chief education officer.
Chicago Public Schools student reflects on the death and life changes of the pandemic and finds hope
Fast forward to the beginning of 2020, a year we all intended to be great; instead, it turned out to be the worst year we could ever imagine. On every news channel, the anchors would talk about the outbreak of Covid-19, and how rapidly it was spreading. The bold red letters “a virus,” “a disease,” or sometimes even a “killer machine” at the bottom of the TV screen clearly emphasized how bad it had gotten over time.
User Experience Problems Plague GoCPS, Too
Last Spring, CPS announced that they were making some big changes to the competitive admissions process for selective enrollment high schools, elementary schools and academic centers. Chief among those changes was the decision to no longer use the NWEA MAP test scores as a factor in the applications for those schools. In CPS schools, all students will sit for the…
Here’s what we’re reading this week: CPS graduation rates, Michele Clark HS, and policing children
These were a few standout pieces on our radar this week. Chicago narrows racial gaps in 5-year graduation rate, but disparities persist, by Mila Koumpilova in Chalkbeat Chicago. An analysis of graduation rates recently released by CPS seems to show increased graduation rates across the board, with stubborn racial disparities. We’re keeping an eye on how this data shakes out.…
I’ll Believe Y’all Are Serious About Black Lives Mattering When You Send More of Our Kids to College Instead of Prison
This post originally appeared on Hope+Outrage on June 17, 2020. I’m hearing a lot of people now all “rah-rah” for Black lives mattering. Meanwhile, I’m over here rolling my eyes at it all because to me, talk is cheap and history has receipts. Black lives didn’t matter in America when Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Jordan Foster, Rekiya Boyd, Eric Garner…
NYC May Make Dramatic Changes to Its Gifted Program—Should Chicago Do the Same?
New York City’s Bill de Blasio announced recently that the NYC Public School system will phase out the Gifted and Talented Program. Beginning next fall, no new kindergarteners will be enrolled into gifted elementary school classes, which accounts for about 16,000 students. Of those students, about 75 percent are white or Asian American (who make up about 25 percent of…