Although American teachers unions have largely opposed the spread of charter schools around the country, at least some local branches have taken steps to organize charter schools even in the face of claims from operators that they are able to perform better and deliver better results to students without unionized staff.

One of the most significant such forays is happening in Chicago, where the city’s representatives of the American Federation of Teachers has approached the leaders of one of the largest charter school networks in the country to allow organizing activities on its campuses. Last month the AFT and the United Neighborhood Organization – which runs 13 charters in the city – agreed to an information swap, including turning over to the AFT the contact information of its 400 employees.

Furthermore, the UNO will also allow union organizers onto school campuses, all without taking a position on whether the group supports or opposes unionization.

Backers of charters, which are public schools run by independent groups, say freedom from union contracts enables innovation in areas like staffing and school calendars. Opponents say charters siphon money and students from struggling traditional public schools. Labor leaders say they want to organize charters because teachers there complain about low pay and poor working conditions, and because unionized teachers can negotiate favorable conditions for students, such as small class sizes. But others say the push has as much to do with unions’ declining membership.

Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, believes that these union approaches to charters are in some way part of a fight to stay relevant – or even just stay alive – in the new educational environment.

And he’s not wrong. Teachers unions have been dropping members year-on-year and the attrition only accelerated once more charter schools, funded by tax dollars but run independently, began opening across the country.

The charter-school drive comes as teacher unions face headwinds on numerous fronts, including layoffs and curbs to collective bargaining in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and other states. Last year, the NEA had about three million members, while the AFT had about 848,000 full dues-paying members, both declines of about 3% from 2011, according to data from the Department of Labor.

Nationally, about 12% of the approximately 5,000 charter schools in 2010 were unionized, according to the charter-school alliance. That includes charters in states that require most charter teachers be part of districts’ collective-bargaining policies. By comparison, more than half of all public-school districts in the U.S., including charters, were subject to collective bargaining in the 2007-08 school year, according to U.S. data.

The post Chicago Charter School Network Opens Door to Unions appeared first on Education News.

Although there doesn’t seem to be much room for compromise to be found in Rahm Emanuel’s statement that the time for negotiations over schools closures in Chicago are over, people protesting the closure of 53 elementary schools around the city continue to march against the move. The downtown rally earlier this week that was organized by opponents of the city’s push to streamline its operations by closing schools and merging campuses still took place — even if its impact is likely to be nil.

Rally attendees enthusiastically welcomed remarks by Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis who continued to insist that the fact that the majority of the closures were going to be in African-American neighborhood was proof that the selection process was rife with racism.

As is usual with events of this kind, getting an accurate number of rally attendees proved a challenge. While organizers said more than 6,000 people showed up either for the rally or the subsequent march, the police put the crowd at between 600 and 900 people.

Those at the protest were loud but disciplined, sticking to a script the CTU provided earlier in the day in a news release. Most of the vitriol was aimed at Emanuel, with protesters carrying signs that included “Rahm’s brain is underutilized” and “School Closings = One Term Mayor.”

David Kaplan, a ninth-grade biology teacher at Von Steuben Metropolitan Science Center on the Northwest Side, said many teachers at the rally came even though their schools, like Von Steuben, are not on the closings list.

The march also included a sit-in on LaSalle Street which runs outside City Hall, and the police broke up the sit-in by leading the protesters away. There were no clashes between those participating and police officers and no arrests related to the sit-in were reported, although 127 tickets were issued at the scene.

The issue of school closures has been a hot button topic in the city for months – and the period prior to the public announcement of the final list was marked by extreme tension between Chicago Public Schools officials and teachers unions and other closure opponents.

More than 20,000 people attended the CPS hearings on the issue and the plan to close 53 elementary schools and one high school was greeted by heated rhetoric from both sides.

The long-awaited announcement of how many schools the district wants to close fueled a fresh round of opposition from aldermen and community leaders. The CTU, which wants a moratorium on closings, has been preparing parents and community groups for civil disobedience acts like the sit-in on LaSalle.

Earlier Wednesday, in comments to reporters during an unrelated news conference, Emanuel said he’s moving forward on the closings plan and negotiations were over.

The post Chicago School Closures Will Continue, Says Emanuel appeared first on Education News.

The list of Chicago schools that will be closed in order to meet financial obligations of the cash-strapped school district has been made public. If district leaders hoped that the release would calm the tempers of those who have been opposed to the closures all along, they were greatly mistaken. Harsh words both for Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools officials flew almost as soon as the list was published.

In total, 61 schools around the city will be shuttered, mainly in the South and West sides where the majority of the population is African-American and where student numbers have been falling for over a decade. The shutdown is anticipated to affect roughly 30,000 students from kindergarten to 8th grade who will be transferred to other schools nearby.

Prodded by Emanuel, officials have been working for months to downsize the facility footprint of the district, which they say faces a $1 billion projected deficit next year. “We have resources that are spread much too thin,” said Todd Babbitz, the district’s chief transformation officer.

Savings from closing schools, though, won’t kick in immediately. Officials estimate school upgrades and enhanced security and other transition costs will add $233 million to expenses in the short term, most of it paid for through bond debt at a time when the district’s credit rating has dropped. Some of the increased costs will also be covered by staff cuts from schools that close.

The district estimates that it will realize more than half a billion dollars in savings over the next ten years. However, for many parents, these are savings expensively bought, since for their kids it would mean not only a displacement from their familiar environment but also a longer commute to school through some of the most dangerous and gang-ridden neighborhoods in the city.

For students like Jayshawn Vinson, the closure of their nearby elementary schools means that they will now be walking nearly a mile to the new school they’ve been assigned – the commute taking place mostly along the Martin Luther King Drive, where crime is a daily occurrence.

Opponents of the closures have also noted that the majority of the schools that are being shut down are in African-American neighborhoods, prompting calls from activists accusing Emanuel of racism.

As WBBM Newsradio’s Mike Krauser reports, to hear some tell it on the West Side, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is a racist liar who doesn’t care about the kids. And they’re just getting started.

“I don’t see any Caucasians being moved, bussed, or murdered in the streets as they travel along gang lines, or stand on the steps of a CPS school,” said activist Wendy Matil Pearson as opponents of the school closing plans protested outside Horatio May Elementary Community Academy in the Austin neighborhood.

The post Chicago Announces List of School Closures, Opponents Fume appeared first on Education News.

CPS initially said 330 of its schools are underenrolled, the chief criterion for closing. Members of a commission assembled to gather public input on the issue told CPS officials earlier this year that closing a large number of schools would create too much upheaval. The Tribune, citing sources, said the commission indicated a far smaller number should be closed than initially feared, possibly as few as 15.

Byrd-Bennett says that they are looking at each school to find reasons to remove it from the list, which has already shrunk to 129. The 200 schools taken off the list in the first round were under-enrolled but had other redeeming qualities. In some cases, it was because the schools got good academic ratings. Other schools were removed because the city aldermen who represent their districts had the political power to take them out of consideration, even if they met requirements otherwise.

On the Near Northwest Side, for instance, the initial list of 330 underused schools included about six in the 1st Ward. Ald. Proco “Joe” Moreno helped organize local school council members, school administrators and parents to fight any closing. He also took that fight to leaders in City Hall and within CPS’ bureaucracy. Nearly all of the schools in the ward were excluded from the list of 129.

“Level 2″ schools are not top academic performers, but they are not at the bottom. Any of the 33 schools in this tier may be taken off the list if they have shown improvements in enrollment and test scores over the last 3 years. Very low-performing schools that show significant improvement are also planned to be saved. The city is also considering population in the neighborhoods. If a school is more than a mile from other schools, keep it open will be a higher priority. Schools that could be closed will be kept open if the nearby schools are all too crowded to take in displaced students.

As the city tries to take an analytical angle, many critics believe that the budget shortfall is not as serious as officials are saying. They don’t want their neighborhood schools closed, and in some cases they are worried about special-needs students who attend these schools.

Rodney Estvan, education policy analyst with disability rights group Access Living, said that although he believes CPS is “definitely thinking about issues like special needs,” he worries about what will be done to schools with large numbers of special needs students. Thirty-nine of the 129 schools on the preliminary list take in students with disabilities from across the city, he said.

Even more controversial is that the city may continue to permit new charter schools to open, at the same time that public schools are half empty and closing. Some teachers and parents question why the city council is allowing more schools to compete and take away students, but Mayor Rahm Emanuel has supported charter schools’ ability to give poor families choices that they would not otherwise have. In recently-released ACT score results, the top ten open-enrollment schools were all charter schools, and most were serving the poorest students. It’s hard to overlook results like this when choosing what’s best for the students, not just for the neighborhoods’ sense of community.

The post Chicago Analyzes Possible School Closure List appeared first on Education News.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s annual State of the State address called for mandatory annual shooting drills in all state schools, says CBS Chicago. The idea came as part of a section that also proposed bans on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

Referring to the recent shooting at Newtown, CT, Quinn said that we must act:

“We cannot wait for another tragedy to happen before we take action,” he said during his State of the State address in Springfield.

The Chicago public school system has already been taking steps to conduct drills, but so far these drills have mostly involved staff and security, not students. Quinn’s proposal is specifically for students to be included. One Chicago area school already conducted a drill of the type that the governor is suggesting.

A little over a week ago, at Cary-Grove High School, students were locked in their classrooms as police performed a security drill, and two shots were fired in a hallway with starter pistols. Some parents said it was going to far to fire shots inside the school as part of the drill.

When Cary-Grove High announced that it planned to conduct a drill that would simulate gunfire, some parents were very concerned that they were taking realistic drills too far. The school planned to have teachers talk to students about the drill before it occurred, so that all students would be aware that gunshots were not real. In spite of parents’ concerns, the school held the drill as planned. School officials said that it went well, and most students said that it had been okay. Students who were closer to the site of the blank firing found the gunshot noise much more shocking than those at a distance who could barely hear it. The drill lasted about ten minutes. Security staff felt that it had been a good exercise and that it exposed a few weaknesses in their security arrangements, which they could now work on changing.

Interviewed about the prospect of “code red” drills like this coming to their schools, some Chicago kids said that it was a good idea, given the reality that school shootings happen. One school has been in the news very recently for shooting violence outside the campus, though, and students at King College Prep High School said that being shot in school was not among their top concerns.

But some King students said they worry more about the dangers they face outside the building than inside.

“I don’t feel safe around this neighborhood at all,” said Cathy Taylor.

It was in a nearby park in the Kenwood neighborhood, after all, that King honor student Hadiya Pendleton was shot and killed last week.

Hadiya Pendleton’s death made national headlines as she had recently traveled with her school marching band to play at President Obama’s second Inauguration. The First Lady has announced that she plans to come to Chicago for Pendleton’s funeral. Although the 15 year old was shot in a park, not at school, her death has certainly called more attention to gun violence and its child victims.

The post Illinois Gov Quinn Calls for Shooting Drills in Schools appeared first on Education News.

In Chicago last year, the teachers union went on strike to protest a new contract that would use student test scores to evaluate teachers, leading to possible school closures. The real heart of the dispute was that the Chicago Teachers’ Union opposed closing failing public schools and allowing new charter schools to open in their places. But analysis of student scores at the end of the 2011-2012 school year should give the teachers more reason to fear, because it shows the top ten open-enrollment schools are all non-union charter schools. Further, says the conservative Illinois Policy Institute’s Josh Dwyer, when teachers complain that charter schools cherry-pick the best students, they’re getting it wrong.

A record number of charter schools opened nationwide for the 2012-2013 school year. There were 400 newly-approved charter schools bringing the total to about 6,000, and nearly 5% of US students are in a charter school.

But when charter school achievement is touted, whether it’s graduation rates, test scores, or daily attendance, public schools always point out that they can’t select their students. Students with learning disabilities, uncooperative attitudes, poverty, family problems and juvenile delinquency are left in the public system. However, only some charter schools are selective. Funded by public money, many must accept students on an open-enrollment basis by lottery. They are likely to end up getting many poor, troubled or learning disabled students.

Charter high school students, like other students in CPS, come primarily from low income backgrounds (91 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch), represent mostly racial minorities (60 percent African-American and 35 percent Hispanic) and must overcome a range of challenges (9 percent are English Language Learners and 12 percent have special needs).

The Illinois Policy Institute used the ACT scores only from these open-enrollment charter schools and Chicago’s traditional public schools. Charter schools, mostly run by the Noble Network, had the top 10 average ACT scores, with the best public schools only tying for 10th place. Strikingly, these top ten schools, including the public ones, all have very high rates of low-income students. The school with the highest poverty rate, 94.8%, came in second with average ACT scores of 21.4. The one top-scoring charter school with a less severe poverty rate still counted over 75% of its students as below the poverty line. Only Chicago Academy and Kenwood High School could compete with these schools.

Tracking achievement over six years, the IPI notes that the best charter schools started out at about the same ACT score level with the best public schools. In both 2007 and 2008, the average scores of the best ten of each type of school were nearly identical, with the public schools narrowly ahead. But in 2009, the charter school block pulled ahead, and it climbed steadily until the best average ACT score was a full 2 points ahead of the best average ACT score of public schools.

The IPI points out that more charter schools could be opened to provide these benefits to more needy students.

Charter schools offer a real alternative to Chicago parents. They are places where parents can rest assured knowing that their child is receiving the education they deserve. It is unfortunate then that only 41 charter schools have been approved so far – 34 still remain open. These openings are not due to lack of demand, but to the actions of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, who work day-in and day-out to make sure no more charters open in the city.

There are sure to be many more power struggles with the Teachers’ Union before the matter is settled so easily.

The post Charters Dominate Achievement in Chicago appeared first on Education News.

A controversial decision by a suburban Chicago high school planned for today has left many parents uneasy about whether the planned “code red” drill procedure will go too far and cause emotional harm to the students. Derrick Blakely of CBS News reports that although Cary Grove High School administration sent some parents an email explaining the drill, not all parents received it, and even those who did are asking questions.

This code red drill is different because school officials plan to simulate the actual conditions of an armed attack. Parents who received the email read that the simulation was to be as realistic as possible. The email stated:

The simulation will take approximately 15-20 minutes, during which time teachers will secure their rooms, draw curtains, and keep their students from traveling throughout the building. Please note that we will be firing blanks in the hallway in an effort to provide our teachers and students some familiarity with the sound of gunfire.

Cary Grove school is not the first to try using the sound of gunshots in a drill, but when Crystal Lake South High School used blanks in a drill last year, no students were present. It was only a training session for faculty and staff.

The Cary Grove police department has been involved in planning the drill, and the police chief supports the controversial simulation. School spokesman Jeff Puma added:

It was their recommendation that we do this in order to create the knowledge necessary to keep our students safe in an active crisis situation.

The drill procedures recommended by emergency management services can be very different from what people would do in a crisis situation. Fearful that children might be in a classroom that’s planned for the next target, some parents assume that students should try to leave the school, as they do in fire drills. But in shooting drills, things are different, as Puma explained:

“I don’t believe there would be any school that would tell you to do that, and that’s coming from police and emergency management officials.”

To police and school officials, the misunderstanding points up the necessity of having realistic drills. Members of the police department and school security will go through the building as the drill progresses, making sure that all students are safely inside locked classrooms and halls are empty.

About half the parents who have contacted the school are concerned that students will find the gunfire too emotionally upsetting. Cary Grove Principal Jay Sargeant says that the school plans to discuss the drill in advance, and then help the students process the experience afterward. To worried parents, his letter explained that parents and staff will work together to keep it an overall positive experience:

I encourage you to discuss the drill with your student both before it happens and after. These drills help our students and staff to be prepared should a crisis occur, but it may cause some students to have an emotional reaction. In those cases, your voice may provide reassurances of the drill’s importance. Additionally, we have trained social workers on staff who can speak directly with your child should he or she need added support.

The school hopes that the drill will not leave students traumatized, but will instead help them be calmer in an actual emergency. As some parents agreed, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

The post Chicago School to Use Real Gunfire in Student Crisis Drills appeared first on Education News.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has announced that education funding will be cut by as much as $400 million next year. The money is instead being used to top up public worker pension funds after attempts to reign in pension costs went nowhere last year.

If Quinn sticks to this plan, that means that this will be the third year in a row that Illinois schools have had to do more with less. The cuts are not projected to be limited to education, and an across-the-board spending decrease is expected to be part of the budget proposal to be unveiled next week.

Among the handful of exceptions to this will be spending for healthcare for low-income and the poor and public safety.

“The explosive growth in the state pension payments means every other part of the budget has less money,” said Abdon Pallasch, Quinn’s budget spokesman. “The pain’s going to get worse and worse every year before we fix this pension problem.” The money pressure is intensifying at a fast clip. The standard annual pension costs are expected to rise from about $5.2 billion this year to $6.2 billion in the new budget that begins July 1, but the overall cost is even higher. The total pension drain could hit almost $7.9 billion — about one-fourth of the state’s operating budget. The higher figure includes $1.66 billion in repayments of loans taken out to cover annual pension costs in previous years.

The concern about ballooning pension payments crosses political lines, as Democrats embrace concern as much as the Republicans. Will Davis, a Democrat, said that something must be done to reign in the expense. Davis, who chairs the budget panel that oversees K-12 funding, says that to make up the shortfall in direct state aid, additional revenue sources from outside the state might be set aside for education expenses.

Davis has long taken an interest in pension reform and authored a proposal towards the closing days of the last legislative session that could have resulted in substantial savings. The proposal went nowhere because the negotiations over how the pension system might be fixed stalled.

Over the past two budgets, the state made cuts in education funding of $162 million and $209 million, Davis said. Quinn previously has asked for more in education funding than the Legislature has been willing to give in previous years. Quinn is scheduled to unveil his budget proposal in late February, but he has asked for more time. Also Tuesday, Quinn told reporters that gambling expansion is a “secondary issue to the most paramount issue we have to face, and that’s the whole pension reform.”

The post Illinois to Cut Education Funding by $400 Million Next Year appeared first on Education News.

Illinois officials have spoken out against standards set out by the federal No Child Left Behind Act after it was determined that 98% of the state’s high schools fell well short of meeting them in 2012. Despite applying for a waiver from NCLB, until Illinois’ waiver is approved, its schools continue to be bound by the law’s provisions — which means even the state’s best-performing schools are currently carrying the “failed” classification.

Only 11 of the state’s 671 high schools met the Adequate Yearly Progress benchmark as measured by the results of the Prairie State Achievement examinations. Six of the 11 are located in Chicago.

Among those high schools failing to make the federal standard are several renowned for their academic prowess: New Trier, the Lincoln-Way high schools, the Hinsdale schools and Stevenson.

Under No Child Left Behind, all public schools must have 100 percent of tested students meet state standards in reading and math by 2014. In the interim, states must set gradually increasing targets. If even one subgroup of students does not meet a target, the school does not fails to make the federal standard.

Gery Chico, the chairman of the Illinois State Board of Education, called the law “severely deficient” because it forces the state to categorize some outstanding schools as underperforming. He added that classification of the schools under NCLB gives parents the wrong idea about the quality of their local schools. It puts school heads in a difficult position by forcing them to explain why a school that has been serving their kids so well is being labeled a failure.

Only 51 percent of high school students passed their standardized tests, yet 82 percent of elementary students did, Chico said.

“The PSAE scores continue to reflect the discrepancy between elementary education and high school, where standards and tests are more rigorous,” he said.

Next year, scores are expected to drop further as new standardized tests will measure the Common Core learning standards being taught in classrooms statewide for the first time this year, he said.

The delay in the waiver approval caps a very difficult year both for Illinois public school system — and for Chicago in particular. After contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union went awry, union leadership called a strike that shut down Chicago schools for nearly two weeks. School closures served to frustrate parents and forced teachers to rush to catch their students up once the schools opened their doors again.

Further adding to the state’s woes was a recent report that Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System could be in danger of insolvency unless the government ponies up around $3.4 billion to the fund by 2014.

Dick Ingram, charged with overseeing the Illinois’ TRS, says that the shortfall is the result of the state shirking its funding responsibility over more than three decades. He says that while the fund can continue to meet its obligations to retired teachers in the short term, its long term health continues to be in grave danger. He added that the only way that the fund’s future could be assured would be for the state to start meeting its obligations soon, and in full.

The post 98% Failure to Meet AYP Caps Tough Year for Illinois Schools appeared first on Education News.

Experts are predicting that unless a course correction is implemented immediately, Illinois’ teacher pension system could be in danger of insolvency, according to IllinoisWatchdog.org. The head of the Teachers’ Retirement System is calling on the state to add $3.4 billion to the fund for 2014 – nearly $500 million more than was requested last year – to prevent the fund’s future insolvency.

Dick Ingram, charged with overseeing the Illinois’ TRS, says that the shortfall is the result of the state shirking its funding responsibility over more than three decades. He says that while the fund can continue to meet its obligations to retired teachers in the short term, its long term health continues to be in grave danger. He added that the only way that the fund’s future could be assured would be for the state to start meeting its obligations soon, and in full.

The state’s contribution to the fund is determined by a formula set in 1995. Every year, the fund’s administrators calculate the amount the state must kick in for the next 12 months and submit the number to the government in October. The fund’s recent request for a higher amount is due to the lower-than-anticipated returns on investment of TRS capital over the past year, mainly due to a 11.71% drop in the value of international stocks held by the fund. Although the losses were offset somewhat by positive returns on local investments, including “real estate, bonds and private equity and hedge funds,” they weren’t enough to overcome losses elsewhere.

A year ago TRS reported a 23.6 percent return on its investments. TRS officials say long-term returns are what matters most, not year-to-year returns. They noted that TRS’ 20-year return on investment is 7.73 percent — a figure that is not nearly sufficient to make a dent in the debt, critics say. During the summer, TRS revised downward its expected rate of return from 8.5 percent to 8 percent, under pressure from government accountability groups that say anticipated rates of return were unrealistic and too exaggerated. Other pension systems also revised their rates.

Ted Dabrowski, vice president of Chicago-based pension think tank the Illinois Policy Center, says that while the government can’t do anything to increase the rate of return, the system that funnels tax revenues into pension funds needs to be rethought in order to alleviate the burden on Illinois taxpayers.

The formula developed in 1995 rests on the assumption that if the state keeps up its contributions, the fund will be able to meet 95% of its obligations by 2045. Recent funding shortfalls have made the estimate unreliable.

TRS says the state’s funding system is flawed because it is artificially set and is not based on actuarial calculations. It requires pension costs to be calculated on 50 years instead of the commonly accepted 30 years.  And it is designed around a 90-percent funding target instead of a 100-percent goal. In fact, TRS says, the state’s latest calculated contribution falls nearly $942 million short of what it would take to fund the pension system under standard actuarial calculations.

The post Illinois Pension Fund Faces Insolvency, Needs Funds, Reform appeared first on Education News.