Chicago’ 435,000 public school students will return to school Tuesday to find that it’s a new day–one with much more math and reading.
High school students will be taking double periods of English and math.
Children in the lower grades will be spending two hours a day reading.
These changes are the opening salvos of the second phase of Chicago’s nationally watched experiment in school reform.
As leaders of the nation’s third-largest school system pledge to create a new “culture of literacy” in the city’s 596 schools, they acknowledge their efforts to satisfy Mayor Richard Daley’s demands for new ideas are only beginning.
But to hear schools chief Arne Duncan and Board of Education President Michael Scott tell it, this year will be different from all the others. These two administrators–from vastly different backgrounds and with contrasting personal styles–are at the center of the change.
Their education czar is an obscure principal who a year ago was sprucing up bulletin boards and getting McCosh Elementary ready for the first day of school. Barbara Eason-Watkins now finds herself directing the system’s top priority: curbing a slide in high school reading scores and elementary school math scores.
“We are making steady strides forward,” Scott said one morning after briefing members of the Chicago City Council’s Education Committee on a portion of the plans. “There’s no room for complacency.”
As this new team moves ahead, they must remember Daley’s disdain for the educational establishment: “The idea here is to be outside of the bureaucracy, that’s what we want,” Daley said recently.
“I welcome a good challenge,” said Eason-Watkins. “Arne has set the standard for all of us, and that is to provide every child with a very good education.”
More than anyone, Eason-Watkins is the architect of a plan that boosts the amount of time children read in class. And she’s the one on the hook if it doesn’t show results.
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But nearly three decades in the public schools as a teacher and principal has taught her this simple rule: Get a game plan and stick with it. She found hers several years ago during a literacy seminar and enforced it at McCosh, an impoverished South Side school where in 1991 only 16 percent of its students could read at grade level.
Her successor recounted how there once was no uniformity in reading instruction at McCosh until Eason-Watkins arrived for a staff meeting one morning carrying a small stack of papers.
“It was frustrating,” recalled Mary Rodgers, a former reading teacher and the school’s new principal. “Like most schools, we were all over the map. We didn’t know what was happening, other than things were getting bad.”
A directive from the principal soon followed. All teachers must take a “hands-on” approach in reading and focus on learning that enhances a child’s ability to memorize words, comprehend, write and then read at a pace that’s close to the way he or she speaks.
Allowing children to read without supervision was frowned upon, Rodgers related. Ten percent of the teaching staff moved on in protest. But reading and math scores doubled at McCosh during the 1990s.
Tim Shanahan, a University of Illinois at Chicago education professor, said the system’s reading goals are among the most ambitious in the nation. No school system has a more intensive reading mandate that spans such a large number of children and schools, he said.
Shanahan has become the system’s reading guru, helping shape the board’s reading plan. “I know this can work,” said Shanahan, director of the UIC Center for Literacy. “Barbara has basically given teachers a framework they can use to focus instruction on what children need to learn.”
The job at hand is formidable. Only about one in three Chicago students reads at grade level. And only two of every five elementary pupils are at grade level in math.
When scores on standardized tests dipped last spring, Daley forced the resignations of former CEO Paul Vallas and former Board President Gery Chico. Their ending of automatic promotion at grades of 3, 6 and 8 has carried reform forward, putting Chicago and Daley in the national spotlight.
The challenge for Duncan and Scott will be to find their own signature reform, one that will keep Chicago at the forefront.
One clear difference under the Duncan and Scott administration is their peacemaking with grass-roots reformers, advocacy groups for local control, and foundations that had been shunned or ostracized after Daley took over the system in 1995.
In Chicago, there have been two reform movements, often at odds. One emphasized local parental control of schools and the other emphasized centralized control under the mayor.
For now, the conflict has abated, several grass-root activists say. As one longtime local reformer, Diana Nelson of the Union League Club of Chicago put it: If the decentralization reform between 1989 and 1995 was a thesis, and the centralization under Daley was an antithesis, then Duncan and Scott represent a “synthesis”–that is, the ambassadors who promise to bridge both sides.
In fact, Duncan recently met with leaders of 16 groups to talk about “inclusion and collaboration on critical issues.”
“We’re encouraged, but we’re waiting to see concrete steps to involve more people in the decision-making process,” said Don Moore, executive director of Designs for Change, a group that Vallas often mocked as “Designs for No Change.”
About Duncan, Moore added: “His basic style seems to be collaboration rather than confrontation. … We’re looking for him to involve principals, teachers, local school councils and school reform groups at the front end so that we don’t have to be standing up at the board meeting objecting to policies that we really didn’t have a chance to make recommendations about.”
Andrew Wade, executive director of Chicago School Leadership Cooperative, an advocacy group for local school councils, or LSCs, said he hasn’t yet met Scott, but he attended a recent event at which Scott was a featured speaker.
“The first words out of his mouth was that we kicked off the [Back to School] campaign by reaching out to parents and LSC members. I appreciate the fact that the first thing he did was lead with the parents and the LSCs. We do feel it’s important for LSC members to be at the table when decisions are being made,” Wade said.
But he added, “The main thing will be, when it gets down to it six months from now, will we be able to say that we were able to get together and solve problems?”