My son went to a Chicago Public School from K to 8. I think he got a pretty good education. He had some very good teachers, and some very bad teachers. One evening when he was in about the fifth grade, we were out doing some shopping and he asked me, “Dad, how many states are there?” When I gave him the correct answer, he said, “I knew it! My teacher said there are fifty-four.” There were a number of times when his math teacher did not adequately explain a math concept (my son is a straight A student and I knew if he didn’t get it, it wasn’t taught properly) and we resorted to the internet to get an explanation, since I didn’t recall ever being taught math in that way. (A ninety-second youtube video gave us what we needed.) There was a permanent social studies display outside one classroom — in a teacher’s handwriting — that was about the “Artic” Ocean. And, once when the teachers’ union was out protesting something downtown, I saw a number of signs with misspelled words. The governor exaggerated a bit by what he wrote, but the fact remains that the CPS has problems beyond the budgetary ones.
Years back I did some service work on equipment in CPS.
A school on the NW side, a nice area.
They said the room is being used but it is ok for me to work if I do not disturb the class.
May have been ESL(?). The teacher reads, then individual students pick up, back and forth. The teacher was an older black woman, the kids loved her.
It was a pleasant experience!
Later in the main office, the assistant principal is SCREAMING wildly at this unfortunate student demanding that he only speak English!!!
That made my blood boil.
It’s nationwide. My son here in Colorado Springs was once given an extra credit assignment, one of the questions on which was how many branches of the armed forces there were. Since I was career military, he asked me and I told him three. His teacher did not give him credit for the answer because, according to her, there were five: Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines (part of the Navy) and Coast Guard (part of the Department of Transportation. The assignment, incidentally, was rife with misspellings and grammar errors. That, sadly, was not an isolated incident.
Years ago a friend’s family lived in Chicago and the kids attended CPS. One daughter was in fourth grade advanced classes. When they moved to a Houston suburb, that same daughter was moved to third grade after they did placement tests.
But is isn’t just CPS, we live in the collar counties and I could not believe the poor quality of the teachers in our city’s system. To the point that I wanted to correct the grammar of the take home papers and send it back to the teacher, but knew that the teacher would take it out on my child.