Posted on 10/25/2013 9:27:11 AM PDT by re_tail20
Chicago's public schools have performed abysmally for years on many measures. But that's how schools with overwhelmingly low-income enrollments typically do. On the Program for International Student Assessment in 2009, U.S. schools with small proportions of low-income students did as well as schools anywhere in the world—while American schools whose enrollments were more than 75 percent low-income scored like schools in developing countries.
In Chicago, low-income enrollments are the norm. Last year, an astonishing 85 percent of CPS students were from low-income families.
Why is the proportion of low-income CPS students as high as it is when the citywide proportion of low-income families with children under age 18 is a much lower 52 percent? Mainly because so many middle-class parents are unwilling to send their kids to the city's public schools. Instead, they send them to private schools, or, when their children reach school age (or high school age), they move to the suburbs.
This isn't a new development. It's a legacy of the racial segregation that has characterized Chicago and its public schools for decades. In the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, the schools here changed from predominantly white and middle-class to overwhelmingly black, Hispanic, and low-income.
The exodus has had a deleterious impact on the city's schools. Middle-class parents tend to be zealous advocates. They're more likely to know an alderman or a reporter, and make noise about a problem their children's school is facing. The clout of a school system as a whole increases when middle-class parents have a stake in it. Middle-class parents can afford to contribute financially to their kids' school.
Most important, many studies have also highlighted the importance of "peer effects" in schools. They've shown that kids benefit from classmates whose parents have stimulated them cognitively from an early age...
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagoreader.com ...
I found the first sentence of this article the most interesting - that schools composed of low income students are more or less the same around the world.
The bedlam and chaos that reigns in most in inner city classrooms makes learning impossible. The remedy is NOT to open functioning classrooms in the suburbs to the refugees of those failing school systems, unless you want those schools to fail as well.
***But that’s how schools with overwhelmingly low-income enrollments typically do.***
The Republicans (aka, the stupid party) would have a slam dunk with the school voucher issue, and for this reason alone. They’re fools for not jumping on this issue.
You want the black vote? Give them real opportunity, not handouts. Give them a fighting chance to learn and grow, not condemed to a life of gangs and violence.
Do something for people, GOP.
“Give them real opportunity, not handouts.”
eh, pie in the sky to take away the handouts without major repercussions.
These schools have entrance exams in order to attend them. Surprise! They are populated mostly by Asian and Eastern European students. Bird-Brain thinks they are not "diverse" enough--so he wants to lower the entrance exam difficulty in order to allow hundreds of ghetto rats in so they have the opportunity to disrupt classes in those schools, too. First they fouled their own local nests, now he wants them to prevent the serious kids from having a quiet haven in which to hone their minds.
This is one area in which I disagree with Republicans. School-of-choice is good in theory, but in practice, it is a disaster because they haven't factored in the cause of the failing schools, which is not the teachers or the curriculum. It is the students themselves.
And now, they're coming to create another failing school in your district!
I pray this doesn’t happen to your good schools.
The very first sentence is a lie. Its not school that performs bad, its just a building. Its the "students" that go there that perform abysmally. And it doesn't matter what building you put them it they are always going to perform abysmally.
Years ago a black robed tyrant illegally ordered the taxpayers of Missouri to spend, at his direction, untold riches on the failing Kansas City School. Opulent, extravagant school facilities were constructed and world-class programs offered. The result? Test scores went down. The palatial schools closed down due to lack of funds and the school district recently lost its accreditation.
You can't fix stupid no matter how much money you spend.
As far as escaping from gangs in failing schools, what happens when they go to successful schools with their vouchers is that they bring their gang affiliations with them. Then there are often competing gangs going to the same school where as before they were with their own gang in their old school. They intimidate the resident kids who have no experience what-so-ever with the street thug element. I had to constantly guard the naive resident kids from the bullying of the thugs who moved into their classrooms. And this was FOURTH GRADE!
Schools-of-choice and vouchers are a disaster for successful schools who take kids in from failing schools.
BBB is totally Socialist/Marxist agenda-driven. He doesn't seem to look up to see if a program or idea is practical or will work. He is too focused on effecting his agenda. He thinks it's just not right that some schools are way over-represented by Asians and Eastern Europeans and few blacks. So he's gonna "fix" that and open the doors for those last bastions of academic achievement to be overrun by "Suck my d__k!", "I gonna f__k you up!", "I gonna find you after school and jump you!" speaking ghetto rats who have already ruined their local neighborhood schools. I quite assure you that these statements and worse are frequently vocalized in NYC high school classrooms in certain nabes.
The high-achieving students will not be able to concentrate in classes disrupted by the shenanigans of the above. Who could? The teacher barely has time to teach anything, they're so busy telling the "students" to put away their cell phones, stop throwing stuff, leave each other alone, etc.
So the best and brightest will be forced to either enter private schools or leave NYC.
Detroit, here we come!
Oh, and another caveat. The accepted argument for vouchers and school-of-choice is because the parents want their kids to “flee the failing schools”. And while that may be true in one or two cases, the VAST majority of kids who take advantage of the schools-of-choice are the kids who HAVE BEEN KICKED OUT OF THEIR SCHOOL! They tend to jump from charter school to charter school or district to district because they either get kicked out or the parent wants to “start over” in a new school because their kid has such a bad reputation in their old school, or the teacher wants to hold the kid back.
That DeBlasio is going to be REAL bad news. I remember NYC in 1971. We took a 2 week choir trip to NYC and Washington DC. We visited Times Square, Chinatown, Midtown, and went to a Broadway musical (Man of LaMancha and Fiddler on the Roof). Times Square was nothing but a rundown skid row with bums laying around drinking out of paper bags, XXX rated theaters every where, boarded up storefronts, trash blowing down 7th Ave, dirt in the gutters. It was like a scene from an Ayn Rand novel. I wish the voters remembered what that city was like before Guilani.
I read to see if Mr Bogira would tell what exactly “ low income” was and also how much per student the CPS budget came to. He didn ‘t.
You are absolutely correct.
It used to be the child's responsibility to learn. That burden has been shifted to teachers who cannot overcome the household that child walks out of in the morning and returns to at night. I was pleased to see that this article understands that.
I don't know what the answer is; maybe there is no answer in the near-term.
Long term would be to shore up the family where the moms and dads accept responsibility and take an active part in their child's development. How to accomplish that is anybody’s guess I suppose.
As a teacher, I felt as though I was trying to fit square pegs into round holes. And that is because the students were rejecting the instruction, the correction, and sometimes even the basic communication.
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