Free Republic

... At schools in the city and across the United States, chronic absenteeism is affecting performance, particularly among children from poor families. Absenteeism costs money for school districts, because they receive no state payments for students who are not at school. It also contributes to cycles of failure in neighborhoods already facing high rates of crime and poverty. The connections between poverty, absenteeism and academic failure are evident, said Robert Balfanz, a research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. A 2006 study of high schools in high poverty neighborhoods with the lowest...

... Chicago’s pitifully short school day is getting even shorter. At five and a half hours, Chicago’s school day is already the shortest of any of the 50 largest districts in the nation. During the mayoral campaign, both Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel and a rival, Gery Chico, brought that up. Mr. Emanuel noted that a child in Houston gets four more years of K-12 instruction than one here. But now comes “Breakfast in the Classroom ” for 410,000 students. Most schools already offer a cold or hot breakfast before the start of classes. It’s free for the 86 percent of public...

The Chicago public schools’ [CPS] response to a recent court desegregation ruling — a plan to use students’ social and economic profiles instead of race to achieve classroom diversity — is raising fears that it will undermine the district’s slow and incremental progress on racial diversity. Chicago schools, like the city itself, are hardly a model of racial integration. But a Chicago News Cooperative analysis of school data shows the district has made modest gains in the magnet, gifted, classical and selective-enrollment schools, where, for nearly 30 years, race has been used as an admission criterion. Those advances may be...

The NYT reports that during a press phone call yesterday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan "unleashed a barrage of dismal statistics about the South Carolina schools" whose Governor, Mark Sanford "has told the Obama administration that he would not accept some $577 million in educational stimulus money for South Carolina unless he could use it to pay down state debt." During the putative barrage of dismal statistics Duncan noted that "only 15 percent of the state’s black students are proficient in math and that the state has one of the nation’s worst high school graduation rates." This is a pot kettle...

The Chicago Public Schools, whose superintendent, Arne Duncan, has been tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to be the next education secretary, failed to meet the Illinois state standards set under the No Child Left Behind Act every single year the standards have been in force. For the last five school years (2004-2008), the Chicago district (District 299) failed to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) in key areas, according to the district’s progress report on the Illinois State Board of Education Web site. Under the No Child Left Behind Act that Congress passed in 2003, each state must “develop and implement...

This morning I took a minor detour into Chicago's Uptown neighborhood while driving home from my local running club's weekly run. I took this photo outside the Joan F. Arai Middle School at 900 W. Wilson Avenue. The entire caption reads "Uplift Social Justice." The signage in front of Arai lists it as an "Uplift" school, although I couldn't find out what that meant on the Chicago Public Schools web site. So here we have our tax dollars at work honoring this "champion" of social justice, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Does the Arai school have any lessons on Guevara in it's...