This is our pandemic! We are facing a huge deficit and our kids continue to fail in school. We really need to face the truth and make hard changes. Our diverse society challenge anyone who is in the classroom. Teachers are facing kids & parents who don't speak english and can barely write coherently. Until we challenge ourselves to face the truth and require parents to held accountable, little will change. It's just our society is unwilling to hold this discussion!
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"You need competition in education," the mayor said. "When you have a monopoly, it just doesn't work."
Some 60 charters now operate in Chicago, and the long lists for admission seem to indicate their popularity with parents. But many of these schools rely heavily on idealistic young teachers expected to perform on shoestring budgets. It is a situation that can lead to burnout. Turnover at charters tends to be very high. Three charter schools in the city have recently taken steps to form unions.
In the view of union president Stewart, the Daley model of running the schools has made a scapegoat of unions. "We have some Chicago public schools that are humming along beautifully," she said. "It's unconscionable to blame the teachers' union for the problems we see in some schools."
Despite the headway Daley's first two school chiefs made, Huberman inherited serious problems; the schools are running a deficit of about $475 million, and four of the city's charter schools have been sanctioned under federal standards for poor test scores. Many students still face poverty and perhaps chaos at home—and violence sometimes spills over into the classroom. So far this year, some 35 Chicago students have been slain—none of them on campuses but some frighteningly near schools. "Imagine yourself as a student trying to focus on academics, and you just lost a classmate to gunfire," says Huberman, who hopes his ties to the police department can help him create a safer learning environment.
Huberman—who says he speaks often to Duncan, using him as a sounding board for ideas and, surely, for support—knows he has a steep hill to climb. "There's been a lot of progress with the schools, but it's certainly not a done deal," he said. "I'm going to have to make decisions that are unpopular … If we don't have good leadership, the schools will fail. And we must have clear standards of success. We need to hold schools accountability. I'm going to tell it like it is. I will execute."
Like Duncan, he said he supports some modifications in the No Child Left Behind law but strongly supports its underlying premise: requiring schools to meet testing standards or giving parents the option to switch to another school. "The execution and the details are sometimes problematic," he said, citing as an example tutoring provisions that hamstring school districts. He said the requirements under the law should be set by federal authorities, not by the states. He stressed that schools serving mostly poor children—as in Chicago—should not be given any slack. "We can't let any districts off the hook," he says, "or we're saying that some kids can't learn—and all kids can learn."
Huberman visits a school nearly every day, often making surprise inspections. After his talk to the faculty at Julian, one teacher, Kelly Williamson, approached him and whispered: "We've still got a long way to go."
© 2009
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