(2012-04-08) Emanuel Chicago School Reform

Jonathan Alter's profile of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel places a lot of emphasis on his School Reform efforts.

CPS and a consortium sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute unveiled a sophisticated online tool that lets parents and administrators learn which of Chicago’s Public School-s are working. Each detailed report card goes far beyond test scores to determine whether teachers collaborate and classes are demanding and engaging; the ratings are based on answers to student and teacher questionnaires. “We’ve spent $300 million in this country on teacher-effectiveness research, and what turns out to be the best predictor?” asks Timothy Knowles, who runs the Urban Education Institute and headed up Rahm’s transition team on education. Knowles offers me a pleasantly contemptuous “Hmmm” and answers, “It’s students.” Their evaluations of teacher quality are surprisingly accurate when correlated with other measurements. Standardized Test-s, he says, “have been gamed so mercilessly by many states that they’re of limited use.” Responding to the report cards was voluntary this year. Rahm has ordered that compliance be mandatory for Chicago schools in 2012–13, which means that every school in the city will for the first time be thoroughly evaluated... His four-year goals include raising Chicago’s 57 percent High School Graduation Rate by at least 10 point.

Chicago’s City College-s (Community College) have become dysfunctional, with graduation rates a pathetic 7 percent. (Nationally, only 15 out of 35 community-college systems graduate more than 50 percent.) “We have 9.4 percent unemployment, 100,000 job openings, and I’m spending a couple hundred million dollars on Job Training,” Rahm tells me. He pauses to let the absurdity of this sink in. “So we are going to reorganize it.” Rahm fired almost all the college presidents, hired replacements after a national search, and decreed that six of the seven city-run colleges would have a special concentration. Corporations pledging to hire graduates will have a big hand in designing and implementing curricula (Curriculum). “You’re not going for four years, and you’re not going for a Nobel Prize or a research breakthrough,” he says. “This is about dealing with the nursing shortage, the lab-tech shortage. Hotels and restaurants will take over the curriculum for culinary and hospitality training.” (Vo-Tech)