June 25, 2009 | Posted At: 02:56 PM | Author: Alexander Russo | Category: Site News
SITE NEWS: "Often Irreverent And Proudly Impolitic"
That's very kind praise coming from Payne. And all of those who write in with their comments and insights or send me memos and slideshows from inside CPS deserve much of the credit.
You can check out Payne's book here, or read a longer excerpt from the introduction below. Thanks to contributing writer John Thompson for letting me know about the mention.
"Make No Little Plans!!": Background on School Reform in Chicago
This book tells a national story but as framed and illuminated by the experience of Chicago. Chicago is an important lens for understanding school reform in part because what happened there has had significant impact on the development of policy in other cities (e.g, the strong mayor model, ending social promotion), in part because the process of change has probably been documented more closely there than in any other major city. The Consortium on Chicago School Research is the closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project on urban schools and from its inception, it has maintained a commitment to combining quantitative and qualitative work, affording its work a complexity that cannot be achieved when the two are separated (and a complexity likely to be lost in the current fetishizing of random assignment research). Chicago's research community is "at the table" in a way that is rare. Researchers are in fairly constant conversation with educational powerbrokers and sometimes what they have to say gets attended to, sometimes now they are present even as major new initiatives are being shaped. This represents a gradual but fairly recent change; ten years ago, the situation would have been far more conflictual, with researchers getting blasted whenever they said the pet policy of the moment wasn't producing. Attempts are afoot in other cities to create Consortium-like entities (Medina 2007).
Chicago also enjoys a probably unprecedented quality of educational journalism. The standard for educational journalism over the last decade has been set by the monthly journal Catalyst :Voices of Chicago School Reform. In the last year, there have been stories or special issues on new plans for merit pay for teachers, parent organizing, how well the system supports children with incarcerated parents, new policies for school autonomy, turnaround districts around the country, high-achieving Chicago schools serving low-income populations, the miseducation of special education children and the question of equity in how technology is distributed across schools. To the everlasting chagrin of the powers-that-be, Catalyst gives school operations a transparency rare in big city systems. (Both Catalyst and the Consortium are spawning imitators in other cities.) Still, we may imagine that when Alexander Russo started his blog on Chicago schools /www.district299.com), school leaders began to look back fondly on the days when they had only Catalyst looking over their shoulder. The blog offers yet another level of scrutiny, often irreverent and proudly impolitic. Richard Wright once called Chicago the known city; in terms of education, that now has a certain aptness.
This book tells a national story but as framed and illuminated by the experience of Chicago. Chicago is an important lens for understanding school reform in part because what happened there has had significant impact on the development of policy in other cities (e.g, the strong mayor model, ending social promotion), in part because the process of change has probably been documented more closely there than in any other major city. The Consortium on Chicago School Research is the closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project on urban schools and from its inception, it has maintained a commitment to combining quantitative and qualitative work, affording its work a complexity that cannot be achieved when the two are separated (and a complexity likely to be lost in the current fetishizing of random assignment research). Chicago's research community is "at the table" in a way that is rare. Researchers are in fairly constant conversation with educational powerbrokers and sometimes what they have to say gets attended to, sometimes now they are present even as major new initiatives are being shaped. This represents a gradual but fairly recent change; ten years ago, the situation would have been far more conflictual, with researchers getting blasted whenever they said the pet policy of the moment wasn't producing. Attempts are afoot in other cities to create Consortium-like entities (Medina 2007).
Chicago also enjoys a probably unprecedented quality of educational journalism. The standard for educational journalism over the last decade has been set by the monthly journal Catalyst :Voices of Chicago School Reform. In the last year, there have been stories or special issues on new plans for merit pay for teachers, parent organizing, how well the system supports children with incarcerated parents, new policies for school autonomy, turnaround districts around the country, high-achieving Chicago schools serving low-income populations, the miseducation of special education children and the question of equity in how technology is distributed across schools. To the everlasting chagrin of the powers-that-be, Catalyst gives school operations a transparency rare in big city systems. (Both Catalyst and the Consortium are spawning imitators in other cities.) Still, we may imagine that when Alexander Russo started his blog on Chicago schools /www.district299.com), school leaders began to look back fondly on the days when they had only Catalyst looking over their shoulder. The blog offers yet another level of scrutiny, often irreverent and proudly impolitic. Richard Wright once called Chicago the known city; in terms of education, that now has a certain aptness.
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