Friday AM News: Tax Relief, Budget, Play Day, Test Scores, Principal Budgets

Property-tax relief in cards? Tribune
Gov. Rod Blagojevich opened the door on Thursday to include at least some form of property-tax relief for local communities in his multibillion-dollar education plan.

Schools look for payday in play day Tribune
Tired of parents pulling their children out of school for a ski trip or a visit to Disneyland, the local school system is billing them for the missed class time at $36.13 a day.

Test Scores Cause Jubilation at School WBEZ
Next week, elementary school students start taking the 2007 Illinois Standards Achievement Test. But Chicago Public Schools is still celebrating the last round of testing. The district announced earlier this week that it achieved record results.

New Principals Wrestle with Budget WBEZ
Next year, two-thirds of all public school principals in Chicago will have just four years experience or less. Rookie principals bring an infusion of new energy and ideas into a school. But they also face a big learning curve.

Comments

[End the AIO farce]

There is no thread for this discussion and there is not likely to be one. But some day the dark, dirty question of the Area Offices is going to have to be broached. The Areas have become one of the primary obstacles to instructional reform. YThere are many reasons for this. 1, as others have pointed out, AIOs are promoted from within exclusively and the result has been politicized incompetence in the selection process. There is no reason to believe that a good principal will make a good instructional officer. The AIO job should be done by people who can focus on the instructional techniques and theories needed for good teaching. They should not be battle tested insiders who think they know how the system works. We could look at the highly successful model in Denver--the office of character and school culture--for clues about how to really improve schools through strengthening and enhancing professional learning communities--i.e., teachers.

See their website:

http://charactereducation.dpsk12.org/

I don't want to do a George Schmidt manuscript here, but I do want to start to plant some seeds for consideration of the problem of the Areas. So I will toss out a few more thoughts.

2. The Areas operate like the rest of CPS by dictating rather than facilitating change. Consequently the Area mandated changes don't happen. They are the very definition of failure.

3. The AIO structure is by subject rather than by function. There's an Englih coach and a math one, and a science one--no art one of course. So not all teachers are involved and those who are touched by the Area are handled in ways that break down school unity and coherence.

3. Because there are AIOs we think we are already doing enough to improve instruction. But the Areas actually diminish instruction and so it's twice as bad.

4. The Areas are not in synch with other central offices that dictate instruction. So they add to the confusion faced by local schools.

I think I'll stop here. It seems likely to me that this line of thought is not going to get much traction despite the Catalyst (was it Catalyst) report earlier this year that gave the Areas a scathing review. But I will bring it up again once in a while to see if the readers of this blog at least can generate some momentum for a review of this disastrous policy.

I would like to know what your solution is to improve instruction, if not the AIO structure.
Surely the solution is not to just let individual schools do whatever they think they want to do.

[Professional]

Dear 8:57

For a second I thought I was reading one of those ironic posts by the Sons of Vallas. What sort of jackass lets herself talk that sort of trash about teachers and schools? But looking again, it seems you take yourself and your insulting opinions of teachers and schools quite seriously. Shame on you. You don't even bother to defend the Areas; you jjust get right to hating on the schools.

You may have slept through it, but I gave an example of what we could be doing instead of the current Area system--see the link to the Denver office of character and school culture in my previous post.

Noone pays me to read things like that (they have their manual on line)--I'm just a lowly teacher--but I do it anyhow because I am a professional and this is important to my profession. Let's hope you are not someone who is charged with designing instructional improvement policies, because you should be familiar with the programs that are working in other urban systems.

Let's assume for the moment that you are someone in the central office or in one of the Areas. You are illustrating my point about the fatal flaw in the Area system. The Areas are based on mistrust of and often contempt for teachers and principals. Nothing positive has or is going to come of that.

Most teachers are professionals. They don't do "whatever they think they want to do"--as you so strangely phrased it; they do what they think is going to be most effective for their students, in the situation in which they find themselves.

They may be in difficult situations, they may need supportive help, but they don't need the mistrust you are so proudly dishing out. In general, you are a fair representative of the attitude of the Areas.

[George Schmidt]

12:39 p.m. You asked for some Schmidtian comments on the AIO thingy.

Here's a brief one.

The AIO structure is a network of very expensive patronage and power relationships to maintain mayoral control. If it were ever written up (other than in stuff I publish) in its real form, it would take up more Page One stories than have been used to lambast Cook County since Todd Stroger pulled that flim flam claim about a "$500 million deficit" and started hacking away at real services to real people (while expanding patronge).

But nothing about the AIO structure's complete corruption (and enormous expense) will ever grace Page One of the Daley Times or the Daley Tribune or the Daley Defender.

The AIO structure provides patronage in several ways, and is camoflaged since most of it is "instruction."

That way, last year Arne could increase non-teaching patronage (again) while claiming (again) he was cutting central office expenses "to the bone" etc., etc. with "laser like" precisions, blah, and more blah. (Arne's scripts and metaphors have gone from the merely fatuous to the truly banal to a "new level" of crudity for which I can't find the right words; he needs some new writers...).

Anyway, after Pedro and Tyra and the crew (under the watchful eye of David Vitale) did the dirty work, and the talking points were all in place, Arne Duncan cut real people -- who were working with real children (many of them disabled children) -- while promoting real patronage hacks who were maintaining Daley rule.

Follow the money into the expanded AIO spaces. Count the mailboxes in each of those offices, then try to locate the people (and the salaries) in the budget.

Then think of all those kids who are blowing out right now without aides in regular classrooms while someone from the AIO pads around making sure that the IEPs look the way Arne wants them in case anyone gets too close.

Expand patronage behind a smokescreen, while cutting real services to real children.

That's what people were testifying against during the budget hearings. That's what happened June 28, 2006 (when the "Board of Education", unanimously and without debate, passed the budget -- even though it didn't have the capital budget in it), and afterward, when the fiscal 2007 budget was approved and implemented with all those massive cuts.

The AIO structure provides hundreds (it may be more than a thousand, but I'm not quite sure of that yet) of disguised patronage jobs out of the classroom, away from the screaming hallways, and at much greater pay.

It also provides all of those cool real estate patronage opportunities to lease space from entities with clout. (From the Avondale offices that shake rattle and roll every time the Metra goes by on the northwest side all the way out towards the Indiana border. Anyone visited St. Benedict the African lately?).

Finally, the people in the AIO offices are enforcers in the contemporary Chicago sense. (We no longer see beefy guys without necks like Fred Roti's cousins doing the heavy work in Daley's city of narrow shoulders nowadays; $130,000-a-year AIOs and $400-an-hour lawyers are in doing the bone breaking now).

As Spring approaches, every person who has gotten out of the classroom (and the school) and into the money is reminded, sometimes not so subtly, what the peasants are facing on these warm pretty days. It's enough to bring a guy to his shivering $120,000-a-year knees. And for keeping their mouths shut long enough and going out on command, they know that at the finish line, they will be drawing pensions above $70,000 a year. Pensions. So what if they have to gargle 100 times a day for all the buttocks they've sucked? Their priorities are contemporary. The principals and classroom teachers and the security aides who risk their lives are the suckers when measured against the real rewards, present and future, being orchestrated in Daleyland.

In a pinch, Arne (Daley) has an army of incompetents and semi-competents (hundreds of them paid between $90,000 and $130,000 a year) to dispatch on command to terrorize principals to force teachers and other staff to put nose to grindstone (with mouths shut) to grind out data for the latest Daleyesque Five-Year Plan.

When the Gauleiters were invented and deployed in a similar type of regime 70 years ago, decent people also noted how iincompetent and wasteful the process was.

They missed the point and kept missing it, making rational arguments as the system grew until it strangled them.

Too late they realized that the whole thing had a very real purpose -- Keeping the regime in power and terrorizing anyone who might know enough to point out the problems as they grew.

Around the same time, commissars were doing the same work in similar regimes.

From that rational point of view, the AIO structure makes great sense.

It's about Power, with an occasional (and accidental) bump into what matters to children and teenagers in public schools.

And as a Power thing, it's been an enormous success.