Education Grades and Recommendations

Education

2007 Grade	2007 Grade Prediction for the Future	2010 Grade
C	??	D+

Despite the heated debate over the efficacy of charter schools, the current state of Chicago’s education system has been deemed unacceptable by those communities most negatively impacted by current education policies. The extent to which families have lost their ability to choose a school for their children, the extent to which communities have been torn apart due to children being placed at schools outside of their communities, and the practically wholesale severing of school from community through the dissolution of Local Schools Council authority, leaves very little indication that Chicago provides adequate access to education for all of its citizens.

Recommendations

1. Ensure LSCs maintain full powers, and support them through adequate funding levels that provide training and supports for LSCs to do their jobs.
2. Implement a moratorium on school closings until a detailed analysis of the impacts of shuffling children is completed, and until a real plan to address the quality of safety and education for every child is in place.
3. Develop and implement a more comprehensive, holistic and fair approach to evaluate student and teacher performance in order to weed out false indicators of performance in high school, college and the workplace, which are currently produced via the Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT) and the ACT test standard.