Stimulus, Neighborhoods and Schools

A couple of recent news items from the Chicago Public schools related to stimulus spending have caught my attention. First, today's hot CPS story is the announcement of details about the district's $30 million, stimulus-funded plan to reduce youth violence. WBEZ's Linda Lutton did a good overall piece on it, which you can read or listen to here. Back in September when the plan was first announced, Englewood pastors loudly complained about a Philadelphia-based agency taking on the task of, and the pay for, working with at-risk youth. For the next five months, the district's chief executive officer, Ron Huberman, zipped his lip about the plan.

According to the Catalyst Notebook blog, Huberman unzipped his lip at a press conference at Englewood's Robeson High School yesterday just enough to let us know that the work with high-risk youth will now be split among community agencies, plus the Philadelphia group, Youth Advocate Programs. Looks to me like the pastors' voices were heard. The Philadelphia group will be paid to work with the 250 highest-risk students, while community agencies will be hired to work with another 2000 students. The two efforts will eat up $10 million, or one-third of the total funds available. Another $2 million will go toward community patrols to ensure students have safe passage to and from school, like the effort Huberman helped kickstart last March in Little Village, which I wrote about here.

I certainly hope this will be an opportunity for NCP neighborhoods with strong antiviolence work in place, like Little Village and Auburn Gresham, to put more gas in their tanks, as well as helping other neighborhoods plant new efforts or help their seedling projects grow.

Second, last week Mayor Daley and the district announced significant new bonds for school construction made possible through stimulus. According to the press release, CPS used approximately $22 million for emergency repairs at Bond, Caldwell, Ebinger, Harlan, Gallistel, Schneider, Sumner and Yale schools, plus $7 million to renovate four CPS turnaround schools: Bethune, Dulles, Fenger, and Johnson. While urgent repairs are key in an underfunded system with decades of deferred maintenance, and turning around a school ought to include needed repairs, only one of these schools (Ebinger) is on the heavily overcrowded Northwest Side. And none of the early spending addresses the long-neglected problem of overcrowded schools on the Southwest Side. (Full disclosure: I'm a Southwest Sider, though I don't live in the bull's-eye of the overcrowding zone.) Back in 2005 a colleague and I analyzed where the kids were and where CPS capital dollars went; the numbers didn't match up well. You can read our analysis here.

Back then, the district cried poor, saying there was no money left to address overcrowding. Well, there's new money now. Unfortunately, there's a lot of new faces in district leadership, which means new priorities and lost institutional memory. Let's hope some of it gets spent this time on longstanding overcrowding in places like Chicago Lawn, Gage Park and Brighton Park. Jimmy Dispensa (head of demographics for CPS), can you put a bug in Ron's ear on this?

Umoja University Trains School Leaders as Community Change Agents

Twelve years ago, less than 10 percent of graduates from North Lawndale's Manley High School went on to college. Last Friday, the Chicago Tribune reported that "all but a few" of Manley's 142 graduating seniors had been accepted to college.

Much of the credit for this achievement goes to the Umoja Student Development Corporation. Umoja provides pathways for students to learn about college and careers and builds the relationships with them needed to help them move forward after graduation. (I wrote about one of them here back in 2003.) Students working with Umoja not only develop postsecondary plans; they follow through. Umoja contacted 139 of last year's Manley grads and found 68 percent of them had enrolled as college freshmen: 64 percent of that group are going back for a second year.

In the last few years, Umoja has been expanding its efforts beyond Manley, to south and southwest side schools like Gage Park, Carver, Dyett and ACE Tech Charter. This summer, teachers and school leadership teams who want to learn more about how Umoja has "changed the way the school does business" (as the Tribune put it), are invited to sign up for four days of workshops and planning known as Umoja University. The workshops will be held at Dominican University from July 27-31. Interested individual teachers are invited to sign up for one or more morning workshops; school teams are encouraged to sign up for the full five days, and will have dedicated time in the afternoons to develop plans for their own school aided by Umoja facilitators.

Why am I telling you about this on a community development blog? Because one of the best ways to strengthen a community is to increase the education level of its members. According to the Trib article, less than 10 percent of adults in North Lawndale currently hold a bachelor's degree. Umoja has been working diligently to plant the seeds that will increase that number down the road, and I think they have something to share with teachers and principals who share that goal.

Going to Scale: Family Science Nights

When a school system has 600 schools and 400,000 students, you don't have time to make changes one kid at a time. You need programs that scale, whether that's the recent Spring Into Sports that attracted 800 kids a day to four schools during Spring Break, or the Family Science Nights that result from trainings by the Museum of Science of Industry.

My wife Pam came home from Stockton School in Uptown tonight with a bunch of nice photos of that school's annual Family Science Night. More than 150 students, parents and teachers (and the principal with her own two kids) turned out to participate in scientific inquiries including Ultraviolet Beads; Sink, Hover and Float; Sound Sandwich; Bee Hummer (a spinning rope that makes noise); Slime; Garden in a Glove; Making Paper; Marbles at Work; and Ink Chromotography.

All the activities originated in the museum's education department, which trains nearly 1,000 teachers a year on ways to engage students in hands-on science activities, which are also available online.

So do the math. A thousand teachers, perhaps 30 kids each, that's 30,000 students. Scale.

Neighborhoods, Social Capital and Schools

Principal Michael Johnson of Reavis Elementary, shown here with some 6th-graders, is working hard to create cohesion among his staff and build bridges between his school and its neighborhood. According to research discussed at the kickoff of this year's School Policy Luncheon series, he's on the right track.

The Consortium on Chicago School Research says that trust within schools is "the heat in the oven" that accelerates school improvement and ultimately academic gains for kids. Further, according to their regular surveys, trust between principals, teachers and parents has been slowly rising systemwide. "These might not be dramatic changes, but they are changes in the right direction," researcher Penny Bender Sebring told a capacity crowd at the Union League Club on Wednesday.

What may be getting less attention as policymakers focus more narrowly on the classroom is the importance of trust beyond school walls, or social capital. Social capital comes in two flavors: bonding, which helps people within the same community relate to each other and solve internal problems; and bridging, which helps people network across communities to get resources and information they couldn't access otherwise.

Consortium researchers classified Chicago's public elementary schools into seven different categories. The "truly disadvantaged" were those in African-American neighborhoods with a median income below $20,000 per year. It won't surprise anyone that very few schools in those neighborhoods had the kinds of internal supports, including trust, that lead to student success. It also won't surprise anyone that even fewer schools in neighborhoods with high incidences of child abuse and neglect had the internal climate to help children succeed. Meanwhile, mediocre schools in high-social-capital neighborhoods can coast a bit internally and their students still make gains.

However, this fact might surprise you: Chicago's "truly disadvantaged" schools are producing better-than-expected academic gains for their students given the low social capital around them. This could mean it's time to look at how to support and connect to the neighborhood outside the school.

That's exactly what Michael Johnson is doing right now at Reavis, with the help of Elev8, a new initiative supported by New York-based Atlantic Philanthropies and a group of Chicago funders. For more about Elev8, see this story from Catalyst Chicago.

As noted researcher Charles Payne put it on Wednesday, "Social capital matters. Social capital is differentially distributed by race. The impact of social capital is greatest for the neediest kids."

Payne also had a couple of cautionary words for Chicago Public Schools leadership. Two hot topics around town are the district's efforts to turn around low-performing schools by replacing principals and entire faculties in one fell swoop and the rapid replication of a select group of charter schools. Though Payne applauded the sense of urgency around school improvement that fuels both these strategies, he cautioned that they do collateral damage to social capital where it is sorely needed.

"We need to respect the desire to get good fast," yet also "beware that doing this may destroy the trust that makes good things good."

For example, he had heard of a turnaround school where "some kids came back boiling mad. Every teacher they knew was gone. It was not their school. How do we do this in a way that minimizes damage to social capital in a place where social capital is already limited?"

Meanwhile, he's encouraged by the strong relationships building at Urban Prep–"that's something special going on"–and worried that a push for them to open new campuses too soon may endanger the trust that has been built there. "Now, doggone! These relationships have been developed with great trust and care over time. You spread those relationships over three campuses? How do you do that? I hope people are staying up at night worrying about that."

In urban school reform, the challenge has always been to "balance urgency with complexity. The least well understood part of complexity has been the power of social capital."

Let's hope Michael Johnson and other practitioners can shed light on this by their example.

'Our children and future are dying'

Gun protest at the Thompson Center. Photos by Gordon Walek.

When word came through about the latest killing of a Chicago teenager – the gun death on Sunday of Julian High School senior Kiyanna Salter on a CTA bus – it hit me as it always does, with sadness and anger that the affected families and communities must absorb this terrible hurt and somehow move on.

For the people around that young person, the pain must be debilitating. How can it not create a feeling of helplessness? The senseless killing of a child knocks down whole networks of people and institutions, or at least slows them down in whatever work or progress they might have been making. It ripples through classrooms. It travels down blocks and through neighborhoods and within families. It is personal.

And so it hurts even more to learn that Kiyanna Salter was a cousin of Southwest Organizing Project organizer Rabbi Joshua Salter, who works on safety issues on the Southwest Side. The death touched that neighborhood, too.

But violence can also galvanize responses, and two came across my desk today.

First, the Sun-Times reported that Chicago schools CEO Arne Duncan refused to accept an anti-violence award from the Illinois Coalition Against Handgun Violence. He cited the eight students killed in the first month of the school year, and left the award on the table. "I don't feel I can accept this award, not quite yet," he said. "I don't feel I've earned it."

Second, I heard from Ernie Sanders in Auburn Gresham, who alerted me to a gun-control protest planned by members of St. Sabina Parish at 11 a.m. this Friday, October 10, at the Thompson Center. This is a return visit after a similar rally on September 24 (photos) and obviously just as needed.

Below, the notice of the protest. The second paragraph packs a punch.

"Our Children and Future are Dying"

"In response to 3 more of our children being killed due to gun violence we will meet on Friday at The Thompson Center from 11am to 12pm.

"It is still our mission to have "Common Sense Gun Laws" enacted in this state. This school year, 2008-2009, has already seen Chicago Public Schools lose 11 students. Understand we have only completed one month of school, and we have lost 1/3 of a classroom.

"Please help us get the word out, raise awareness, and put an end to the destruction of our children, our future. If you need to ride the bus to the rally please call the Rectory at 773-483-4300, the bus will be leaving the church at 10 am."