Tier 1 National Org

The Latino Policy Forum is a multifaceted organization and they conduct research to determine which public policies have the greatest impact on Latinos' well-being and society's well-being in general. Then they get people involved in improving policies at all levels of public decision-making. (For more info about the Latino Policy Forum, click HERE.)

The Forum recently highlighted data from a study conducted by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. The key finding of that research contradicts the dominant misleading narrative about English Language Learners. Since today’s accountability systems only focus on active English learners' test scores, they fail to track those students after they become proficient in English while also failing to track achievement metrics other than test scores. After retroactively tracking more than 18,000 English learners from kindergarten through eighth grade, the researchers found that English learners have similar achievement and growth and go on to have better attendance and grades in core subject areas than native English speakers.

The key takeaway here is that investing in English learners works. However, reporting only on active English learners misses how well most English learners perform and--more importantly--fails to demonstrate the value of investing in instruction for English learners.

The chart displayed above depicts three different ways that English Learner performance data can be communicated. In the first column, ELs consists only of students who are actively receiving services, which is how data has historically been reported. The second column includes the performance of students who began as English Learners but reached English proficiency by eighth grade. The final column aggregates the data between active and former English Learners into one subgroup, which lessens the perceived differences in achievement.

One Principal's Perspective

I was principal at Blaine Elementary School from 2011 to 2016, where the percentage of Black students meeting reading standards rose from 28% to 75%, and the Hispanic percentage rose from 73% to 83% between 2011 and 2013. Overall achievement rose from 79% to 89% in that same time period. In 2013 CPS moved to a funding system that I call Sacrifice Based Budgeting (SBB). SBB allocates an inadequate dollar amount to each...

Around the start of this school year, it was reported that Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson’s chief of staff, Pedro Soto, was charged with lying to the FBI about his role in an apparent bid-rigging and bribery scheme. Soto is alleged to have passed secret information to a company bidding for a $1 billion CPS custodial contract in 2016. Jackson responded by portraying Soto’s alleged crimes as a “betrayal of trust.” 

For many CPS principals, her response is deeply problematic for the following reason: When school-based employees act in bad faith and betray the trust of principals, Jackson’s administration punishes the principals for trusting those employees in the first place.

As president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, I have received multiple reports from our general counsel about occasions in which CPS accused principals of not exercising due diligence in hiring or volunteer practices, and then targeted those principals for disciplinary action even when those principals did not violate any CPS policy or procedure. School leaders have been dragged into disciplinary hearings for simply making positive statements about employees or volunteers who later turned out to have committed some offense. Officials in Janice Jackson’s Law Department have actually said on the record that school leaders “should have known better” with no evidence to back up their claims. They assert that despite the absence of clear rules against a principal's actions or inactions, they should have exercised some vague “common sense.”

If that is the district’s standard under Jackson, then Jackson “should have known” better than to bring this alleged criminal into her administration, and she should have had enough “common sense” not to promote him to a position with a $175,000 salary and then keep him in that position while he was under federal criminal investigation. The mere fact that CPS attempts to discipline many school leaders for what they “should have known” is infuriating given the fact that district officials regularly escape accountability for far worse lapses.

One of the great unspoken but driving forces of today’s racial justice protests is the idea of unfairness. That is, the unfairness of how Black people are treated by the police and the courts is highlighted by the fact that police and courts do not treat white people the same way in similar circumstances. It is that stark contrast that drives the anger, resentment and frustrations of so many Americans.

In a similar way, the anger, resentment and frustrations of Chicago’s school leaders are elevated and heightened by unfairness. We know that central office officials regularly escape accountability for lapses, failures of judgment, and procedural violations that could end the careers of school-based administrators. If a CPS principal hired and...