Parents to Board: "We Need to Talk"

Rivas launches the conversation in his district, 3b. Plus, we preview the February board meeting agenda.

Continuing their push for better governance of Chicago’s public schools, parents from the city’s two main public school advocacy groups, Raise Your Hand and Kids First Chicago, want more in-depth opportunities to share their experiences, insights, and recommendations with board members. But so far, they aren’t getting them.

Raise Your Hand, a leader in the fight for an elected school board, worked very hard to inform the community during the first school board election cycle. Now that the hybrid board is up and running, RYH wants to ensure parents and community leaders have the tools to influence their work and hold them accountable for results. Last night, the group held the first of two calls where parents, Local School Council members, and other advocates can learn strategies to pressure Board of Education members and Chicago Public Schools officials to tackle school-level issues, like removing an incompetent interim principal.

The board’s new public participation rules allow union leaders and elected officials (state reps and City Council members) five minutes to speak. Since LSC members are also elected public officials, should they also be allowed five minutes? Watch for more advocacy on this topic, which has already been raised at a board meeting. 

RYH’s second strategy call will be held on Friday, February 28; register here. 

Also last night, Kids First Chicago held a call with its Equitable Funding Task Force to delve into the district’s new budget model for school budgets. Last spring, the district moved away from funding schools primarily by enrollment, or student-based budgeting, to an equity model where every school receives a base allotment of centrally-funded teacher positions, plus additional staff for higher-need schools based on an Opportunity Index.

The upside of the new model is that it sends more money to smaller schools in high-need communities. On the downside, a larger share of each school’s budget is tied up in teacher and staff salaries, so principals and Local School Councils have less autonomy and authority to decide how to spend money. Though LSC members on last night’s task force call pointed out this problem forcefully, at the moment there’s no avenue for a deeper conversation with board members than a two-minute speaking slot during public participation at board meetings.

Northwest Side Starts the Conversation

Board member Carlos Rivas (3b) kicked off February by partnering with the Academy for Local Leadership and the Puerto Rican Arts Alliance to host a meet-and-greet that drew about 75 people: parents and students, administrators, local nonprofit leaders, LSC members, and local elected officials and staff. ALL’s Bridget Lee led the group in a visioning exercise that drew out attendees’ priorities for their local schools, from creating functioning, safe playgrounds at every school to guaranteeing that every student has the opportunity to learn more than one language.

Rivas says the meet-and-greet was just the beginning. He's got all the charts from visioning and intends to analyze them more closely. He also said he wants to “ensure parent and community voice leads in decision making and how I vote.” 

ALL is hiring a community engagement director who will likely lead similar sessions for board members in other districts. It will be interesting to see how deeply ALL’s work connects with the existing parent advocacy groups, where folks have deep experience in (and frustration with) working with CPS leadership at the board and central office, and whether they succeed in breaking new ground.

What’s on Today’s Agenda?

The board’s agenda review committee meets today to prep for the February board meeting. They’re addressing a mammoth  400-plus page agenda. It’s big this month because the board will be approving many financial transfers and changes to construction contracts. 

Here are some noteworthy items.

Back to Our Future: Re-engaging students who have dropped out of school isn’t just an academic issue; it can save lives and improve public safety for the whole city. In 2022, CPS used an $18 million grant to launch Back to Our Future, an effort to reach 1000 young people who had dropped out of school and were at risk of being involved in gun violence. The program struggled to connect and engage with these hardest-to-reach youth, reaching far fewer of them than expected. Bureaucratic friction between the school district and the state’s Department of Human Services didn’t help.  

But the program is getting a second chance, with a 3-year contract of up to $25,500,000 to Metropolitan Family Services. Specific services are still being negotiated, but an October story from Chalkbeat Chicago noted that this revamp would offer “even more — and more personalized — services.” 

The Chalkbeat story took careful note of lessons learned from the first attempt, which only managed to engage about 450 disengaged high schoolers when the target was 1000. About two-thirds of the more than 2000 youth initially referred to the program were Black boys. Nearly half had been arrested at least once.

Lessons learned:

• Recruiting participants through community-based organizations was more effective at getting teens into the program than just contacting young people on a CPS list of dropouts.
• Use one consistent service model, focused on therapeutic interventions, including cognitive-behavioral therapy. Metropolitan Family Services was likely chosen as the main vendor for the new contract with the expectation it could deliver this kind of service. It does have the ability to subcontract.
• Don’t rely on online credit recovery without coupling it with personalized mentoring and support.
• Intensive services don’t come cheap. The first version of Back to Our Future cost $18,000 per student; the second will cost $25,000 per student. 

There's more to learn about Back to Our Future from the University of Chicago's Crime Lab. On a personal note, as a former teacher in alternative high schools, I would strongly encourage Back to Our Future 2.0 to forge closer ties with long-established, community-based alternative high schools, many of which now operate under the Youth Connection Charter School umbrella. Folks there have been doing this work for a long time. Building pathways between Back to the Future's shorter-term, more flexible structure and the nurturing communities alternative schools create and sustain could help more young people earn diplomas and transform their lives.

Data Warehouse: An $11,000,000 contract with Accenture will have them create a cloud data warehouse, establish data analytics and visualization, and “provide Master Data Management for the following domains: Schools, Students, Vendors, Facilities, and Employee records." This warehouse and management system creates the foundation for better reporting and analysis of data needed for the new accountability system. The agenda item also notes, "In addition, this will position CPS students, educators and the broader community to take advantage of the advances in AI and Generative AI.”

There's room saved in the agenda for charter renewals and renewals of Options Schools, the board's broad category for alternative schools serving young people who have dropped out and want to complete their high school education. Last week the board held a public hearing regarding Options Schools renewals.

Next Week: We'll analyze the Trump administration's decision to cancel $900 million in contracts overseen by the Institute for Education Sciences, the arm of the Department of Education that tracks national student performance through NAEP and shares comparative data on higher education through its College Scorecard. Though the administration says those efforts will stay, The 74 reports that the Common Core of Data and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, known as IPEDS, are "on the chopping block." Even conservatives, including Fordham Institute's Chester Finn, are concerned that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gone too far too fast.

Education insiders are waiting with bated breath for an executive order that could reduce or eliminate the entire department, even as Linda McMahon, Trump's pick for education secretary, goes before the Senate tomorrow in her confirmation hearing. What does all this federal chaos mean for us? Stay tuned.