Blogs

In the last six months, the Mayor and CPS have been working hard on selling a 7.5 hour school day to parents, students and teachers. Just the time involved in doing a "Find and Replace" on all the name changes for this campaign must demand a full time job.  

They have been telling us if we ‘build’ a 7.5 hour day, the good grades, higher graduation rates and college-readiness will come. The Mayor has been telling us the “emptiness” behind the eyes of students will be filled if we simply move to a 7.5 hour school day.  

CPS released its construction and capital plan for the district recently and a lot of parents are angry. I’ve been getting calls and emails from parents in various parts of the city who are incensed at some of the choices made by CPS.  “If CPS has $659 million to spend on capital improvements, why are so few schools on the list and not mine,” is the gist of the complaints. Here is a link to a Catalyst article about the plan.

If you pay attention to what’s happening in CPS, you probably have heard that 123,000 students are in “underperforming seats.” If you attended the October Board meeting you would have seen the presentation from the new Portfolio team on CPS’ new system of classifying schools as Level 1, 2 or 3 (1 the highest performing), and you may have seen members of the CPS leadership team on the news speaking about these underperforming seats as part of their reasoning for both school actions and a 7.5 hour long extended school day.  

What you won’t hear at a board meeting or from district leaders is that CPS cut recess out of the school day about thirty years ago. Today, about 60% of CPS students -- more than 200,000 school-age children -- have no recess.  While CPS plans to reinstate recess for all schools next year, supports for funding and implementation remain to be seen. As well, CPS does not follow the daily physical education requirement mandated by the state. Most students have few opportunities for physical activity with gym only once a week. In an emergency meeting last month, the Board of Education approved getting another P.E. waiver from the state for high school juniors and seniors for the next 2 ½ years. CPS does not have a waiver for elementary schools; they remain out of compliance with the state daily P.E. requirement, and no one has ever held their feet to the fire.

So let’s take a step back for a moment. If we have 123,000 underperforming seats, is it possible that inadequate physical education, recess and  almost no unstructured time has had some impact on the performance of these seats?  We know we have a growing achievement gap and we have many children in this city who don’t have the opportunity to run and play on their streets due to safety issues.  Who made the decision that it was a good idea not to honor the PE requirement mandated by the state?

I would argue that these kids have been sitting in these underperforming seats for too much of their day. Our district should take a cue from the American Academy of Pediatrics and many other groups who say physical activity is critical to learning.  A new study was published recently in the Archive of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine that says the national recommendation for school physical education [PE] – endorsed by the National Association of Sports and Physical Education (NASPE) and the American Heart Association – is that elementary school students be offered at least 150 minutes/week of PE. According to Education Week, the “authors (of this study) surmised that schools may be cutting physical activity time to add instructional time to the potential detriment of their students.” On a broader scale, we cannot talk about improving schools without improving community health, reducing childhood obesity and ensuring safe places to play and travel to school. The U.S. Surgeon General was in Chicago last week, urging our community leaders to take a pledge to make it easier for communities to make healthier choices where we live, learn, work, play and pray.    

I know the new leadership team at CPS wants good things for the kids of Chicago and they didn’t create this mess of a system. In reading their list of non-negotiables for next year that was recently distributed to principals, I am glad to see recess on the list. But in this non-negotiable plan, the school day is 7.5 hours long, and recess is only 20 minutes long. Our largely sedentary and unhealthy workforce gets more time for lunch and coffee breaks.

I am mixing two issues of school closings and the extended day but they’re not unrelated. If half of CPS schools are on probation and CPS sees school closings as a solution, how can they expect these other hundreds of schools also failing by their standards, to implement a day that is 105 more minutes long and succeed? I have yet to hear anything from the district regarding how they will fund or provide support to improve things, other than a modest increase for recess and lunch and more “time on task.”  I have seen some sample schedules provided by the National Center for Time and Learning, the vendor from Boston that is working with the district to plan the longer day, but I have not heard any answers about how any of these sample schedules will be funded. It’s interesting to me that when Boston implemented their extended day they moved about 10% of their schools to the new schedule, not the whole district. I wonder if anyone at CPS told them that Massachusetts funds education at a substantially higher rate than Illinois, perhaps making it easier to fund an increased day. I know it’s crazy that I’m looking for some answers on a set of priorities, but hey, it’s almost January and a lot of parents are asking me, what exactly is my kid going to have next year? Will they have recess and PE more than once a week, or will they be sitting in their seat all day?

CPS should come up with a long-term plan of priorities for our district. Something concrete that will provide a vision for real change for these underperforming seats. Closing schools outright, especially when it means kids will be sent to another low-performing school down the street, has not proven to work. As we saw recently in a report from Linda Lutton and Sarah Karp published on WBEZ, after a decade of school closings, only 18% of schools that were closed for underutilization, underperformance or other reasons are now “Level 1.” And if and when CPS creates this plan, I hope they add PE to the list of priorities, in addition to recess. Seats really do perform better when they are treated like children, who need physical activity in order to learn, retain information and be successful.

Yesterday I attended an event in Lawndale where Raise Your Hand was invited to speak briefly about our recess initiative. It was an event sponsored by Power-Pac, a fantastic group that organizes parents on the south and west side. We have partnered with them on the recess issue for several months. There were a hundred or so parents, guardians and kids who came out on a Saturday morning for five hours to learn about ways to improve their schools and get involved in Power-Pac initiatives.

The time between June and September is feeling less and less like summer vacation and more and more like months spent in CPS remission. I'm shot and I've only been back at this for what, six weeks?