Kelvyn Park teacher asks Board of Education why Pritzker Prep Noble Street charter school can dump its 'failing' students on Kelvyn Park in February
[Editor's Note: The following is the prepared text of the statement by Jerry Skinner, a teacher at Chicago's Kelvyn Park High School which was delivered at the Chicago Board of Education meeting of May 25, 2011. Kelvyn Park High School is a real public school, a general high school serving sections of Chicago's northwest side. These remarks are reprinted here as provided to Substance by the writer. Others who delivered statements to the Board can have them shared here at BOARDWATCH at substancenews.net by sending them via e-mail to Substance, Csubstance@aol.com.]
I am Jerry Skinner, a teacher at Kelvyn Park High School, and I am here to inform you of the connection between my school and Mayor Emanuel’s Transition Plan for the city’s public schools.
Initiative 33 of the Transition Plan is to “Increase the number of non-selective, world-class schools in every neighborhood” and discusses increasing “new school options”.
If “non-selective . . . new school options” includes charter schools, then the plan will only further harm the city’s truly non-selective schools like mine, which is situated in the same neighborhood as the Noble Street Pritzker Charter School.
Unlike a neighborhood school, Pritzker does not attempt to educate a representative selection of children from the neighborhood, but instead selects only the students with high academic skills. The 8th grade EXPLORE average reading score for incoming freshman at my school is 11.4, while for Pritzker the score is 14.9, over 30 percent higher. How is that non-selective?
There is more: 18.4 percent of our students are special ed. and 13.4 percent are ESL, while for Pritzker the numbers are less than half these at 7.9 percent and 5.9 percent respectively.
How is that non-selective?
If a Pritzker student does have academic or discipline problems, it sends the student to us in mid-year — claiming this is not an expulsion but a result of “counseling”. My school doesn’t “counsel” even our most difficult students to leave.
Yet the CPS Office of New Schools and charter schools like Pritzker call themselves “non-selective” when they duck the hard challenges that neighborhood schools take upon themselves every day. Even worse, the Board allows Pritzker charter school to come into our neighborhood, cherry-pick our best students and then lets the CPS Office of School Improvement on its website call neighborhood schools like mine “dropout factories”.
According to their respective ISBE School Report Cards, Kelvyn Park, in fact, compares well with the much-publicized selective charter school Urban Prep Academy in terms of graduation rates and ACT scores.
So why are we called a “dropout factory”, while Urban Prep is praised by our former mayor on television and at public events? Now come reports that another Aspira charter school will open a mile from us, selectively targeting even more of our better students.
Therefore, I am asking the Board; stop letting the Office of New Schools and charter schools play with the meaning of words. Charter schools are not “non-selective” and it’s a misleading of the public when CPS states that they are. Thank you.
Comments:
By: Sasha Santiago
Mr. Skinner Is Right!
I just wanted to give a some personal examples supporting Mr. Skinner's statment. Currently I am a freshman at Dominican University and I am proud to say that I am a graduate of Kelvyn Park High School. Much to the dismay of my relatives I elected to go to Kelvyn Park rather than Pritzker College Prep. It seemed to my family as a very poor decision considering all the hype and talk about this great school and the fact that it is literally next door to my house. If I take about twenty steps out of my yard I find myself in their parking lot. So why no attend? Well, its very simple. Work-ethic. After the school opened I quickly found that Pritzker students felt as if they were entitled to all of God's greatest creations. They felt as if they went to that school they were automatically better than everyone else. I wondered why considering the fact that many of them actually live in the same neighborhood that all the "reject" students live in. But after talking with my cousin who is a student there I quickly found the answer. He stated to me that Kelvyn Park was used as a scare tatic. I asked him what that exactly meant and he told me that whenever a student would act out the teacher would say, " Stop acting like that, do you want to end up a bum at KP." Now I can understand that they may feel that they are better because of the significantly higher amounts of funds that they have but to belittle a school is complete ignorance. The teachers at Pritzker do not have half the heart and determination that the teachers at Kelvyn Park do. Jerry Skinner was my AP English and Comp teacher my junior year at KP, and it was because of him that I am a successful writer in college. It takes courage and faith to go to school and teach students that everyone else gave up on. The task is sometimes more than they can handle so please Pritzker do us all a favor and stop giving us more problems than we already have. We understand that your mindset tells you that you are entitled to the best but you are not! Those that feel entitled will never know the true value of their blessings. They will only become obssesed with the idea of being better but wont actually strive for it. The lack of the journey will take the value away from the destination.
By: Sarah Loftus
Well said
Sasha & Jerry
Well said, now if only others will listen....
By: Rod Estvan
Excellent statement by Jerry Skinner
Jerry's comments were excellent, Access Living as an organization too has noticed the concentration of students with disabilities in traditional high schools. We f raised this issue in a report we issued several years ago.
Access Living formally met with the Ren Schools Fund staff and actually asked that they make their funding of charter schools contingent on enrollment of greater numbers of students with more significant disabilities. They simply refused to respond to this request.
As the charter and contract sector of CPS grows there is a ghettoization affect for students with more significant disabilities in particular for students with emotional disturbance. My experience as an advocate for students with disabilities is that the Noble Street network will educate students with moderate learning disabilities and pass them through the system to graduation.
Over the last three years Noble the school has improved its percentage of students with IEPs reading at state standards, but overall the charter school like traditional high schools including Kelvyn Park is not effective in educating these students. Both charters and traditional schools in Chicago lack the resources and will to remediate these students.
There is no reason why even given the social economic deficits of disabled students in Chicago that at least 40% of these students can't be reading at state standards by the time they graduate. Better funded school districts can achieve this level of proficiency and there are sadly very few such school districts in the entire State of Illinois.
As to Jerry's comments on Urban Prep, they are on the mark the school is a drop out factory of students with disabilities and given the reading levels of those students with IEPs who do graduate it is beyond me how they are admitted to four year colleges. I have to assume they are going to colleges like Chicago State and for profit colleges that have all been characterized as drop out factories themselves.
Rod Estvan