No worse charges have been made against Chicago`s public high schools in years. At stake here isn`t just a tragic failure to educate some students with special problems or prevent some dropouts or raise test scores. What a new report has found is an inexcusable failure even to try. It`s a deliberate short-changing of students most in need of education. And it`s evidence of a cynical attitude by school administrators that can rub off on teens and do long-term harm.
The Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance, a nonprofit research group, started out to determine why some high schools have a markedly higher dropout rate than others with similar students. The panel discovered that some some schools deliberately foster a ”culture of cutting” by assigning students to nonexistent study halls or to study halls they are not expected to attend, especially during the first and last periods of the day. Some schools are also lax about enforcing class attendance. The lesson in irresponsibility this teaches students is obvious.
Although Illinois law requires that high school students receive 300 minutes of instructional work every day, many students get schedules that give them only 200 to 280 minutes in class or study hall, the panel found. That means school administrators are deliberately and illegally cheating students of part of the education to which they are entitled. And these are the very students who have the most to lose from an inadequate high school education.
Even in class, instructional time is often cut by too much seatwork and busywork and by what the panel described as ”general chaos.” In only one of the eight high schools studied by researchers did teachers actively teach more than half of the class period.
More damning, the panel`s findings generally have drawn shrugs. These practices have been going on for years, some administrators and teachers responded. Change is impossible to enforce. It would cost too much to give every student the full 300 minutes of instruction. The initial reaction of School Supt. Manford Byrd was to hunker down and criticize the design of the study, but he later promised to stop the padding of students` schedules with nonexistent study halls. That`s the least he can do and he should be held accountable for it.
The panel`s report does offer room for encouragement. It found considerably lower dropout rates in schools where the principal exerts strong leadership, where discipline and order are enforced, class attendance is stressed and teachers spend more of the class period actively instructing. It recommends lengthening classes from 40 to 50 minutes, changing the ”culture of cutting,” expanding counseling services and establishing an environment of orderliness and learning. Such changes, the report emphasizes, aren`t expensive.
Surely, at a minimum, students are entitled to an orderly school that doesn`t discourage attendance; a full schedule of classes; and adequate instruction time. It`s inexcusable that it took an outside research panel to call attention to this fundamental failure.
