I was glad to see the May 8 editorial welcome the Chicago Teachers Union’s proposal to have the CTU help reform failing schools (“A welcome school experiment”). CTU President Deborah Lynch’s proposal is a bold alternative to business as usual.
But the editorial criticized many aspects of the proposal, including the use of our Success for All program.
The article implies that it will be difficult for the CTU to find many teachers willing to implement such a “choreographed” approach.
Success for All is indeed structured. It is explicit about what good instruction should be like. Yet there is also plenty of room for creativity.
Success for All is popular among most teachers. We require a vote of at least 80 percent in favor, by secret ballot.
More than 50,000 teachers work in our 1,600 schools nationally. If they did not support it, they would not have voted for it.
Studies in several locations have found that 70 percent to 81 percent of teachers strongly support the program. There is a minority of teachers who do not like Success for All, and they can be very vocal. But most teachers find that the program lets them be creative and, most important, more effective.
The editorial characterized results in the five Chicago schools currently using Success for All as “mixed.” It’s true that some schools have been more successful than others, but every one of the five is performing better today on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills reading scale than when it began.
Taken together, the schools gained more than twice as much as other Chicago schools from 1998 to 2001.
The editorial claimed that Success for All can cost more than $1 million per school. The figure of $1 million relates to New York City’s Chancellor’s District, a reform that includes Success for All but also many other elements, such as a longer school day, smaller class sizes and increased social services. The CTU has proposed to help implement something similar in Chicago, but that is far beyond what the current Chicago Success for All schools have been doing.
The usual form of Success for All, which costs an average of $48,000 per year over three years, has also been found to increase student achievement in many studies, done by many researchers in many locations. As in Chicago, results vary school to school and year to year. But the overall effectiveness of the program is clear.
The CTU’s proposal has great potential for Chicago’s children. Here is a teachers’ union willing to put its own reputation on the line to show how low-achieving schools can be improved instead of closed. Any city would be delighted to have such an offer, and Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan has wisely offered his cooperation.
As this plan unfolds, I would urge the Tribune to give the idea a fair chance to show what it can accomplish.
