News
at The Chicago Public Education Fund
Mike Sanders, Development/Communications Director
(312) 558-4520

December 8 , 2002

Reading experts turn teachers into students
from the Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO—The lesson in Sandra Bruce’s class on this particular day is reading comprehension, but she is not the one teaching it, and the lesson is not aimed at her 5th and 6th graders.

It’s aimed at her.

As the teacher sat among her pupils at Medill Elementary School on Chicago’s Southwest Side, reading specialist Geraldine Woolfolk took over the class, “modeling” an exercise for Bruce’s benefit.

Sending 232 reading specialists into Chicago’s lowest-performing public schools is the cornerstone on which schools chief Arne Duncan is building his education plan.

It’s also part of an effort to turn around the system’s troubled professional development programs, which a recently released audit strongly criticized.

The study found that the schools “lack standards for instructional quality” and that the results from the system’s professional development programs “are unclear and highly variable.”

In addition, a large chunk of the schools’ $123 million professional development budget—about $55.7 million—is spent on eight teacher development and institute days. One of those training days in Staff Appreciation Day, a day off for teachers, administrators and students.

The audit, spearheaded by The Chicago Public Education Fund, took 18 months to complete and was begun under former schools chief Paul Vallas. Officials from Duncan’s office, however, say they were making significant changes in the department before the audit came out last August.

For example, numerous reading programs have “all disappeared,” according to Chief Education Officer Barbara Eason-Watkins. They are now aligned under the Chicago Reading Initiative, which is being lauded by the educational community as a worthwhile investment.

That initiative includes the reading specialists, who have been working for more than a year with teachers in schools that need the extra boost to improve their test scores and reading literacy. The coaches all have master’s degrees and training in the latest methods for teaching phonics and fluency.

Math and science are also expected to get more attention under an initiative that will be unveiled later in the school year, Eason-Watkins said.

School officials also hope a new, streamlined accountability plan will help teachers and schools understand better the district’s expectations for achievement.

Changes to the eight professional development days are in the works as well, according to director Al Bertani.

“The findings suggest we ought to look at those days more carefully and that we also ought to look at the time devoted to those days and see if we could use them more creatively,” Bertani said. “We are in the process of evaluating all that.”

Deborah Lynch, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said professional development had not been a priority in the past. Lynch, who helped on the study, said teachers were subjected to professional development instead of involved in the process.

“There is much that goes by the name of professional development that is not very helpful, and part of the reason might be that somebody else decided what those teachers need as opposed to the teachers themselves,” Lynch said.

The Chicago school reading initiative was designed by Tim Shanahan, a University for Illinois at Chicago education professor who no longer works for the district. He said many teachers, although knowledgeable and experienced, may not have had the opportunity to keep up with training and new methods.

The reading specialists “do demonstrations in the classroom, co-plan lessons—but it’s not just one activity,” Shanahan said. “What it comes down to is . . . really trying to teach teachers to teach more effectively.”

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