Week 2

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

-Langston Hughes, “A Dream Deferred”

Teaching Me the Tough Truth

“What are you going to do after this? You don’t want to be a teacher, do you?”
“Yes.”
“Not with Chicago Public Schools, I don’t hope.”
“Um, yeah.”
It is this middle-aged woman’s tenth year as a teacher. She just moved from D.C. where, she implies, the teaching/learning situation was (surprisingly) much better.
The dropout rate is 50 percent in Chicago schools. Let me make this clear: On a yearly basis, only half of the freshman entering a Chicago high school will graduate. This is verse the 16 percent U.S. average, which when compared with other developed nations, is abysmal.
Students of AVID (Advanced Via Individual Determination) were reading a book entitled There Are No Children Here. It’s about two brothers who grew up on Chicago’s West Side and struggled with staying in school or dropping out early on.
This led to a discussion on the CPS dropout rate, and reasons it could be so high.
“People get bored.”
“Sometimes, you know, people have to take care of their family.”
“Students need different ways of motivation,” realized one student.
“Maybe it’s the whole culture of school or schools,” added a program manager from a local non-profit.
It could be the CPS Board of Education, which is a group of appointed advisers. No one on the board is either an educator or an elected official, the teacher grimaces. This differs from almost every other school board in the country.
If a parent doesn’t like how the board is handling policy, she has no say. When poor performing schools “turnaround” and fire most of their teachers, only to reopen with no real reform plan, a parent has no say.
The board members are on and off with the command of the mayor, not the parents and community members of those they serve. There is no accountability for the CPS Board of Education. And who could handle all this decision-making anyhow? –not Board President Michael Scott, who two weeks ago shot himself dead.
Maybe Chicago is known as the City of Big Shoulders because it bypasses the citizens and does it all by unelected committees.
I shouldn’t be quick to judge, though.
“I usually ask people who have been on the job long as you have, how’s the chair?” To that, I nod to this disgruntled but painfully accurate woman: in the midst of this and trying to stabilize from Azerbaijan, I really have no idea what’s going on.