The Examiner U-46 News FeedU-46 challenged to offer more choices to parents By Seth Hancock
Last week was National School Choice Week, and Wayne resident Rick Newton feels empowering School District U-46 parents with more options is worthy of discussion.
Noting that the U-46 administration recognizes National School Bus Safety and School Lunch weeks in October of each year, Newton raised the school choice week when he spoke during public comments at the Board of Education meeting on Monday, Jan. 25.
Newton said: “While their acknowledgement is understandable I’m curious why this week, National School Choice Week, receives no attention. I think you might be surprised by the number of parents who would find school choice to be a subject of great interest.”
According to schoolchoiceweek.com, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner was one of 27 governors across the nation to proclaim last week School Choice Week. There were 918 events across the state, over 16,000 across the nation including at many traditional public schools according to the website.
Newton cited a recent Chicago Tribune article that said over half of Chicago parents now send their children to magnet schools or other options rather than the traditional public school based on zip code which he says shows parents want choices.
“Wouldn’t that seem to underscore the fact that parents value the option of viable educational choices for their children,” Newton said.
School choice is not “the sole solution for this district’s academic challenges” said Newton who added parental involvement is the key, and options would mean more parental involvement.
Citing another news story, “From NYC to Harvard: The war on Asian success” published in the New York Post, Newton said that American students are underperforming many poorer nations.
Quoting the article, which said some blame changes in standardized testing for the poor performance, Newton said “that convenient excuse was torpedoed by the stellar performances of Asian-American students” who are outperforming all other ethnic sub-groups by wide margins regardless of socioeconomic status. The article said those Asian-American parents are heavily involved.
“Yes, it is parenting despite what those who prefer to play the blame game and play the role of victim may allege,” Newton said. “Children may have varying levels of aptitude, abilities and desires but without committed parenting achieving their individual potential becomes a much larger challenge.”
New board member Cody Holt noted and supported the National School Choice Week when he recognized it during board member updates while Phil Costello and Jeanette Ward, who both ran on the same ticket as Holt in the last board election, both supported the idea of school choice and more options during the campaign.
Veronica Noland, in her third year of a four-year term, supported offering U-46 parents a choice when she voted in favor of the Elgin Math and Science Academy charter proposal in the summer of 2014, but she was the lone vote in favor. The two current board members who were on the board for that vote, Traci Ellis and Donna Smith, both voted against the charter despite wide public demand that packed the board meeting the night of the vote.
The U-46 administration has opposed choice for parents in instances where an opportunity for options has been available in recent years. It opposed two charter proposals in the last three years.
The district also chose the option that kept it in control of 10 elementary schools that were deemed failing under the federal government’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. The district could have closed those schools and reopened them as public charters, replace most or all of the staff at each school, bring in a private management company to operate those schools or designate those schools as “restructuring” and U-46 chose “restructuring” which kept the power in the district’s hands.
Those schools are no longer designated as “‘restructuring’ because of a waiver the State of Illinois received from the U.S. Department of Education” according to a weekly message to staff sent out by U-46 CEO Tony Sanders this past October, but are those schools any better off today?
According to the most recent report card data from the Illinois School Board of Education, of those 10 schools, the highest percentage of students meeting or exceeding expectations is 28 while the lowest is 13. According to the Student Academic Growth Chart, in its second year of use on the report card, Elgin’s Lords Park Elementary School was the only “restructuring” school not to see any declines in math or reading over the last two school years.
When the board discussed and ultimately approved elementary school boundary changes last December, Ward suggested the possibility of school choice within the current U-46 system allowing parents from overcrowded schools to send their children to underutilized schools in the district if they provided their own transportation. The administration has yet to publicly state whether that’s a viable possibility.
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