Catalyst Chicago
With budget cuts, union discontent and a sizeable list of pernicious problems, the education landscape in Chicago today looks a lot like it did 25 years ago. Yet for all the unsolved challenges that remain, Chicago has also seen considerable unsung progress.
Twenty-five years ago we knew astonishingly little about the state of the school district. Today we complain that student achievement data provide an incomplete picture of what is happening with our children and schools. Twenty-five years ago we didn’t even have reliable measures. Today, we fear that the contentiousness of public discourse will distort data and facts. A quarter century ago, the discourse was just as contentious, but there were no data...