NV on Oprah

[rew]

MO3 -- This is why the shows were so dissappointing to me. None of the good questions were asked. It's just dumb to say "The schools are failing, they're in crisis" and then compare pools??? Or go to prisons and say 80% of inmates are HS dropouts, so as Oprah commented "If we spent $10,000 on them in school, we wouldn't have to spend $34,000 to incarcerate them???"

I looked at per pupil expenditures at Harper. But your earlier comment about Magnet schools makes me wonder. Does CPS spend a ton more per pupil at the Magnet schools than it does on the rest of it's students? The $$ per pupil is reported by district, not by school. Harper's school report card shows a low income rate of 84.6%, a drop out rate of 18.3%, and a mobility rate of 30.5%(Yikes!) The CPSs spend $9564 per pupil.

[notconvinced]

Only the top academically performing students in the CPS attend Northside Prep. The entrance requirements are very selective. I'm not sure if there is an entrance exam such as with some of the private HS around here or if it is based on performance in elementary school. The pool of highly academically motivated students is obviously a big factor in the success of the Northside Prep magnet school. I'm sure they are offered a more 'honors' type curriculum but in terms of expenditures per pupil, I don't see that as being different.
I would guess that CPS does not spend more per pupil at the Magnet school. It is simply a different student population. Of course this is just my guess knowing how rigorous the process is for getting into Northside Prep. I have a friend who's kids go there.

[jenrik2714]

notconvinced said:

Only the top academically performing students in the CPS attend Northside Prep. The entrance requirements are very selective. I'm not sure if there is an entrance exam such as with some of the private HS around here or if it is based on performance in elementary school. The pool of highly academically motivated students is obviously a big factor in the success of the Northside Prep magnet school. I'm sure they are offered a more 'honors' type curriculum but in terms of expenditures per pupil, I don't see that as being different.

I would guess that CPS does not spend more per pupil at the Magnet school. It is simply a different student population. Of course this is just my guess knowing how rigorous the process is for getting into Northside Prep. I have a friend who's kids go there.

My nephew attends a CPS and he is a straight A student, he was one of 10,000 kids who tried to get into Whitney Young but he did not get accepted. My in-law's are hesistant to send him to the neighborhood school due to the increase in violence, and they can't afford Catholic School tuition that ranges from 6 to 8 thousand dollars....I told them to move out here so he could be challenged.

[rew]

It's an interesting discussion, because building a magnet school or an honors high school was one of the options people here wanted considered in lieu of the third HS.

How well would it really have gone over, if you had a HS with curriculum differences, or staff differences == opportunity differences??

[momof3]

That's why I personally was against the magnet school idea here. I believe it was discussed as an alternative to a third high school. I think every student in the district should get a chance to attend an excellent high school. I wonder how many students at Harper missed the chance at Northside Prep by a small amount on some entrance exam and how different would their lives be if they had gotten in? If I was in that situation, I would focus my energy on the differences within my own district before I went searching for other districts to compare to.

[jenrik2714]

Harper High School , a Chicago public school located on the city's South Side and serving the West Englewood neighborhood, was founded in 1911 and is named after William Rainey Harper, a noted educator, biblical scholar and university president. Harper draws a primarily African American population of approximately 1,300 students. Harper is a leading participant in the small schools movement within CPS. After successfully completing Freshman Academy their first year, students are invited to select one of five small school tracks, each of which is tied to an Education-To-Career (ETC) program combining academic studies and job skills training. Harper's five small school programs and ETC clusters focus on:

Construction Trades (CTA)

Culinary Arts (FACETS)

Entrepreneurship and Business (AOBE)

Travel, Tourism and Language (ILCA)

Information Processing (COMETS)

Approximately 85% of Harper's students participate in this integrated curriculum model combining classroom instruction with real world career experiences. Student who elect not to join a small school continue with a general high school curriculum.

[jenrik2714]

When I was a grad student at Depaul University in the School of Education, we had to visit Farragut HS and New Trier and compare the schools....

When I visited Farragut, my shadow was a participant in the George Patten Academy ( an academy inside Farragut) These kids had their own classrooms and they were seperated from the general population....these kids were bright and headed off to college. These kids were focused and headed off to college. (I find it funny how ROTC's are primarily set up in poor high schools--but that is just me)

The paper was a no brainer....some people actually walked out early and didn't spend the entire day at New Trier..why because they knew what to expect.

dr who--good point.....

[jenrik2714]

My alma mater was on the news recently---the honor kids walked out and protested the violence at their schools---good for them

[cantretirehere]

Kennedy HS. I went there. They walked out because the school was not keeping non-students from entering the school during the day. The non-students were causing distruptions.

We walked out 30 years ago for this same reason. When a school has students that are members of certain gangs, and then rival gangs come in during the day to cause trouble, who can learn?

30 years ago - and it seems that nothing has changed.

Well, not nothing. Supposedly the students now have to wear their ids in a visible location on their person. The students who walked out recently were complaining that the administration does not enforce this. The administration should be calling the police an forcing 'students' not wearing their id to leave.

Oh - wait a second, they don't have to call the police because the police are already stationed in the school like they were 30 years ago.

Let's just say that the police weren't effective for certain reasons, 30 years ago, that I'm not going to say here (if anyone knows my identity I don't want problems with them). Perhaps those same reasons for ineffectivity are still in existence.

[proschool]

This is getting freaky. I'm a Kennedy grad too. I remember the walkouts in 1980ish. They were pretty disorganized at that time. I think that some of the protesters just wanted to get outside but in general we were worried that racial violence would return when the weather got warmer.

[jenrik2714]

I graduated in 1990's, I saw a few fights, but nothing like what happened to this boy. I was an honor student in honors classes. I played on the winning Volleyball team for Kennedy when we took 3rd in the city. Most of us either went on to Daley college or UIC (where I went). We had to wear our ID's around our neck. My little sister graduated from Kennedy in 2000. Do you guys remember Mr. Sims----he was the volleyball coach--he retired--he had cancer--he used to smoke in his office while gym was going on! LOL

[Arch]

It seems to me like Oprah is trying to show the vast contrasts in society that exist. Today's segment was taking a decently affluent couple and making them live on minimum wage for a month... literally "to see how the other half lives" so to speak. Needless to say, it was eye opening to them. She's also focusing and trying to draw attention to the daily strife that over 30 million Americans have to deal with each and every day and how we as a society should help deal and try to solve these issues. It's not about the Have-Alots and Have-Somes.. It's about focusing the light on the impact to the children that it has, since they are indeed our future.

I doubt very seriously her intent was to "Pick on Neuqua". She's on a much larger mission, and personally, I applaud her for hitting them head on.

[cantretirehere]

jenrik2714 said:

I graduated in 1990's, I saw a few fights, but nothing like what happened to this boy. I was an honor student in honors classes. I played on the winning Volleyball team for Kennedy when we took 3rd in the city. Most of us either went on to Daley college or UIC (where I went). We had to wear our ID's around our neck. My little sister graduated from Kennedy in 2000. Do you guys remember Mr. Sims----he was the volleyball coach--he retired--he had cancer--he used to smoke in his office while gym was going on! LOL

I went there in the late 70's. I remember Sims - He was the coach of the swim team (which I was on) my senior year! I can't believe he was still there in the 90's. How weird. He seemed to be in his 40's back when I went there. Was coach Brown still there in the 80's or 90's? I really liked him. He was badly burnt during the time I went to school there and he almost died. He had 3rd degree burns on like 80% of his body. But he recovered and I had him for gym my junior year. He was so nice. My junior year was the first year that we had co-ed gym classes.

Sounds like a few of us went to the same overcrowded, crappy, gang ridden, racially violent HS (speaking for the seventies, mind you) and yet still found a way to make it to 'utopic' Naperville. Maybe we past graduates of 'bad' (ie. not prep or magnet) CPS, who have kids in NV or WV should have been guests on Oprah. That would have been ironic!

[jenrik2714]

Now during the 90's Curie was a bad school. I went to Lourdes HS for my first 3 years and we had to take the Pulaski bus to get to the Archer bus. Every day kids from Curie would be fighting. Fighting on school grounds, the bus. Curie had race problems. They would leave off the bus and begin fighting. Curie had open campus so...

Maybe Curie was equivalent to what happened to Kennedy during the 70's and 80's. I don't know if you know but they torn down Miami Bowl....

I made it past Kennedy, rat infested UIC (where I managed to get my degree) and made it to Naperville/Aurora--sounds like the Jeffersons--I moved on up to the western suburbs. We finally got a piece of the pieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee LOL

[jenrik2714]

I also find it depressing that people will college degrees are only making 11-12 an hour...when we were prepped, they told us we would get good jobs! what a load!