Another interesting article from this weekend's News-Gazette regarding Urbana High Schools federally-mandated NCLB restructuring:
After months of meeting and debating, the plan to restructure Urbana High School in the wake of failing to meet federal testing benchmarks has yet to be finalized.
In a June 4 e-mail, the State Board of Education gave the district 30 days to come up with a revised plan for figuring out what's working and fixing what's not.
But those days have come and gone. School starts next month, and though parts of the plan are still undecided, Urbana schools staff members have begun altering how UHS functions.
When school starts Aug. 27 for freshmen (Aug. 28 for grades 10-12), students will have an altered day, including more extra-help time with teachers for underclassmen. Freshmen will share teachers in core subject areas like math and reading, and teachers will meet more regularly to share knowledge and skills, a concept called a professional learning community.
More on restructuring in general here. Both articles are quite good. The NG has been doing a great job with local stories lately (or at least so it seems to me), with this seris, the Jon White stories, and the Garden Hills stories, among others.
It was my understanding that the big problem with the plan was lack of oversight. Specifically, the extra admin position that was sliced out of the plan by the board. Not sure why there is a hold up getting this back to the state.
Professional learning communities (PLC) is a brain child of the Stevenson High School district in suburban Chicago. Apparently the idea is that a school with almost no minorities and hardly a poor child in sight will have all the answers for a school like UHS, with its wide diversity of ethnic and SES students.
I hope PLC works for them, but knowing the roots of the program I kind of doubt it will. Schools are expected to perform miracles with some of the worst-off people in a community. When they don't turn those kids around in a year or two they are considered failures. It is a fairly insane paradigm.