{"id":4440,"date":"2017-04-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-04T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/cw_post\/cbe-in-chicago\/"},"modified":"2020-02-05T13:01:36","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T18:01:36","slug":"cbe-in-chicago","status":"publish","type":"cw_post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/cw_post\/cbe-in-chicago\/","title":{"rendered":"CBE in Chicago"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This is the first post in a series covering my recent trip to Chicago.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Chicago perseveres. And it is paying off in education \u2013 most trend lines are going in the right direction. I started visiting Chicago to learn about their efforts to improve education over twenty years ago. It\u2019s a huge city (the district has 516 district-run schools and 125 charters serving a student population with over 80 percent at an economical disadvantage) working within the context of historical racism that created rigid segregation. (Please put <\/span>The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America\u2019s Great Migration<\/span><\/i><\/a> on your reading list.) It\u2019s obvious that these dynamics are still at play, limiting opportunity and sometimes <\/span>breaking the social contract<\/span><\/a>. Yet, there are hundreds of organizations and thousands upon thousands of educators who, day in and day out, are working to improve educational opportunity in Chicago. <\/span><\/p>\n

In terms of competency-based education, there aren\u2019t 1,000 CBE flowers blooming in Chicago…yet. There are shoots popping up in the city, school by school. I visited four schools on the move.<\/span>\u00a0<\/b>Thanks to Amy Huang at <\/span>LEAP<\/span><\/a> and Alan Mather and Dakota Pawlicki from CPS\u2019s <\/span>Office of College and Career Success<\/span><\/a>, I was able to visit <\/span>Lovett Elementary<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>CISCS West Belden<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Robert Lindblom Math and Science Academy<\/span><\/a> (Lindblom), and\u00a0<\/span>Benito Juarez Community Academy<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

State Policy Context<\/h3>\n

In 2016, Illinois state legislature passed the\u00a0<\/span>Postsecondary and Workforce Readiness Act<\/span><\/a>, which included a competency-based pilot as well as an effort to begin the calibration process between graduation expectations in mathematics and freshman-year mathematics in higher education.<\/span><\/p>\n

The IL Department of Education has launched the\u00a0<\/span>Competency-Based High School Graduation Requirements Pilot Program<\/span><\/a> for twelve districts to \u201creplace high school graduation course requirements with a competency-based learning system.\u201d The pilot only focuses on grades 9-12, although districts will quickly learn that they are going to want a full district system \u2013 otherwise there is a constant flow of students with big gaps in their learning, as students in the earlier years are passed on without ensuring they are mastering the fundamentals.<\/span><\/p>\n

See articles on IL for more information:<\/span><\/p>\n