Is Public Education in a State of Crisis?

Often in past years I shared articles from the UCLA Center for Mental Health in Schools via articles on the TutorMentorConnection.org site. That's an archive now so I'm not able to add new articles there.  Thus, from time-to-time I will share on these blogs.  Below is there eMail from April 21, 2022.

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From the Center for MH & Student/Learning Supports at UCLA 

Is public education in a state of crisis?

We note that a great many folks are stressing that public education is in a state of crisis. (Google the matter for a sample of what the media are saying.) And most of the statements are better examples of problem-naming than problem-solving.

At the same time, Secretary Cardona notes: “We are at the doorstep of a new chapter in American education.” And he has some things he is asking to happen to make things better. However, who will make it happen is not clear from what he says.

How are most of you perceiving the current state of public education?

And if you think public education is in crisis, what do you think would turn things around?

Our view is that the key mechanisms for stimulating the magnitude of fundamental and transformative changes needed reside at the state level. Such changes require sophisticated and unified policy actions by state legislators, chief state school officers, and boards of education, with support from a wide range of public education leaders and stakeholders.

We suggest that three fundamental changes in state education policies are needed to counter the factors threatening public education and the inequities experienced by so many schools, students, and families. These changes involve

 (1) increasing school budgets so that are competitive enough to attract and maintain a high quality professional work force (i.e., teachers, student/learning support staff, administrators),

 (2) transforming the policy framework for school improvement and accountability to include a primary focus on establishing a unified, comprehensive, and equitable system of student/learning supports that weaves together available school, home, and community resources,

 (3) supporting the establishment of structured school-community collaboratives designed to facilitate the weaving together of school, home, and community resources (e.g., collaboratives that bring together the resources of complexes of schools, a broad range of family representative, and a wide range of community stakeholders to work on unifying mutually beneficial efforts and blending resources).

These and related matters are detailed in

 > Improving School Improvement 

 > Addressing Barriers to Learning: In the Classroom and Schoolwide

 > Embedding Mental Health as Schools Change
   Access at http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/improving_school_improvement.html

 >Improving Teacher Retention, Performance, and Student Outcomes    http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/newteach.pdf

Finally, it would help if the many advocates for specific initiatives temporarily moved their lobbying efforts to deal with an agenda that addresses a big picture for school improvement policy and practice. The reality is that they currently are competing for the same sparse resources, and the winners are pursuing initiatives that cannot have more than a marginal impact in countering the factors threatening public education.
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We don't have email addresses for all who we hope will read this, so please share this with your colleagues. And as always, we ask that you share with us whatever you think others might find relevant. Send to Linda Taylor at Ltaylor@ucla.edu

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Visit the http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu and get to know the many resources in their web library.  

6-15-2022 update - the UCLA Center is planning a national online summit focused on unifying student/learning supports with mental health concerns fully embedded.  Read more in this PDF issues by the Center on June 15, 2022.

9-15-2022 update - Here's most recent "Rethinking Learning Supports" PDF from the UCLA Center for Mental Health in schools.  click here

8-8-2024 update - Here's another PDF from the UCLA Center, titled "A Brief Guide for Moving in New Directions".  It's from 2022.  It's full of charts and visualizations.  

Chicago Public Schools Annual Regional Analysis

The graphic below is just one page in a comprehensive analysis of school quality in one of Chicago Public Schools' 16 regions. Visit this page and see a list of the 16 regions. Choose whichever interests you, and dig in. This is an annual report, for 2017-18.

Report for Greater Calumet area - pdf

In articles on this blog, and the MappingforJustice blog I've frequently shown how maps can be used to understand the need for extra support of kids and families in different parts of Chicago.  There's no single interactive source for the type of analysis that needs to be done, so users will need to learn to draw from multiple map platforms.

For instance, the image below is a screen shot from a section of the Chicago Health Atlas, showing the North Lawndale area of Chicago.  I posted an article earlier today pointing to some of its features.

If you layer health disparities over poverty and locations of poorly performing schools you'd find the are the same areas. Building the public attention, and will, to draw needed resources into these areas, and keep it there for 10-20 years, is a mountain few have tried to climb. Yet is is a journey that needs to be taken, which I've tried over the past 25 years.

These are just two data resources you might use. Visit this concept map, and find many others.

I would like to find others who are trying to make sense of this data, and who are putting stories in blogs the way I do, with the same goals of mobilizing resources to support needed tutor, mentor and learning programs in areas where maps show a need.

In the Tweet I've embedded, I found some other statistics about poverty.

The number of kids in or near poverty in USA is huge. I pulled this from article at https://t.co/L15F94z15m Anyone have experience with FirstBook? https://t.co/h7rrobTk6L #tutor #mentor #clmooc pic.twitter.com/2bf8x0JODT

— Daniel Bassill (@tutormentorteam) March 13, 2019

"More than 31 million children in America are growing up poor, or near poor. More than HALF of the students attending U.S. public schools are from low-income households."  An analysis of the maps and the data will show where those kids live, which is where we need to be pointing resources, jobs programs and other help.

If you're writing such stories, share them in the comment section, or with a Tweet to me @tutormentorteam.

If you appreciate the information I'm sharing, and archiving, please consider supporting my efforts with a contribution. Visit this page to learn more.

New Chicago Resource to aid youth, teachers, parents

Yesterday I and about 150 others attended a To&Through Project launch event at the University of Chicago Gleacher Center. This is a powerful data-driven portal intended to increase the number of Chicago Public School 9th graders who aspire to go to a 4-year college (76%) to more than the 18%  who actually do go on to earn a 4-year college degree within 10 years of starting high school.

A range of handouts were provided, including one showing key milestones included in the To&Through strategy.  As I looked at them, I felt there needed to be something added, so I did.

Scroll down on the To&Through home page and you'll see a section under the heading of "Milestones that Matter", which I fully support.

However,  I feel that without emphasizing the support needed, at the school, and during the non-school hours, that helps kids get to 9th grade with momentum to succeed, too few will invest in the programs and talent needed in every school neighborhood where too few kids are not going to college and finishing.

I wrote this article in 2007 to illustrate how the huge emphasis on what happens in the school often reduces resources available for what needs to also be happening in non-school hours.

In the same 2007 article I included this concept map to illustrate how our combined support helps kids move through school and into careers, with, or without, a traditional 4-year college degree.

In a 2014 article titled "Developing Talent: Unlocking the Passion in Employees" I referred to a white paper published by the Deloitte University Press, which describes the concept of 'worker passion'. I hope you'll read it and understand the value of this trait as well as I do.

To me the development of these habits needs to start in elementary school and be reinforced all the way through high school, and then in vocational school and/or college.

Without educators and education funders focusing on pre 9th grade and post high school, and the non-school hours, it's likely that too few resources will support these other important milestones.

My only other wish from what I saw was that there would be an abundant use of maps.  

This map is from a presentation created in the 1990s to show a school-centered strategy that I was recommending then, and still advocate for now. This PDF is out of date, but the ideas are usable.

With a map you can show high schools and feeder schools within a defined area. In this case I'm showing Doolittle Elementary school and Phillips High School, on Chicago's South Side. On the map, and in the PDF, I show non-school programs in the area. On the Tutor/Mentor Program Locator's Interactive map, you can double click on a green star, and go to the web site of the organization.

On this graphic, I'm also listing businesses in the area. In other maps I show hospitals and colleges. In the asset section of the Program Locator you can build maps showing these assets.  All of these groups could be meeting regularly to help students move through school and into jobs and careers,  using data provided by To&Through and ideas provided by many others, to constantly increase the success of young people in this map-area.

In an article posted on the MappingforJustice blog I illustrate how libraries and hospitals in areas with highly segregated public schools could take on the intermediary role of drawing stakeholders in a map-area together. 

Similar map stories could be created for every high school in the city, or in other cities. Students, working with teachers and business volunteers could be creating the maps, creating the map stories, sharing them on blogs, YouTube and Instagram, and hosting meetings where adults discuss this information and become motivated to provide the talent and dollars needed in each school neighborhood.

Much of what I've written here was not discussed yesterday, or is on the To&Through web site.  Furthermore, the Interactive Program Locator is out of date, needs updating, and I've no money or talent to do this. Thus, it's not as useful for students and community organizers as it could be.

I'm hoping that many who attended will take a look and want to talk more about these ideas.

Free College for All - Let's Dig Deeper

One of the popular campaign issues that Bernie Sanders is proposing is 

"It’s Time to Make College Tuition Free and Debt Free"

On his web site he says "As President, Bernie Sanders will fight to make sure that every American who studies hard in school can go to college regardless of how much money their parents make and without going deeply into debt."

I see two problems with this.  

First,  he's only talking about tuition at public universities. And, if you read this article, you'll see that tuition is only 39% of the full cost of attending a 4-year public university. The major other cost is room and board.  Thus, many poor and middle class families still will not be able to afford college, or will go in debt to pay for it....just not as much.  And, of course, students will still not have as equal access to private colleges as much as more wealthy students have.

Second, is this "who studies hard in school" phrase.  At first glace, this makes sense. It's the American way. Work hard. Get rewarded. Get ahead.

The problem is, for many different reasons, a large number of US students are not motivated to "study hard", thus their grade point averages and college resumes don't look so good as they finish high school (if they do). Here's an interesting article titled "What's Wrong with School". 

In the "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis" book, Robert D. Putnam (see my article for link) shows the growing impact of where you live on what your support system is.  Youth born or living in high poverty have fewer people in the family, neighborhood or school who model the wide range of careers youth might aspire to, or who help kids build study habits and experiences that enable them to "do well in school".

However, it's not just kids in poverty who are not motivated in classrooms all across America.  While affluent families can pay the way for less prepared kids to get into the best colleges, or any college, less affluent families who might not qualify for the "study hard" free tuition deal, will only get their kids into college by absorbing large amounts of debt.

I'm not sure how much any of the candidates are addressing this issue of student motivation and how well schools, families and/or communities are addressing the problem. 

Just to be fair to Bernie Sanders, five of the six steps he talks about when he talks about college education, focus on the financial burdens incurred by student and parent loans. 

What do you think? Is this something we should be talking about?

Recommended Reading: Grad Nation 2015 report

Visit this link to read the "2015 Building a Grad Nation Report: PROGRESS AND CHALLENGE IN ENDING THE HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT EPIDEMIC"
This report is released annually, by the Alliance for Excellent Education, America’s Promise Alliance, Civic Enterprises, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. It shows detailed progress toward the GradNation goal of a national on-time graduation rate of 90 percent by 2020.

On the home page you can click into subsections titled "Explore this Report". Look at some of the "drivers" causing gains, or lack of gains, in graduation rates, like poverty, big cities, and big states.

Download the report and use this as research and recommended reading in groups who are focused on closing the opportunity gaps in Chicago and other cities and states.

Poverty - Public Education's Biggest Problem - Washington Post article

Two articles by Valerie Stauss in the October 18, 2013 and October 17, 2013 show the impact of poverty on education for poor kids and the impact of policy being driven by "elites" who have no personal experience with living in high poverty.

One paragraph reads "But education has a powerful role to play in combating poverty and its various manifestations. Not just by exposing children to career-advancing skills, but also by exposing them to a full range of potential interests and pursuits, by affording time and resources to discover what they care for and what they are good at, and by supporting creative thinking and creative action."

This type of support can be offered by non-school, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs, even if it is not being fully offered in the local school.

CPS School Closings - Map Analysis

While I post stories on this site I also continue to post stories related to mapping and visualization on the Mapping for Justice blog site. Today I did a map analysis of the area around King Elementary School, which is on the CPS school closing list. Take a look at this and other mapping stories.

Dog Eating Too Much of Education Conversation?

This week I've spent at least 10 hours listing to on-line discussions focused on helping more young people graduate with the preparation they need for college and to compete in a global marketplace. Saturday it was American Graduate. Monday and Tuesday it was the Education Nation Conference. I also listened to the Clinton Global Initiative. Last night I watched part of Education Nation on WTTW and today followed a live chat about the film.

There were a number of profiles of youth serving organizations, but too little discussion of the leadership, marketing and resources needed to fill neighborhoods around poorly performing schools with mentor-rich learning programs. It led me to create this graphic.

I think our public education conversation is monopolized by the education/business establishment and that a focus on poverty and strategies that fill the non-school hours with youth and family supports, including jobs, is just not getting enough attention.

Do you agree? Can you think of a better caption for this graphic than what I've posted? Where are you meeting with people to build the leadership and support system needed to make high quality, constantly improving youth tutoring, mentoring, arts and technology programs available in your community?

This concept map visualizes the "pipeline to careers" support kids need.  Youth in affluent areas have most of these supports. Those in high poverty area have too few. 

How do you evaluate the programs that are in your community? Do the web sites have graphics that show an intent to help youth through school and into jobs and careers? Most programs can't do everything, but do they show what role they take in this effort?

Who will sponsor another track of on-line broadcasts where leaders are talking of what they are doing to support a city-wide network of youth serving organizations operating in non-school hours?

I want to do better but don't have time to learn how.

This video featuring Sir Ken Robinson is one of several from the 2012 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference that you can find on YouTube. Below the video I've highlighted some quotes from the video and provided some comments.



In the first section of the video Robinson pointed out two challenges that I think are relevant to everything I've been writing about on this blog.

1) "Practitioners don't have time for theory" - To me he's saying 'The people in the classroom, or leading tutor/mentor programs, don't have time to view all of the videos, read all the blogs, or read all the research this is being produced.' This is a critical issue. Learning should be focusing on adults who need more about social problems and solutions, not just kids going from first grade through traditional education systems.

2) "Policy makers don't know much about theory or practice"...This is even more important. The people who are making policy decisions at the government level, or who make funding decisions at the corporate or foundation level are focused on short term issues and are often too busy to spend time learning from all of the information available to them. How do we engage them in learning from all of the information that is being shared?

I wrote an article a few weeks ago showing how it's hard to get non profit leaders to collaborate on fixing some of the problems they face because they are too busy fighting for day-to-day survival and success in their work. I hope that my articles stimulate thinking among others so we can innovate ways to engage more people in learning from each other and from on-line information.

Robinson also said in this video "No Social Change is Linear. It is unpredictable and dynamic." This article about Evaluating Social Innovation is one of many I've posted in the Tutor/Mentor Connection library that shows challenges non profits face. I feel that if we can engage volunteers, donors, policy makers, practice leaders, etc. in on-going on-line learning and relationship building we can create shared understanding of the goals of innovative projects before we begin to frame strategies to achieve them. My leadership of tutor/mentor programs intended to engage volunteers as leaders so they would give more of their own time, talent and dollars to help do the day-to-day work because they had a personal understanding of where we were headed and how well we were doing in getting there.

Robinson recommended that we "Engage in the flow of knowledge" and stated "We learn from collaboration". I've focused on site-based volunteer-rich non-school programs because they connect adults from beyond poverty -- and from the workplace -- with youth and families living in high poverty neighborhoods in an on-going learning process. Robinson talked about the "economic purpose of education". If business leaders see a strategic value in supporting employee involvement and use of company resources to make constantly improving tutor/mentor programs available in more places, we would begin to see programs in more places with talented staff who keep volunteers and youth involved for multiple years, and support learning by both youth and volunteers. Such programs could support a constant increase in the resources available and the number of people involved.

This animation by one of my interns illustrates how supporting the volunteer's growth can make a difference.

I've written a number of articles focused on learning. I think that we won't solve our K-12 education problems until we build an adult-learning support system where adults become personally engaged in service projects and through that are engaged in learning more about why the service is needed and ways they and other adults need to be more consistent in providing the resources to support the places where adults and kids connect.

Those places can be schools operating from 8am to 3:30pm, or non school programs operating right after school or in the evening or weekend hours.

Robinson said "There is everything you can do." I agree. We all have a role to play in creating social change and making mentor-rich programs available in high poverty neighborhoods of Chicago and other cities.

I hope you have found time to read this far and hope you'll share this with others.

Who is Protesting This? Redlining in Education

I'm reading a report titled "Education Redlining in New York City".

This is a quote from the introduction:

However, missing from the vision put forward by the Mayor and the New York Department of Education is any mention of what should be done to address the extremely high levels of segregation by race and class in the city’s neighborhoods and schools. Our leaders have known for some time that most of the “failing” schools in the city were located in the poorest neighborhoods and were serving the most disadvantaged children. So far, no effective action has been taken to begin to ameliorate these profound inequities.

Over the weekend I encourage you to read with me if you're tired of reading about the NATO protests in Chicago. As you do, take a look at some of the other articles I write which are all intended to "increase the number of people who care enough to give serious time, talent and dollars on an ongoing basis to solve the problem."

Battle Plan for War on Poverty

I attended a STEM Education Summit in the Chicago area on Friday, hosted at Oak Park/River Forest High School. While the speakers at this Summit were not talking about the high school drop out crisis, which I've written about in past articles, they were talking about a workforce crisis that will result from baby-boomers retiring and not enough young people preparing to go into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) related careers.

Over the past 18 years I've created a variety of graphics to illustrate this problem. The one below shows that the "pipeline to careers" is not working well enough to reach kids at an early age and provide a wide range of mentoring and learning supports that would result in a larger number finishing high school and post high school education and entering careers in STEM or any other avocation they choose.



In the conferences I go to and web sites I browse I don't see many who are using maps and charts and thinking about this problem the way generals and CEOs think about the distribution channels and logistics needed to win military wars, or business wars.

A few years ago I created a graphic that illustrates the planning that would need to take place to enable more and better mentor-rich programs to be in neighborhoods where kids don't have an effective entry point into the "pipeline to careers" nor to that have enough effective supports along the way. As a result, we're losing kids to street violence, bad health, poor nutrition, and lack of preparation for adult jobs and responsibilities.

I've been trying to think of a way to communicate this idea in an article that I could post on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC web site or in the collection I've been building on Scribd.com.

If you look at this chart you'll see how I compare the planning process needed to support military forces in many places to that needed to make tutor/mentor programs available in many places. While many might want to create "pilots" or "demonstration projects" we can't really afford not to have some sort of learning support reaching K-12 kids in all of the high poverty areas of Chicago with intense forms of learning support and mentoring, while also providing needed supports to kids in all other neighborhoods who may need more inspiration and support to succeed in school and/or choose STEM careers.

Maps can help us focus our attention on specific parts of a problem. Out of all the people talking about education reform, perhaps some can focus just on high poverty neighborhoods, while others can focus on non-poverty areas. If we can segment our focus then we're talking about the same problems and able to converge on better solutions than if we have a mixed bag of discussion where the words are the same but the meanings are different, depending on what the economic and community support is for the kids you're talking about.

So, if we have a team focused on helping kids born in poverty be starting STEM careers in 20-25 years, the first step is to be building a library of information and ideas that the group can use to innovate new solutions that might generate more consistent support, and a better distribution of resources in more places.

To reach youth at every age level in more places with age-appropriate mentoring and learning a huge range of programs will be needed, meaning the planners need to be thinking of ways to recruit, train and equip thousands of program organizers, leaders, tutors, mentors, coaches, etc.

Imagine the logistics needed to put military forces all over the world and keep them supplied with food, weapons, ammunition, medicine, etc. The army of teachers, tutors, mentors and leaders needed to reach kids in every poverty neighborhood of the Chicago region requires the same type of on-going support.

The War in Iraq lasted over 8 years. World War II lasted 4 years. WalMart has been growing for more than 40 years! Imagine the thinking that is being done some place in the headquarters of the military and at companies like Wal Mart that enables them to constantly recruit and train new talent to take the place of those who retire, resign or are lost in combat. We need this same type of thinking preparing young people for STEM careers, and for careers leading programs that prepare young people for these careers!

We've spent billions of dollars fighting wars. Big business spends billions of dollars on their human resource development so they have well-trained people in the jobs that need to be filled in order for the companies to be successful. We need people who are innovating ways to generate revenue to support this massive infrastructure of youth development, mentoring and tutoring programs in just the same way.

It all comes down to how well you can build and sustain public attention, interest and support for the war effort. Companies spend millions of dollars on advertising and public relations to maintain support for their business strategies and to attract customers to their products and services. While there are events like National Mentoring Month, National Volunteer Week, Make A Difference Day, Black History Month, etc. where is the coordination and planning needed to turn these into an orchestra of events needed to build long-term public support for this battle plan to end poverty by help more kids through school and into 21st century jobs and careers?

I have been trying to map these ideas using the types of graphics I've used in this article, and using on-line platforms like this Debategraph tool.

I'm not sure how clearly I've communicated this idea. I invite others to do their own version of this story. However, while I may not be communicating as clearly as I'd like, I've spent more years thinking about this from a systems perspective than many others in this country. I've written more than 1000 articles on this blog alone, and created numerous illustrated essays posted on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC site and in many other places.

If you're trying to develop a strategy to mentor kids to jobs and careers, I'd like to encourage you to read some of the articles I've written. I also encourage you to hire me to help you understand these ideas. I can come to you and talk about any of the articles on this blog, or that I've posted in the Tutor/Mentor Institute library or the Scribd.com library.

If you've been fortunate to amass great wealth and you want to leave a legacy, why not put your name on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC or bring the Institute to alma mater where it can be integrated into the work a university does to prepare young people for adult roles.

If you'd like to connect, just post a comment or meet me on Twitter or Facebook.

Fighting Dropout Crisis – Building Public Will

In the article I wrote Friday, title We All Pay a Price for the Dropout Crisis, I provided quotes from some of the leaders who spoke at events held in Chicago this week. The basic message was “High School Drop Outs Cost All of Us, not just the young people who face a “miserable life”.

(This map was created by Learning Point Associates. See this and other maps here.

I’ve attended dozens of events focused on poverty, public education and the dropout crisis. I’ve read all sorts of research on how to make youth programs and schools more effective.

They all have a point where they say “if we had the money” and if we had the “public will” to create policies and funding strategies to support better schools and better workforce-development activities.

But then they don’t go further to say “how do we achieve this?”

That’s what I focus on. I’d like to suggest two strategies in this article, which I’ve written about often in the past.

1)Using maps for accountability, resource distribution and to obtain the 51% of votes needed to enact new legislation. I suggest that leaders and voters could use maps to build understanding where this problem is most severe, build public support, and to hold elected leaders accountable for what they do. The map above shows locations of high drop-out schools in Illinois. They are mostly concentrated in urban areas but they are scattered throughout the state. The map below shows state legislative districts. The third map is from the Tutor/Mentor Program Locator and shows legislative districts in the Chicago area, with overlays showing poorly performing schools, poverty, and locations of existing non-school tutor/mentor programs.

Using maps like this, leaders could determine what districts have high drop out schools. These are districts where elected leaders (and businesses) should be held accountable for what they do to bring resources to the district to combat this problem. The Tutor/Mentor Program Locator map does not show all schools, or have a layer of data showing dropout schools. We could build this if we had the resources. However, such a map may be already available from another sources. If it is, let me know and we can point you to it.

If such a map does not yet exist, then it could be created through a service learning or graduate school project at a local high school or university. I outlined this map-building process in this PDF essay.

Once the map is available on the Internet we can determine how many votes are available from representatives with drop out schools in their districts. If it’s not 51% or more of needed votes, then the next step would be to look at surrounding districts where people and businesses are paying part of the costs of youth not finishing school. We could also look at districts with schools where a large number of youth are not finishing school, but which are not as bad as those in the “high” drop out category.

The goal is to identify enough representatives in the house and senate to get 51 to 60% of the votes needed to pass new legislation.


2) Expand the number of people who “care” enough to vote, volunteer and donate. This is equally important. At Wednesday’s dropout event, Andrea Zopp, President of the Chicago Urban League said “We’re tired. We don’t vote”. We need to get more people into the voting booth.

However, just getting more people in districts with high dropout schools to vote won’t assure 51% of the votes needed to change legislation, unless there are that many legislators representing districts with high drop out schools.

We need to find a way to build empathy and support in more affluent areas where they don’t have a lot of poorly performing schools. We can do that through an effort to increase the number of volunteers who connect with inner city youth in volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs.

We can do that if we focus on transforming the volunteer, not just the youth. In October 2009 I wrote an article titled Transforming Adults Involved In Volunteer-Based Tutor/Mentor Programs


This article was converted into this animation by an intern from the University of Michigan working with one of our one-year fellows from Northwestern University. Then it was converted into a video with the help of a volunteer from the United Kingdom.

The point of this article is that volunteers from many parts of the city and suburbs are connecting with inner city youth in non-school and school based tutor/mentor programs. If those volunteers are well supported and stay involved for multiple years some will build a personal bond with the kids, and an empathy for the problem, and will be willing to do more to help the kids move through school and into careers….if they are well-supported in their programs and encouraged in an on-going public education effort.

If we were to have 100 mentor-rich programs in the Chicago region with 50-100 volunteers each, that could be 5000 to 10,000 volunteers who actively advocate for public and private sector policies that help them in their own efforts to help kids to careers, and help schools and others do more of the work that needs to be done.

If in the other big cities throughout the state there were another 100 programs with 25-100 volunteers involved, that could double the number of potential advocates working to change the number of votes available to support new policies that reduce the dropout rate and help more kids through school and into careers out of poverty and contributing to the tax base and the democracy we cherish.

If we keep volunteers connected to kids and programs in years after they do direct service, the total number of potential voters would be even larger after 10 or 20 years. If we also are showing young people what it takes to help them move from poverty to jobs and careers, young people who graduate from these programs can also become voters and advocates.

This represents an army of not-yet-organized potential!

Take time to review these ideas. Share them with people in your own network. Support the infrastructure that leads to a growing number of volunteers connecting with kids in neighborhoods with high-dropout schools. Build map-based accountability and resource distribution strategies that assure that a full range of birth-to-work programs reach kids in neighborhoods with the highest dropout schools.

Instead of paying $200,000 a year to keep a youth in juvenile detention or paying $50,000 to keep an adult in jail, redirect this money to an education and enrichment system that moves more of these young people to jobs and careers.

It can be done.

We all pay price for high school dropouts

In this article I’m providing quotes from some of the speakers at two events I attended this week in Chicago. On Wednesday the event was “Re-Enrolling Out of School youth: A state, County and City Action Blueprint". On Tuesday the event was “Connecting Communities for the Common Good” and was advertised as “Conversations and Partnership Opportunities with the Obama Administration’s Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Office.”

I ran into some of the same people at both events. Many I've known for more than a decade.

This weekend I’ll post an article showing how maps can be used to build partnership and accountability and possibly to get the 51% of votes needed to affect legislation in the Illinois House and Senate. I’ll also show how volunteer-involvement in tutor/mentor programs can provide the extra adult support youth are calling for and can also build the extra political advocacy needed to gain needed legislative support.

But in this article I want to share some quotes and hopefully get more people thinking about this pipeline to jobs and careers. It's clogged.

Wednesday’s event drew much more media attention than Tuesday’s White House Partnership event, even though the Mayor was a speaker.

The editorial pages of the Chicago SunTimes and Chicago Tribune both had articles showing the high costs to society of young people dropping out of high school.

In the December 8 Chicago SunTimes, Alejandro Escalona wrote “I’ve covered Chicago as a reporter for almost 20 years and every now and then, a new study6 comes along that presents the dropout rate among minority students as an emergency situation with catastrophic consequences for minority communities.” Then he writes “So I find it refreshing that the latest report looks at the drain on city and state resources. Reducing the dropout rate would lower the costs of some enormously expensive social problems and, quite simply, be good for city and state finances.”

A star-studded cast of education and political leaders addressed the crowd on Wednesday at the Union League Club in Chicago. Here are some quotes:

Jesse Ruiz, Chair, Ill. State Council on Re-Enrolling Students Who Have Dropped Out.
“We know what we need to do. We just need a collective effort to do it.”

Andrea Zopp, President & CEO Chicago Urban League
“It’s not just the right thing to do. There is 20% difference in people going to jail between high school grads and youth who dropout. The cost per year to keep someone in prison is nearly $50,000 per person.”

Toni Preckwinkle, Cook County Board President
“The failure of our public school system feeds our prisons.” “The US has 5% of the world’s people and 25% of the world’s prison population. We’re doing something terribly wrong.”

Andrew Sum, Professor of Economics, Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern Illinois University …author of the research discussed on Tuesday and in media editorials.
“Everything has gotten worse over past 25 years.” “You can no longer make it in Illinois without a high school diploma.” “We can’t have a strong democracy if we tolerate this problem”.

Gery Chico, Chair, Illinois State Board of Education
“Kids tell us what the problem is. First is ‘No adults in my life to motivate me.’ “

Jean-Claude Brizard, Chicago Public Schools CEO, and a Panel of political leaders also spoke but I did not get quotes from them.

While the "Re-Enrolling Dropouts" event was Wednesday, on Tuesday an event at the UIC Forum attracted nearly 1000 guests, with Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel kicking off the event. It's goal was to show faith based and community organizations ways they can build partnership with the Federal Government.

Some quotes from Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel
“Too many families are falling through the cracks….. Government cannot do it alone."

Marie Johns, Deputy Administrator, Small Business Administration was the noon keynote speaker. She said “We’re all given gifts and are responsible to use those gifts to build a better community.”

As Alejandro Escalona wrote in the SunTimes, this is not new news. Even talking about the costs to society is not new news. Unless we find a way to build public willpower to build and sustain comprehensive, mentor-rich school-to-work programs in all neighborhoods with high drop out rates this story will repeat over and over in the coming years.

View the tags at the left to see the hundreds of articles I’ve written about these problems since 2005. Here are a couple:

On October 23, 2007 I wrote a summary of a Chicago Public Schools meeting led by Arne Duncan back in 2006 where he called for High Schools of Excellence…Consequences of Dropping Out of School in Illinois

In September 2005 I wrote a summary of an Illinois High School Summit hosted by the Illinois College Access Network and Chicago Public Schools. The discussion at the Summit was framed by the question, “What is the future vision and what must be achieved systematically for high schools to be successful in the 21st century?” During this Summit one man brought up issue of political will.

He said “Are the right people involved to make significant change? Are the people driving the process the ones in charge of crafting the solutions?

This question was not answered in 2005 and it's not yet been answered in 2011. I've been focusing on this problem for 20 years and I've shared my ideas with Gery Chico, Jesse Ruiz, the Alternative Schools Network, and the past CEOs of Chicago Public Schools and the Mayors of Chicago. They've been available on the internet since 1998.

Yet, I'm still just a whisper in the wilderness. Too few are taking the time to understand how maps and mentoring can be used to expand support for inner city youth and kids attending high school dropout factories.

Visit this blog over the coming weekend and see what I suggest is a strategy for building the public and political will needed to bring more resources into areas with high dropout schools so we can get the pipeline working for more kids.

Achievement gap: Black Students Still Behind

Today's Chicago Tribune includes a feature article titled: CPS fails to close performance gap: Black students still losing academic ground despite reforms, study finds

It leads off saying:

Twenty years of reform efforts and programs targeting low-income families in Chicago Public Schools has only widened the performance gap between white and African-American students, a troubling trend at odds with what has occurred nationally.

Across the city, and spanning three eras of CPS leadership, black elementary school students have lost ground to their white, Latino and Asian classmates in testing proficiency in math and reading, according to a recent analysis by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.

It includes a statement saying:

"If school closings destabilized certain neighborhoods, other efforts were ineffective — millions of dollars pumped into countless after-school initiatives and tutoring and mentoring programs geared toward African-American students, only to see math and reading scores languish and many students fall further behind."

I challenge this statement of "countless after-school initiatives and tutoring and mentoring programs".

I've been hosting a database of non-school volunteer-based tutoring and/or mentoring program serving Chicago and have been using maps to show where these programs are needed, where existing programs are located, and where more dollars are needed to help programs constantly innovate ways to have a greater impact.

I tried to find census maps on the internet today to support this article. Here's one set of maps showing demographic concentrations in the Chicago region. This is from a U.S. Census Grids web site.



Here's a maps showing African American population concentrations in Chicago, created by the Tutor/Mentor Connection in the mid 2000s. On this map we've overlaid locations of poorly performing schools from the 2007 ISBE watch list. From both sets of maps you can see high concentrations of African Americans living in high poverty areas. You can also see a huge number of failing schools.

On this next map you can see locations of different non-school tutor/mentor programs in the Chicago area. You just don't see a large number of programs in many parts of this map. I encourage you to use the Interactive Program Locator and create your own map. Sort by type of program and age group served.
When trying to understand this information you need to think in layers. What is the distribution of tutor/mentor programs serving elementary school kids? Middle school? High school? In each neighborhood programs serving all three groups need to be equally available?

If "millions of dollars had been spent on countless non-school tutor/mentor programs" targeted at African American youth, the map should show many more programs in these neighborhoods than we show.

There may be more. This mapping project has never received funding from the city, the schools or major philanthropy. Thus, there may be programs we don't know about and some of our information is out-of-date. Furthermore, there needs to be many more questions asked, to know more about what these programs have in common, how they differ, what they need to find and retain quality staff and financial support, ways they can constantly improve.

The Tribune story offers a generalization that makes one think that millions of dollars were spent on a comprehensive tutoring/mentoring strategy. Millions may have been spent, but there is no evidence that any strategy has been used to assure that Chicago has a broad distribution of well-organized and constantly improving non-school tutor/mentor programs in high poverty neighborhoods.

This could change if the Mayor, a foundation or an investor were to become a partner and provide financial support to the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC so we can update the maps and launch an aggressive advertising campaign to help existing programs get the funding and talent they need to operate in more places and to constantly improve their impact over the next 10-20 years.

Chronic Truancy Jumps in area schools

Today's Chicago Tribune has a feature showing that truancy is rising in Chicago area schools, which contributes to poor performance, high drop out rates, and a high cost to society and to the young people involved.

One school shown with 56.9% of students chronically truant was Robeson High School, located at South Normal Boulevard on the South Side. I used the http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifChicago Program Locator's Interactive map to zoom into this neighborhood and created this map.



This map shows that there are three organizations trying to reverse this trend in the area around Robeson. One is the Yancy Boys & Girls Club which has developed a partnership with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metropolitan Chicago. A second is the By the Hand Club for Kids, who on their web site show some impressive statistics.

I did a second map showing the area of Belmont-Cragin Elementary School, located in the Central part of Chicago. This map required a little more effort to make because this school was not included on the 2007 or 2008 list of low performing public schools, thus it's not included in the map on the Program Locator. Since the Tutor/Mentor Connection has had no public or private funding to support this mapping project since a $50,000 gift from an anonymous donor in late 2007 we've not been able to keep updating the mapping and now we have no staff at all to support this resource.



Thus I placed an X on the map to show where Belmont-Cragin is located. You can see that while there is a medium rate of poverty in the area (based on 2000 census info) there are no tutor/mentor programs in the area around the school. If you use the Asset Map feature on the Program locator you could determine if any churches, hospitals, banks or colleges are in the area, who could be helping start such programs.

I have been collecting information about tutor/mentor programs and using maps to show where they are needed and where existing programs are operating since 1993. My goal is to help existing programs connect and learn from each other while creating public attention that would draw more donors and volunteers to support the existing programs or to help new ones form where they are needed.

I have hosted a Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference every year since 1994 to encourage programs to network and share ideas. Obviously the Boys & Girls Clubs, Big Brothers Big Sisters and By the Hand Club have some expertise they could share with others....if they were to make time to participate in the conferences.

There are many organizations in Chicago who have much to share, and much to learn. We all need more resources to support the work we do and constantly improve based on what we learn from our own efforts and the efforts of peers. Yet if we can't find time to connect and share ideas and work together to build the pool of resources available to do this work, it's unlikely that we'll ever have more than a few good tutor/mentor programs working to help more youth succeed in school and in life.

There's still time to register for Friday's conference. The web site is www.tutormentorconference.org

Technology in the Classroom. What's the Impact?

I'm a big fan of using computers and the internet to work smarter, faster and to expand my network of people and ideas. I feel that if young people learn some of these skills the problems that they face in the future have a better chance of being solved.

However, this is not necessarily how technology in the classroom is being evaluated. Here is a link to a Sept. 3 2011 article from the New York Times titled In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores

It's worth reading. What are your thoughts?

Economic inequality: The real cause of the urban school problem

Today in the Chicago Tribune is a commentary titled: Economic inequality: The real cause of the urban school problem This was written by economists from Harvard and the University of California at Berkley.

The authors write, "Our findings show that the root of the problems facing urban schools can be found in gradual but extremely powerful changes in the nation's economy — not the least of which is the increasingly unequal distribution of family incomes."

I've been using maps since 1993 to try to show this income inequality and the connection between high poverty concentrations and poorly performing schools. We include maps in many of the articles we've written on this blog and in the MappingforJustice blog. Our interactive Program Locator can be used to create your own map story for your own communications.


Every time I've hosted a leadership conference in Chicago (the next is November 4) I've put maps on easels to help others see the power of these as a tool to focus attention and resources to volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in all high poverty neighborhoods.

I've tried to get attention of leaders who've attended the conferences so they would incorporate maps and our strategy of volunteer-based tutor/mentor program growth into their own leadership.

Today there was another editorial in the Tribune, challenging the way TIFF money seemed to go to charities favored by the Mayor and his wife.

If the Mayor had incorporated T/MC maps into his efforts to help kids in poverty perhaps the aldermen, state legislators and others would do the same. Were that happening there would now be a much stronger distribution of high-quality tutor/mentor programs in all of the poverty areas of the city and suburbs and perhaps there would be a different future for some of the youth who have grown up in neighborhoods of high poverty and under-performing schools.

That's the past. We have a new Mayor and we have another presidential election. We have new research. Now can we interest some of the leaders and people who are concerned with poverty and its impact on the economy and quality of life for all of the people in the region to participate in the next Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference on Friday, Nov. 4 at the Metcalfe Federal Building?

Can someone step forward to become the Steve Jobs who bring vision and financing to the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC to help build tutor/mentor program support infrastructure in Chicago and other cities?

Better Address Barriers to Learning

I've been a fan of the UCLA Center for Mental Health in Schools for several years. This PDF is a policy brief I received via email today.

It's title is: Expanding School Improvement Policy to Better Address Barriers to Learning

Under the title is the quote: "It is not enough to say that all children can learn or that no child will be left behind; the work involves achieving the vision of an American education system that enables all children to succeed in school, work, and life."
From the 2002 mission statement of CCSSO - the Council for Chief State School Officers

If you're from UCLA and live in the Chicago region why not become a sponsor of the Tutor/Mentor Connection's May and November Conference or Tutor/Mentor Program Locator and help us increase the number of volunteers working with inner-city youth so more people begin to have a personal stake in helping remove barriers to learning around the schools operating in the highest poverty neighborhoods.

More bad news on education

The headline of this Chicago Sun Times article is "Over a third of students entering college need remedial help."

In the final paragraph of the article one of the people interviewed says “It’s not a quick-fix kind of issue,” Bragg said. “These are systems that have grown apart rather than grown together over the years.”

I encourage readers to browse the articles on this blog, going back as far as 2005, to find ideas that they might use to use maps to better understand what schools produce the most kids not prepared for college and to expand the non-school learning supports available to those kids.

Treat Schools like Prisons?

Nathan Bootz, Superintendent, Ithaca,Michigan Public Schools, makes a powerful case for treating public schools like state prisons. Read the article on the Fireside Learning site.

He says, "Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children."