One of our most requested programs in Cook County is Conflict Resolution for Youth. Schools across the county express their difficulty in getting past conflicts to reach education each day. Students come to schools with complex issues including hunger, broken families, homelessness, fear, anger, and a lack of social interaction that previous generations take for granted.  

A classic grade school science (or is it art?) activity calls for charcoal briquettes, ammonia, salt, water, food coloring, and bluing. What is bluing? Bluing is a dye used to treat clothing that has yellowed with age and use. Here is copy from the website for Mrs. Stewart’s Bluing:

If you read something tragic in the papers, like a youth being shot, or a life being lost to gangs, drugs, or the cumulative impact of poverty, and you want to do something to change the future for kids born or living in high poverty neighborhoods, I encourage you to visit the www.tutormentorconnection.org web site and use it like a text book, as a resource, and as a guide for how you, your church, your business and/or your friends change what's happening in many inner city neighborhoods.

As chalk disappears from the classroom, and images of blackboards, chalk dust, and clapping erasers are replaced by images of whiteboards, Magic Markers, and dry erasers, and even these are replaced by computer screens and projectors, sticks of chalk and blackboards (which are actually usually greenboards in grade schools and high schools and brownboards in universities) remain icons in our collective educational imagination, as persistent as clip art graphics of little red school houses, school bells, and an apple for the teacher.

Jim McLaughlin is part of a research team working with the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) to study the connections between learning in the arts and learning in other content areas - mathematics, literature, writing, and world languages - in twelve Chicago public schools. But he is not only a researcher. He is also a learner. He recently participated in a poetry writing institute led by established living poets.

President George W. Bush visited Liberia on the 21st of February, 2008, the first visit by an American President in three decades.

One of the ways to understand the once and future role of the arts in school improvement is to poke around in the iconography of schools themselves. What is the history and meaning of bell schedules, of the intercom, of desks in rows, of asphalt playgrounds, of chain-link fences, of pencils, of erasers, of cursive writing, of blackboards, of whiteboards, of calculators, of computers, of notebook paper? Investigating the images and artifacts of public education maps the subjective terrain that arts education advocates work within.

A tax on bottled water? A proposed 10.5% sales tax in Cook County? When does it stop?

Mayor Daley has even been quoted as saying:

"I'm open to more innovative ideas on things to tax..."

Wouldn't it be cool if we could fund the Chicago Public Schools with something other than taxes?

Local businesses spend money to advertise. One day, all that money they spend will be with companies located in Silicon Valley. Our local economy will be devastated when all this money leaves the state and never comes back.

Bela Legosi’s Count Dracula, perhaps the most famous creature of the night, was filmed entirely during the daytime. The same movie set for the daytime Dracula was inhabited at night by an entirely different cast and crew to shoot the Spanish language version of Bram Stoker’s classic tale.