While on a trip to Washington, D.C., I paid a visit to the offices of the U.S. Department of Education. Special structures had been built around the entrances to the building- replicas of the archetypal “Little Red Schoolhouse”. I later found out that these had been installed to protect government employees from falling masonry, but why were these particular wooden pieces of nostalgia chosen to grace the doorways to these large, gothic, stone buildings?

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.  

John Boller is a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago who works with Chicago public school teachers to support greater depth and authenticity in their mathematics teaching. He is working with the Chicago Public Schools Office of Academic Enhancement and with the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) at Swift and Thorp schools through a U.S. Department of Education grant to integrate the arts with rigorous mathematics instruction.

The human creature is inherently motivated - to explore, to wonder, to at the very least seek food and shelter. The human brain is programmed to seek stimulation. Boredom is a learned behavior that fills the gap between "the mismatch of one's skill and the challenge at hand". Boredom is the invention of creativity alienated from choice. Once learned, boredom can become a "stance" of the learner (literally), an aggressive response to limited options and past disappointments.

As part of their Renaissance 2010 school transformation plan, the administration of the Chicago Public Schools annually announces a list of low-performing schools to be closed. What's different this year is that community groups are at the table with CPS for the first time.

Educational testing tends to be time consuming, nerve-wracking, humiliating, and boring, but above all, expensive - eating up resources that might be better used for teaching and learning. And just last week Chicago Public Schools was embroiled in a conflict over having to give newly arrived immigrants high stakes standardized tests in English, and only in English.

A number of years back, an award-winning, Broadway-produced playwright gave a talk at Victory Gardens Theater here in Chicago about the years he had spent making his living resubmitting the same script, in different forms, to a Hollywood film studio. It had quickly dawned on him that, although the studio had sought him out and commissioned this script, the film was never going to be green-lighted for production.

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.