Stacy Gates is the President of the Chicago Teacher's Union. She recently held a press conference where she touted the successes of Richards Career Academy. The school is one of 20 schools in the district that adopted the Sustainable Community Schools model. The Journey for Justice Alliance has pushed this model for 20 years, touting the model as a way to teach children in poor urban areas the skills needed to succeed in life rather than teaching children to succeed at taking standardized tests.
The model boasts 6 pillars:
Curriculum that is engaging, culturally relevant, and challenging
High quality teaching, not test taking
Wrap around support such as health care, eye care, and social & emotional services
Providers are accountable and culturally competent
Transformational parent and community engagement actively involved in planning
Inclusive school leadership committed to implementing the model
The brief description of each pillar is straight out of the Marxist critical race theory program. All the buzzwords of the woke left are included: culture, inclusion, diversity, representative of the community, etc.
This model has been in place for a few years, so you would expect Ms. Gates to tout the successes at her press conference, where she called for implementation of the model across all schools in the Chicago area. I think all of us would, in principle, support a teaching method that actually taught children skills and imparted knowledge that would set them up for success in the future. So how has Richards Career Academy performed?
The school boasts an 80% absenteeism rate. 80% of students are absent from school at any given time. Or a majority of student are not attending school. That's not clear but either way you have to ask, how can students learn anything if they are not there? Osmosis? Computer chips implanted in their brain?
They do take the standardized tests other students take in order to compare and contrast the teaching methods. At Richards, not one student, NOT ONE, tested competent in math or English. Across all 20 schools using the model, 4% of 11th graders tested competent in English and math. The average for the rest of the CSD schools was 26%.
Gates and other proponents claim the students are taught in a way that gives them skills which are not measurable by tests. I'll say this, math is math. I don't care how you teach the student, addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication is consistent. Ask a student to solve 2+2 and they should get 4 no matter the formula they use to get there.
What the union likes, as well as the politicians, is that the students are culturally and politically aware. In other words, they have been indoctrinated to believe what the teachers want them to believe. To be socially and culturally active, just like the students at Columbia University.
Ignorant students are easy to manipulate by tyrannical governments. That's what the model accomplishes. And it is clearly very successful.