Education Desk

Advocacy groups argue that a one-size-fits-all policy to measure accountability is unfair, particularly in such an economically diverse state as Illinois.

State budget cuts have threatened to take a bite out of Golden Apple teacher scholarships. 

But while the governor has been seeking to eliminate funding for the highly regarded private program, the state is paying a collection agency to go after students who accepted competing state-run scholarships then skipped out on commitments to teach in struggling schools.

While campaigning for president, George W. Bush borrowed a phrase from the Children’s Defense Fund to sell his education message: “No child left behind.” Attaching it to the most recent rewrite of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Republican-led Congress approved the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, and President Bush signed it into law.

Students at Kreitner Elementary School in Collinsville hear two sets of morning announcements: one in English and one in Spanish.

Twenty-two years ago, critic and teacher Robert Bray asked an interesting question in his book, Rediscoveries: Literature and Place in Illinois. “The creation of a culture at any time and for any society requires its re-creation from the materials of the past,” wrote Bray, now the Colwell Professor of American Literature at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. “And that act of re-creation, the search for a ‘usable past’... ought to be as ongoing and as serious as anything we do.” 

Walter Wendler appreciates society’s changing attitudes about its responsibility for higher education. As a scholar, Wendler, who also is chancellor of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, enjoys the nuances of this evolution. He’s intimate with the details of the federal Morrill Act of 1862, which marked the first federal aid aimed at institutions of higher learning. The land grant act, as it’s called, conveyed to the states parcels for developing colleges of agriculture.

Ashley Hustava is candid. A decision about where she attends college may come down to cost.

The senior at Springfield’s Southeast High School has been accepted at four schools. Now she’s waiting to find out what financial aid and scholarships are available. Her family started putting money away for her education when she was little, but it’s still not enough.

Construction paper isn’t in much demand in Carlinville’s schools because elementary students can no longer take art. The teaching staff was cut by more than 17 percent, forcing class sizes to climb at all elementary grades. The average fourth-grade class size is now 29.

The district has had to take several such steps over the past three years to reduce its budget deficit. 

Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 in suburban Chicago spends about $13,600 a year on each student — nearly twice the average per-pupil spending in Illinois. And under a proposal in Gov. George Ryan’s fiscal year 2003 budget — which would take money from 22 categorical grants and redistribute it — that one-school district would get $1.3 million more each year.

It was a teacher's dream. Ray Ulrich arrived last fall for his first day of class at Farragut school in Joliet to a classroom full of motivated students. But this wasn't a batch of fifth-graders. Instead, Ulrich, a teacher training specialist from the Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science in Chicago, faced Farragut's own math and science teachers. His job was to help them improve the way they teach math to their elementary school pupils.