Book Club Blog Week 1 for "Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago"

Within the first group meeting, there was a lot of things mentioned and discussed. Although I missed the first group meeting, I was able to reconnect and share thoughts. After reading a lot of the book, there was a lot of information to take in. After reading through the prologue and Introduction, the information within the book is quite shocking. Based on the intro and prologue its safe to say that Chicago public schools are in awful condition and need a lot of help. From what was read on the book so far the book is designed to be a massive research paper that the author did on Chicago schools for people to understand and hopefully be able to offer support and help. The book started off explaining what was wrong with the schools and how they were currently working. Showing the reader what is causing this issue. They use different measures to indicate whether a school is efficient enough or not compared to other schools in Illinois.  Within our group discussion, we were able to locate where we thought schools needed to change. We started targeting the principles and questioning leadership. Where we exchanged comments about what a school which is run by teachers and leaders who care in comparison to teachers who are there just to collect a paycheck. Which seemed like the issue was in CPS. We traded stories and began trying to find our own solutions modern day to run a better school system and taking in what the book had taught us. There needs to be a school with a balanced attendance rate where the numbers aren't too high or fall below 90% because it would pose an issue. Teachers play a significant role in the way kids are taught and how they teach it. In Chapter 1 It mentions that not all of the kids were learning the same way and the same material. They all began to lack in English and mathematics because of the different curriculums. As a group, we agreed on everything the chapter discussed and sincerely looked forward into reading the rest of the book because we had all an interest in learning about Chicago's history.