Frederick M. Hess's Blog
Assessing Rep. Chu's Attack on School Improvement Grant Program
by Frederick M. Hess • May 26, 2010 at 8:52 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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California Congresswoman Judy Chu's office has issued a fierce indictment of the School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. The report, with pretensions of quasi-scholarly cred, has attracted the notice of some SIG advocates. Chu's analysis, with the assistance of a couple dozen exceptionally vague citations, argues, "Instead of providing teachers and administrators with the tools necessary to build better schools, the [SIG] models deprive schools with the flexibility necessary to respond to the specific needs of their students." Chu references the Commission on No Child Left Behind approvingly, arguing that the Commission "has asserted that it is critical to fully understand and to comprehensively address students' behavioral, social, and emotional needs as well as their academic needs," and she argues that any such effort should precede "punitive" measures.
Chu wants us to back off the teachers and to promote the "bigger and bolder" crowd's call for increased attention to the students' mental health, community engagement, and so on. In her own words, "Research has shown that the environment a child grows up in will have a powerful influence on how they will approach school. Support and wraparound services for children not only have to be provided, they have to be integrated into a
