"How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools" tells the story of the extraordinary thirty-year school reform effort that changed the landscape of public education in Chicago. Acclaimed educational ...researcher Anthony S. Bryk joins five coauthors directly involved in Chicago's education reform efforts, Sharon Greenberg, Albert Bertani, Penny Sebring, Steven E. Tozer, and Timothy Knowles, to illuminate the many factors that led to this transformation of the Chicago Public Schools. Beginning in 1987, Bryk and colleagues lay out the civic context for reform, outlining the systemic challenges such as segregation, institutional racism, and income and resource disparities that reformers grappled with as well as the social conflicts they faced. Next, they describe how fundamental changes occurred at every level of schooling: enhancing classroom instruction; organizing more engaged and effective local school communities; strengthening the preparation, recruitment, and support of teachers and school leaders; and sustaining an ambitious evidence-based campaign to keep the public informed on the progress of key reform initiatives and the challenges still ahead. The power of this capacity building is validated by unprecedented increases in benchmarks such as graduation rates and college matriculation. This riveting account introduces key actors within the schools, city government, and business community, and the partnerships they forged. It also reveals the surprising yet essential role of Chicago's innovative information infrastructure in aligning disparate initiatives. In making clear how elements such as advocacy, civic capacity, improvement research, and strong democracy contributed to large-scale progress in the system's 600-plus schools, the book highlights the greater lessons that the Chicago story offers for system improvement overall.
On January 11, 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan--a Republican on record as saying that "some crimes are so horrendous . . . that society has a right to demand the ultimate penalty"--commuted the ...capital sentences of all 167 prisoners on his state’s death row. Critics demonized Ryan. For opponents of capital punishment, however, Ryan became an instant hero whose decision was seen as a signal moment in the "new abolitionist" politics to end killing by the state. In this compelling and timely work, Austin Sarat provides the first book-length work on executive clemency. He turns our focus from questions of guilt and innocence to the very meaning of mercy. Starting from Ryan’s controversial decision, Mercy on Trial uses the lens of executive clemency in capital cases to discuss the fraught condition of mercy in American political life. Most pointedly, Sarat argues that mercy itself is on trial. Although it has always had a problematic position as a form of "lawful lawlessness," it has come under much more intense popular pressure and criticism in recent decades. This has yielded a radical decline in the use of the power of chief executives to stop executions.
Chicago's Southwest Side is one of the last remaining footholds for the city's white working class, a little-studied and little-understood segment of the American population. This book paints a ...nuanced and complex portrait of the firefighters, police officers, stay-at-home mothers, and office workers living in the stable working-class community known as Beltway. Building on the classic Chicago School of urban studies and incorporating new perspectives from cultural geography and sociology, Maria Kefalas considers the significance of home, community, and nation for Beltway residents.
InWide Rivers Crossed, Ellen Wohl tells the stories of two rivers-the South Platte on the western plains and the Illinois on the eastern-to represent the environmental history and historical ...transformation of major rivers across the American prairie. Wohl begins with the rivers' natural histories, including their geologic history, physical characteristics, ecological communities, and earliest human impacts, and follows a downstream and historical progression from the use of the rivers' resources by European immigrants through increasing population density of the twentieth century to the present day. During the past two centuries, these rivers changed dramatically, mostly due to human interaction. Crops replaced native vegetation; excess snowmelt and rainfall carried fertilizers and pesticides into streams; and levees, dams, and drainage altered distribution. These changes cascaded through networks, starting in small headwater tributaries, and reduced the ability of rivers to supply the clean water, fertile soil, and natural habitats they had provided for centuries. Understanding how these rivers, and rivers in general, function and how these functions have been altered over time will allow us to find innovative approaches to restoring river ecosystems. The environmental changes in the South Platte and the Illinois reflect the relentless efforts by humans to control the distribution of water: to enhance surface water in the arid western prairie and to limit the spread of floods and drain the wetlands along the rivers in the water-abundant east. Wide Rivers Crossed looks at these historical changes and discusses opportunities for much-needed protection and restoration for the future.
The popular image of the "digital native" -- usually depicted as a technically savvy and digitally empowered teen -- is based on the assumption that all young people are equally equipped to become ...innovators and entrepreneurs. Yet young people in low-income communities often lack access to the learning opportunities, tools, and collaborators (at school and elsewhere) that help digital natives develop the necessary expertise. This book describes one approach to address this disparity: the Digital Youth Network (DYN), an ambitious project to help economically disadvantaged middle-school students in Chicago develop technical, creative, and analytical skills across a learning ecology that spans school, community, home, and online. The book reports findings from a pioneering mixed-method three-year study of DYN and how it nurtured imaginative production, expertise with digital media tools, and the propensity to share these creative capacities with others. Through DYN, students, despite differing interests and identities -- the gamer, the poet, the activist -- were able to find some aspect of DYN that engaged them individually and connected them to one another. Finally, the authors offer generative suggestions for designers of similar informal learning spaces.
•A physically- and process-based bank erosion model is coupled with TELEMAC2D/SISYPHE.•The model includes the effects of subgrid-scale riverbank geometry.•The model is tested for meandering-river ...planform adjustment.•The model simulates a great variety and complexity in meander wavelengths.•Planform adjustment rate is reduced if alternate bar and meander wavelength are similar.
The flow and sediment transport processes near steep streambanks, which are commonly found in meandering, braided, and anastomosing stream systems, exhibit complex patterns that produce intricate interactions between bed and bank morphologic adjustment. Increasingly, multi-dimensional computer models of riverine morphodynamics are used to aid in the study of these processes. A number of depth-averaged two-dimensional models are available to simulate morphologic adjustment of both bed and banks. Unfortunately, these models use overly simplified conceptual models of riverbank erosion, are limited by inflexible structured mesh systems, or are unable to accurately account for the flow and sediment transport adjacent to streambanks of arbitrary geometry. A new, nonlinear model is introduced that resolves these limitations. The model combines the river morphodynamics computer models TELEMAC-2D and SISYPHE of the open source TELEMAC-MASCARET suite of solvers with the bank erosion modules of the CONCEPTS channel evolution computer model. The performance of the new model is evaluated for meander-planform initiation and development. The most important findings are: (1) the model is able to simulate a much greater variety and complexity in meander wavelengths; (2) simulated meander development agrees closely with the unified bar-bend theory of Tubino and Seminara (1990); and (3) the rate of meander planform adjustment is greatly reduced if the wavelength of alternate bars is similar to that of meanders.
In Diabetes in Native Chicago Margaret Pollak explores
experiences, understandings, and care of diabetes in a Native
American community made up of individuals representing more than
one hundred ...tribes from across the United States and Canada. Today
Indigenous Americans have some of the highest rates of diabetes
worldwide. While rates of diabetes climbed in reservation areas,
they also grew in cities, where the majority of Native people live
today. Pollak's central argument is that the relationship between
human culture and human biology is a reciprocal one: colonial
history has greatly contributed to the diabetes epidemic in Native
populations, and the diabetes epidemic is being incorporated into
contemporary discussions of ethnic identity in Native Chicago,
where a vulnerability to the development of diabetes is described
as a distinctly Native trait. This work is based upon ethnographic
research in Native Chicago conducted between 2007 and 2017, with
ethnographic and oral history interviews, observations, surveys,
and archival research. Diabetes in Native Chicago
illustrates how local understandings of diabetes are shaped by what
community members observe in cases of the disease among family and
friends. Pollak shows that in the face of this epidemic, care for
disease is woven into the everyday lives of community members.
Diabetes is not merely a physical disease but a social one,
perpetuated by social policies and practices, and can only be
thwarted by changing society.
The time over which a soil has developed since the parent materials were deposited and subaerially exposed, referred to here as soil development time, is of considerable interest to pedologists, ...geomorphologists, geologists, archeologist, and paleoclimatologists. Soil development time has been estimated both indirectly, based on the degree of soil development, and directly, by radiocarbon dating of soil organic matter, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of parent material deposition, and through exposure dating using cosmogenic nuclides. Here we propose a new model for estimating the soil development time by subtracting the low molecular weight (LMW) or pyrolysis-volatile 14C age of the uppermost A horizon of a soil from the OSL age of the C horizon of the parent material soil time=OSL age(parent C horizon)−14C age(LMW fraction of uppermost A horizon). The LMW organic compound fraction represents the most mobile carbon compounds in the soil organic carbon pool, and is least resistant to physical, chemical, and biodegradation in the soil environment, potentially yielding the youngest 14C age. OSL dating of the C horizon provides an estimate of the time since deposition of unconsolidated parent material. Thus, the difference in the two ages can be used to estimate the time that has elapsed for pedogenic alteration from deposition of the parent material to the most recent additions of soil organic carbon. We applied this new approach in four scenarios: (1) in a modern soil that developed downward in loess; (2) in a buried soil developed in aggrading loess (a cumulative soil which grows upward); (3) in a buried soil formed in dune sand; and (4) in a counterexample showing that simple subtraction is not always appropriate because of changes in soil's parent materials from loess to sand. These case studies reveal that this approach constrains soil development time more reasonably than can be commonly done with either OSL or radiocarbon dating alone. The difference in 14C ages between the uppermost and lowermost sola of a soil profile almost certainly underestimates the time of soil development, and the difference in OSL ages taken from sediment units overlying and underlying a buried soil most likely overestimates it. A combination of OSL and radiocarbon dating better constrains soil development time, broadening the applications of these two dating methods beyond their use for cross-checking the accuracy of the other dating method.
•Soil development time=OSL age(parent C horizon)−14C age(LMW of uppermost A horizon).•Four different scenarios•A combination of OSL and radiocarbon dates is better.
Public funds spent on jets and horses. Shoeboxes stuffed with embezzled cash. Ghost payrolls and incarcerated ex-governors. Illinois' culture of "Where's mine?" and the public apathy it engenders has ...made our state and local politics a disgrace. In Corrupt Illinois , veteran political observers Dick Simpson and Thomas J. Gradel take aim at business-as-usual. Naming names, the authors lead readers through a gallery of rogues and rotten apples to illustrate how generations of chicanery have undermined faith in, and hope for, honest government. From there, they lay out how to implement institutional reforms that provide accountability and eradicate the favoritism, sweetheart deals, and conflicts of interest corroding our civic life. Corrupt Illinois lays out a blueprint to transform our politics from a pay-to-play–driven marketplace into what it should be: an instrument of public good.
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