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Another Path is Possible: Two Chicago Principals Keep an Eye on What Matters
It’s mid-March—testing week in Chicago—and for many administrators in the city’s schools, that means a laser-like, 24/7 focus on one thing: the ISAT, or Illinois Standards Achievement Test. But Amy Rome, the third-year principal at NTA, an elementary school on the Near South Side, has spent the past 15 minutes in a hallway brainstorming session with a representative from a neighborhood social service agency. The mother of several NTA students has been evicted from her apartment in a nearby public housing development, and the social service worker has come seeking Amy’s help in finding temporary housing for the woman and her children.
As Amy sees it, this is an integral part of her job. Ask her about her school’s vision—even during ISAT week—and you won’t hear references to test scores or mantra-like chants of the latest educational jargon. “At NTA we’re about knowing our kids and our families,” she says. “We’re about relationship building, student support, and collaborative problem-solving with the community. We believe the community’s challenges are the school’s challenges.”
Although she laments the obsession with high-stakes accountability that has beset the city’s schools over the past decade or so, she also believes that her students’ scores matter. “Using a single test score as the basis for assessing our kids is unfair,” she tells me later. “It puts them at a disadvantage, and we don’t like that. But at the same time, it’s the reality of how students are being evaluated right now, so we have to be responsive to it. We absolutely don’t teach to the tests, but it’s cheating a child to dismiss the idea that they need to do well on them. We try to view testing as a way to navigate better opportunities for our students. It matters to us because it impacts their future.”
But rather than allowing the crush of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)–related demands to dictate their direction, Amy and her staff have worked hard to see through the thicket and clear a different path. They’ve focused not only on a more rigorous curriculum that encourages critical thinking, but also on broad-based supports for students and families and on making NTA “a place where kids want to be.”
