Rx: instructional leadership. “A year ago in North Lawndale,” writes Elizabeth Duffrin in Catalyst (October), “one school saw nearly half its 3rd-, 6th- and 8th-graders fall short of the test scores required for promotion to the next grade. Around the corner, a similar school failed just one in seven students. In the Robert Taylor Homes area, two schools a block apart that draw students from the same towering, gang-infested high rises also were miles apart in student achievement: A child attending the school on the north end of the block was more than four times as likely to repeat a grade as a child attending the school on the south end. The disparities in students’ failure rates cannot be explained by their race, poverty level, English fluency, prior achievement, how often they switch schools or any other individual characteristic, according to researcher Melissa Roderick, who analyzed Chicago’s promotion policy results from 1997 to 1999 for the Consortium on Chicago School Research. Rather, she says, the varying failure rates reflect uneven work by the adults inside the school buildings, particularly the principal.”
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How to tell if it’s the client from hell? Attorney Eric Singer advises architects in the October issue of “Focus,” the newsletter of the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects: “Satan may indeed be upon you. Here are some of those telltale signs. Clients who walk away from other architects will be willing to do the same to you. If you are looking at an incomplete set of plans or sketches, ask where they came from….If the client is evasive or tells you not to worry about it, you should worry about it.”
