Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for June 3, 2006 THE RICH...GET RICHER!

I'm just overwhelmed by sympathy for these "poor" folks!

Class rankings outdated? Naperville schools say yes

By James Kimberly
Tribune staff reporter

In her third year of a high school career that has included varsity sports and an academic record of mostly A's and just a few B's, Jillie Johnston probably would be considered a top student at many Illinois schools.

But at intensely competitive Naperville Central High School, Johnston's 3.9 grade-point average on a 4.0 scale ranks somewhere around 140th in a class of 800.

Johnston, 17, is concerned that her comparatively low class rank might hurt her chances of attending and playing soccer at a good college or university.

"The girls that go to smaller schools, in general, their class rank is significantly higher," Johnston said. "I have the same GPA as them. It hinders whether I am going to be accepted, what scholarship I get."

Naperville Central Principal Jim Caudill points to students like Johnston when explaining why Naperville District 203 is abolishing class rankings.

The seniors due to graduate Thursday from Naperville North and Naperville Central High Schools likely will be the last ranked numerically according to their grade-point averages.

Under the plan, to be reviewed a final time by the school board June 15, members of the Class of 2007 will have the option of having their class ranking listed on their transcripts. Then the practice will cease, Caudill said.

Naperville North Principal Ross Truemper said the schools became concerned that elite colleges might overlook high-achieving students simply because they do not rank at the top of their class.

"We want colleges and universities to look at who our students are, way beyond a simple number," Truemper said. "You can't rank anything based on a single indicator. If that was the case, we'd buy only one kind of automobile, we'd only buy the same kind of house, we'd only buy one type of gasoline."

Not everyone is in favor of the decision.

Junior Brett Lullo, a competitive swimmer whose grade-point average of 4.48 places him 20th out of a class of 800, said his accomplishments did not come easily. During swim season, Lullo's days stretch from before 5 a.m. until 11 p.m.

"It's kind of a detriment they are getting rid of it. I've worked hard to get where I'm at," the 17-year-old said.

Naperville is not the first school district to decide that class rankings have outlived their usefulness, but it will join the minority of public high schools nationwide when it eliminates them.

Locally, New Trier High School in Winnetka was the first in the area to eliminate class rankings when it did so six years ago. Last year, Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire stopped the practice. Highland Park and Deerfield High Schools have also.

Indian Prairie District 204, which serves the west side of Naperville and the far east side of Aurora, has studied the issue and likely will look at it again now that neighboring District 203 has acted, said Supt. Howard Crouse.

"I think class rank started because here we are in America and we want to rank everything," Crouse said.

Crouse said school officials are asking themselves whether class rankings "are anachronisms whose time has passed."

Nationally, about 85 percent of public high schools rank their seniors by grade-point average, said David Hawkins, director of public policy at the National Association for College Admission. About 17 percent of private schools do it, Hawkins said.

Hawkins said colleges generally want to see class rankings.

"What they want to see is some perspective of how you placed among your peers," Hawkins said.

Keith Todd, director of undergraduate admissions at Northwestern University, said the school does not screen applicants based on class rank. But the numbers can be helpful in determining an applicant's qualifications as the school fills a freshman class of 2,025 from a pool of 18,400 applicants, he said.

"We ask high schools that don't give us rank for a lot more information. It's hard to know what a grade means by itself," Todd said.

Ted O'Neill, dean of undergraduate admissions at the University of Chicago, said class rank provides "a kind of shorthand" that helps counselors put an applicant's grade-point average in context.

If a high school does not provide a class rank, then the university might ask for the percentages of A's, B's, or C's awarded in the school.

As the focused and driven daughter of two physicians, Naperville Central senior Meghna Motiani has achieved a class rank worth bragging about.

After a heavy schedule of Advanced Placement classes that carry weighted grades, Motiani, 17, has a grade-point average of 4.42 on a 4.0 scale.

She ranks 17th among the 750 soon-to-be graduates and intends to study economics at Northwestern before attending medical school.

Motiani said she used class rank to gauge her performance against other students, but agrees with the decision to eliminate it.

"It is something that puts a lot of pressure on a student," Motiani said.

From the Washington Post...

Affluent New Trier High Can't Decide How to Spend Windfall From Painting's Sale

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer

CHICAGO -- The high school art teacher thought the oil painting would make a good teaching tool.

"Still Life With Flowers," a lively and whimsical work by Stuart Davis, was being unloaded by the State Department, which had drawn criticism for staging a traveling exhibition that included works by leftist artists. The year was 1948, and the House Un-American Activities Committee was in full cry.

At New Trier Township High School, north of Chicago, teacher and part-time art critic Frank Holland spotted an advertisement for the sale and got permission to buy the painting. He hung it in a school hallway, carting it back and forth to class as an example of American modernism. Students pondered the painting's musical notes, the flower-as-gramophone, the college pennants, the French hotel facade.

The cost to New Trier: $62.50.

Eventually forgotten in a storeroom, the painting was rediscovered in the 1990s after Davis had become famous. The school lent the piece to a grateful Art Institute of Chicago.

"It's the kind of painting we dream of, that we hope will fall from the sky," said Eric Widing, an expert in American art at Christie's. Recently it did, and the auction house sold it to an anonymous bidder.

The price tag: $3.1 million.

Talk about buying low and selling high. The painting's odyssey left New Trier with some unforgettable lore and a windfall, after commission, of $2.8 million. If it were a Hollywood film, the school would lie in a hardscrabble neighborhood and the sudden riches would turn bleak dreams into gold.

But New Trier is considered one of the elite high schools in Illinois. Its two campuses are rooted in the prosperous heart of Chicago's North Shore. An annual budget of $75 million underwrites enviable capital programs, a student-teacher ratio of 14 to 1 and an average teacher salary of $84,151. The 105-year-old school offers more than 300 courses and graduates 98.5 percent of its students, who are overwhelmingly upper middle class and white.

Noted alumni include Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Reps. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) and Mark S. Kirk (R-Ill.), as well as actors Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Ann-Margret and Bruce Dern.

New Trier has even registered its motto: "To commit minds to inquiry, hearts to compassion, and lives to the service of humanity." ®

Where will the "Still Life" money go? Most of the windfall will go to programs and capital improvements to the art department. One proposal is to establish a program for artists-in-residence who could help "bring our students together with other communities and learn from each other in the arts," said Painting Proceeds Committee member Laura Bertani.

Yet some have argued that New Trier, whose students perform countless community service projects, should share its new cash more directly in a region where school funding levels and student performance vary dramatically. Several told the school board that the money could make a far bigger difference in the lives of students who have less and need more.

"All the people who presented were extremely eloquent," said Hank Bangser, the school's superintendent. "However, we've also received a legal opinion that we're not even legally able to write a check, so that won't happen."

Northwestern University art historian Stephen F. Eisenman said: "It's ironic that's where the work of a communist painter was found and will enrich the budget of one of the wealthiest school districts in the country."

Davis, an inventive painter who studied realism under Robert Henri before drawing on European modernism, painted the colorful "Still Life" in 1930, after returning from Paris. The State Department bought the painting in 1946 for a tour of Latin America and postwar Europe called "Advancing American Art."

Members of Congress, aware of the leftist politics of many of the artists, objected to the exhibition and the fact that 79 oils and 38 works on paper had been bought with public money. The State Department sold them to educational institutions.

Two went to New Trier, thanks to Holland, a teacher and part-time art critic for the Chicago Sun-Times; the other has disappeared.

"Still Life" moved back and forth from hallway to classroom to art faculty office for many years until it found its way into a storeroom for much of the 1970s and 1980s, according to Bangser. He said an art teacher recognized the work as something valuable and alerted superiors, who put it in a bank vault. Bertani, the school's personnel and communications director, was in the bank in the early 1990s when specialists from Christie's and Sotheby's examined the work.

"They came out and they were just blown away. I can still remember their faces," Bertani said. "When they removed the covering, one of the auction house representatives, her eyes got wide and she just gasped."

The painting stayed at the Art Institute for 13 years until someone pointed out, as Bangser put it, that "Stuart Davis is hot and this particular painting is very important in his line of work."

After the Dec. 1 sale in New York -- to a buyer who, Bangser has heard, intends to show the painting in public -- the suggestions flowed in. As it now stands, a big chunk of the money will go for renovating the school's main arts building. A piece, said Bangser, could go to a program that New Trier and schools outside the district could share.

But in New Trier terms, the money simply is not huge.

"The painting proceeds will not have a significant effect on any particular thing that we will do that we would not have done before," said Bangser, who reported that the Painting Proceeds Committee is expected to make a recommendation by December. "I do think it will inspire some very interesting thinking about projects, and may well fund a portion of those projects."

"Still Life With Flowers" was not the only valuable artwork in New Trier's collection. Ivan Albright, who did the painting for the film "The Picture of Dorian Gray," is a New Trier alumnus. He gave the school a typically macabre self-portrait, which Bertani said is now worth tens of thousands of dollars.

It's not for sale.