Are you aware?

Here's an interesting article in the Chicago Sun-Time yesterday.
Apparently the average CPS freshman has 19 absences and 2.6 F's. While this is not good news at all, and there is also a 60-something page report by Chicago Public Schools that details how the research was done and what the findings were, there was not anything in either the article or the report that emphasized how these results followed along poverty lines, racial lines and language lines. What the report also doesn't say and what is even more pertinent to what we're doing is how tutoring and mentoring programs could combat these poor results. A lot of people have read the article, and fewer people will read the report. But it takes a special person who will draw the same conclusions that we have on the importance of tutoring and mentoring programs in improving students' performance in schools. The key word is awareness - are you aware to what is going on in Chicago schools and do you care enough to ask. Everybody who reads this article should ask themselves this very question.