A number of LACHSA alums call Chicago home, at least during their college years and among my itinerary are events at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College. It has been a pleasure to visit these schools and explore new avenues and opportunities for our graduates.
I also spent considerable time visiting the newly-opened Chicago High School for the Arts, known by its community as 'Chi-Arts'. This school, the only public arts high school in the city, is modeled largely on the design of LACHSA--some of you may be aware that a delegation of Chi-Arts faculty and administration visited LACHSA during their planning year to see our school. Now in its second year with students, Chi-Arts is an exciting, vibrant school.
Whenever I visit an arts high school I always reflect on the success of LACHSA. There is a reason that LACHSA is a destination for artists and educators seeking models and mentorship; they are drawn to LACHSA's rich legacy of success. Our twenty-five year history has firmly established LACHSA as a top arts high school in the United States.
All effective institutions, however successful, are continuously reflecting on their progress and refining their practices. LACHSA is no exception. Our professional development this year builds upon the work that we begun at the start of the last school year. Using our late-start Fridays, all full-time faculty and arts chairs have been documenting and aligning our curriculum for all subject areas. Effective schools clearly articulate their core mission; these principles can be seen and felt in all segments of a school, teacher to teacher, classroom to classroom.
We are also consistently, deliberately, and collaboratively examining the impact of our instructional practices on our students. Designing and refining benchmark assessment tools, examining their results on student achievement, and refining our instruction are all a substantial part of this work. Given the complexity of schools this kind of expectation is difficult to fulfill. Our faculty, like most, have piles of student work to grade, lessons to plan, classes to teach, and students and parents to contact. Finding the time to collaboratively examine one's own practice and its impact on students is always difficult, seldom realized in most schools, but essential. I am excited that our faculty have embraced this work. We have implemented a structure--late-start Fridays--that supports our faculty in this work.
There has always been effective instruction and quality student work at LACHSA. Our goal is to refine our practices to eliminate things that don't work, share and replicate the practices that do, and ensure the highest quality of rigorous and engaging instruction for every student in every classroom. This is a goal for which we will always strive.
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