Individual Graduation Plan: Fill & Download for Free

Check out Justine Marie Sherry's On Mentoring Undergraduate Researchers. It has great tips for managing undergrad students, and is the best article I have read on the subject.Summarizing:Be flexible regarding time.Sign off on academic credits.Individualize their projects.Assign projects you mostly have planned out.Be ready to dig into the details.Meet with them 1:1 unless they’re explicitly working together.Make them co-authors on papers that they contributed to.Find out their post-graduation plans and help them towards it.Find them opportunities to present their work and talk about it.Treat them like real researchers from Day 1.

The State of Illinois has established certain minimum requirements for graduation that every Illinois education unit that teaches twelfth grade must adhere to. However, individual educational units are permitted to, pretty much without restriction, establish higher standards than those required by the State Board of Education, using nearly any factor that the governing authority deems relevant. The only things that are not allowed are those which would tend to discriminate on a protected status or otherwise infringe on constitutional rights, which have no plausible connection to any credible public interest (this is a due process violation for “lacking a rational basis”), or which are rooted in animus. While the “post-graduation plan” requirement is certainly a nontraditional requirement, it cannot be reasonably argued that this requirement lacks a credible connection to legitimate public interests of the City of Chicago, and it almost certainly cannot be said to lack rational basis. And there’s no evidence of animus, of any intent for this rule to be implemented in a manner which is discriminatory, or any evidence to show that this rule has discriminatory effects.The decision to require hopeful graduates from Chicago Public Schools to have a reasonable post-graduation plan as a qualifying condition is certainly controversial, but I don’t see any manner in which it violates either federal or state law. Even if this rule were inconsistent with the state’s “default” standards (which it does not appear to be), Chicago is a “home rule” city and is thus empowered to, in many areas, make laws that are inconsistent with the defaults established in state law. (“Home rule” is a complicated concept in Illinois law, but in general home rule municipalities are allowed to adopt laws which override general state law, except for state laws which the General Assembly has specifically designated as not subject to being overridable by a home rule municipality.)Chicago has a serious issue with teen unemployment (in some neighborhoods, it exceeds 50%); while this requirement will not immediately fix that, it might encourage students who might have otherwise simply planned to “coast” through school and then gone on public assistance afterwards to make more substantive plans. Since the policy takes effect for the Class of 2020, those affected by it have three years to come up with an appropriate plan. The idea, I believe, is to “change expectations”, and that is often fairly effective. It’s not clear that this rule will actually help, but the standard for rational basis is not that the law provably will advance a public interest, but rather only that the lawmaker’s belief that the law might advance a public interest must have some rational basis. If the lawmaker turns out to have been mistaken in that belief, the remedy is to convince the lawmaker to amend the law; challenging it in court will not succeed.One thing I can see coming out of this is yet another push by the General Assembly to force Chicago to return to having a separately-elected Board of Education. At the moment Chicago Public Schools is governed by a Board of Education that is wholly appointed by, and serves at the pleasure of, the Mayor of Chicago, which means that for all intents and purposes the Mayor makes all of the substantive decisions, and the Board is a rubberstamp for the Mayor’s will. In the past, CPS has been governed by an independent elected Board, and from time to time Springfield has made noises about requiring a return to this. But no legislation to actually cause this to happen has actually made it to a floor vote, let alone to the Governor’s desk. Given the general state of dysfunction that reigns in Springfield of late, this is not something I expect to see change any time soon, and in any case the Assembly has finally gone home for the year (having successfully overridden the Governor’s veto of its proposed budget and then adjourned the special session convened for the purpose of adopting a budget) and will not reconvene until November.My daughter is starting ninth grade in the fall, and while our local district is not (yet) mandating a post-graduation plan as a requirement for graduation, they are putting a lot of emphasis on the need for students to have such plans and are providing both students and parents with significant resources to assist in the development of such plans. I can’t argue with the idea that this is a good thing.

I do support tax increases on the very wealthy to help pay for basic government services. That said, I think we can have a college plan that pays for itself. Individuals should be able to get grants to go to college. If they choose professions that pay well or if they do well, they will have a higher obligation to pay that back. If they become a teacher or serve the country or choose a profession that is not as lucrative, they will have less of an obligation to pay back. This will help alleviate the enormous debt that individuals graduate with, and that restrict their life choices. I am still paying back my student loans. So figuring out how to make college debt free and affordable is something I am very passionate about!