Back in September, some of the old-timers at the school system’s Pershing Road headquarters figured the reform movement was like a bad headache that would fade once the local school council elections were out of the way.
“The bureaucracy reminds me of the political systems in Eastern Europe,” says William Ayers, an assistant professor of education at the University of Illinois, who played a key role in drafting the Sunrise Statement. “It’s a huge, expensive monopoly that’s not at all responsive to what’s going on at its base. We should get rid of it.”
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For the moment, the “Sunrise Statement” has been obscured by the hullabaloo generated over Kimbrough’s coronation. But reformers are marshaling their forces. By April they plan to complete an audit of the bureaucracy to determine which departments in the $2.58 billion school empire are justified.
Part of the reason for their confidence–which borders on cockiness–is that so far they have been very successful. The document is the creation of a diverse coalition called the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, which includes Hispanic leader Dan Solis of the United Neighborhood Organization of Chicago; Sokoni Karanja, executive director of Centers for New Horizons, a community group based in a black south-side neighborhood; Coretta McFerren, leader of the Peoples Coalition for Educational Reform; Fred Hess, executive director of the Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance; and interim board member Joe Reed, who heads a coalition of business leaders called Leadership for Quality Education.
The central administration also inundated local councils with a barrage of paperwork. “In one day, I can get as many as five sets of forms to fill out,” says Michael Radzilowsky, president of the school council at the Hayt Elementary School, which is in Edgewater. “Mostly they’re questionnaires that don’t relate to what we need in the school. It’s a total waste; they’re choking us with paper.”
In addition, the reform movement has fostered some central-office bureaucrats of its own. There’s now an “office of reform” that oversees a “reform implementation unit” that’s supposed to “coordinate” reform efforts and act as a “liaison” to local school councils–whatever that means. In the long run, no doubt, it would be best to use that money to cut class size and give teachers a decent wage.
“Corporations and government agencies that are restructured start with a clean slate,” the document reads. “We demand that the following steps be taken to restructure Pershing Road once and for all: the general superintendent and Interim Board must establish three or four major task forces to recommend a quick and thorough restructuring of the bureaucracy. The task forces must start from scratch, recommending ways to carry out only those obligations of the central administration required by the reform law. They must recommend staffing and budgeting needed for the new responsibilities, starting with zero-based staffing and zero-based budgeting. . . . A sunset date must be set for each department. After that date, each department must cease to exist. Its budget must be shut off, its staff position closed, its activities stopped, and its guidelines made null and void.”
