Long before the Chicago school reform plan officially went into effect this month, cynics were carping that it would never work. It’s the folly of innocents who don’t appreciate the depths of corruption and ineptitude that prevail in this city, they say. They sneer at the do-gooders who spent months hammering out the legislation. One professor of education at the University of Chicago points out that “to succeed, the plan requires 4,800 hardworking, intelligent, conscientious, honest volunteer parents and community residents and 1,200 teachers with the same qualities who are willing to work after their normal school days–4,800 parents and community members in evenly divided packages of eight and 1,200 teachers in packages of two.” His unspoken implication, of course, is that such people will never be found.
Who is to say, ask the cynics, that the same thing won’t happen in Chicago? David Cohen, professor of education at Michigan State University, insists that “there will be more conflict, more politicization of the schools under the plan. Chicago has always had clubhouse politics with lots of patronage and there is no reason to think it won’t happen the same way in the schools.” Cohen concedes that “part of the purpose of decentralization is to open schools to political pressure, which makes them better because there is some accountability.” But he warns, “The schools that need change the most may get the least because they have the least human resources. Poverty has its effect, and to think you can eliminate it with a little training and education is only wishful thinking.”
For four long days last June, representatives of some 50 reform groups that had been marching uphill for years sat in house speaker Michael Madigan’s Springfield office with several legislators and redrafted Senate Bill 1839, the school reform act.
Cullerton gives the largest share of credit to the black legislators who “courageously defied their major leaders and institutions to vote for the bill. They stood up to Manford Byrd and PUSH, who opposed it. They listened to their constituents instead of the black leaders. If they had said ‘This won’t work in our communities,’ the bill would have been dead in the water. After all, they represent most of the kids in the system.”
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Public Act 85-1418 gives Chicago the first fully school-based management system in the country. While the tendency throughout the nation, and certainly in Illinois, has been toward greater consolidation, centralization, and bureaucratization of public schools, Chicago is taking power away from the central bureaucracy and putting it into the hands of the local schools–into the hands of an elected council for each of the 595 elementary and secondary schools in the system, and into the hands of those schools’ principals and teachers. A council will consist of six parents, two community residents, two teachers, and the nonvoting principal. The parents will be elected by parents, the teachers by teachers, and the community representatives by the community in which each school is located (or, if it’s a magnet school, by the other council members).
Principals and teachers have also gained decisive new powers. For the first time in Chicago, principals can hire–and begin proceedings to fire–teachers regardless of their seniority or length of service. With the assistance of their faculties, principals will now determine their own curricula and make their own budgets, subject to the approval of the local councils. For the first time, a school’s engineers and food-service people will come under the jurisdiction of its principal. No longer will principals be captive to their engineers.
Furthermore, in the terrible money crunch of the last 20 years, the school board habitually misused funds allocated by the state and federal governments primarily for compensatory education programs for low-income, low-achieving students. Instead, these funds were exploited to cover such general costs as kindergartens and libraries.
