Who’ll Tell the Story of School Reform?
No disrespect whatsoever intended, to the Sun-Times or to the Tribune, but school reform in Chicago has advanced to a point that’s way beyond the dailies’ ability to do it justice.
“It’s two publications in one,” says Lenz. “It’ll come out monthly for nine months during the school year. Six issues will take a newsletter format, like the Chicago Reporter”–which CRS has been publishing to general acclaim since 1972. Suppose a local council somewhere cooks up an innovative reading or counseling program; the newsletter, Lenz explains, is where the other councils will be able to learn about it. They’ll also learn from each other’s mistakes.
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The other three issues will be the journal. “That will be more analytical,” says Lenz, “and it will be aimed at policymakers–local, state, and national. The analysis will involve some hard reporting as we try to get a picture of what’s happening out there, and what’s not happening.”
To begin with, Gwen Jordan, CRS’s director of community relations, had been talking to Chicago Community Trust about doing some sort of “published resource” since 1988, which is when the trust offered $5 million to nonprofit organizations for programs advancing school reform.
“The new paper’s a function of the Community Renewal Press,” Larson went on. “One of the reasons we were asked to do this–getting back to the poetry of the infrastructure–is we had in place an infrastructure that had demonstrated an ability to bring this off.”
“At one time,” said Larson, “when we were thinking of how to distribute this, we thought of doing it through the regular [school] board routing. But we don’t want to reach people that way. The medium would take over the message.”
She told us, “One interesting thing to follow will be who gets to be selected to be principal. What traits are considered valuable by the councils. The principal is just truly the key.”
