Chicago Begins the Hard Work of Dismantling Neoliberal School Reform

Right now we are watching in real time as Chicago tries to figure out how to undo the consequences of a catastrophic, two-decades long experiment in marketplace school reform.

Chicago’s Board of Education has voted to implement an important first step in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed school district overhaul: the elimination of student based budgeting.

Mayor Johnson seeks to restore equal opportunity across a school district that has become marked by magnet schools, charter schools, elite and selective public schools, struggling neighborhood schools, and neighborhoods without a a public high school or even a traditional public elementary school.

Johnson has prioritized major changes in the Chicago Public Schools, whose problems became especially obvious in June of 2013, when Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 neighborhood public schools because, as he claimed, they were under-enrolled. Eve Ewing, a University of Chicago sociologist explains that, “80 percent of the students who would be affected were African American… and 87 percent of the schools to be closed were majority black.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 54)

Chicago was an early experimenter with school reform. Brandon Johnson, the city’s elected mayor, leads Chicago’s schools as part of the 1994 mayoral governance plan imposed on the public schools by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Illinois legislature. The Chicago Public Schools adopted universal, districtwide school choice, and the launch in 2004 of Renaissance 2010 (led by Arne Duncan) that involved the authorization of a mass of new charter schools and the subsequent closure of so-called failing neighborhood public chools. Chicago adopted a strategy called “portfolio school reform,” described in a National Education Policy Center brief: “The operational theory behind portfolio districts is based on a stock market metaphor—the stock portfolio under the control of a portfolio manager. If a stock is low-performing, the manager sells it.  As a practical matter, this means either closing the school or turning it over to an charter school….”

Then in 2014, Mayor Emanuel added a districtwide funding plan called student based budgeting. In a 2019 report, Roosevelt University professor Stephanie Farmer explained: “Student Based Budgeting fundamentally remade the approach to funding public schools. Student Based Budgeting is akin to a business model of financing public schools because funds are based on student-consumer demand and travel with the student-consumer to the school of their choice.  (The plan contrasts with)… the old public good approach to financing public schools that ensured a baseline of education professionals in each school.”

Because it is known that aggregate school test scores correlate primarily with poverty and wealth, it was predicable that student based budgeting would put schools in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods on a race to the bottom, leading to schools with tragically limited programming for the city’s most vulnerable students and more school closures.  Farmer concludes: “Our findings show that Chicago Public Schools’ putatively color-blind Student Based Budgeting reproduces racial inequality by concentrating low budget public schools almost exclusively in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods. The clustering of low budget schools in low-income Black neighborhoods adds another layer of hardship in neighborhoods experiencing distress from depopulation, low incomes, and unaffordable housing.”

In late March of this year, WBEZ’s Sarah Karp reported that the Board of Education voted to launch a new plan to determine how much each school has to spend on teachers and programming: “Chicago Public Schools is officially moving away from a school funding formula that pitted schools against each other as they competed for students… District officials… announced (on March 21, 2024) they are implementing a formula that targets resources for individual schools based on the needs of students, such as socioeconomic status and health. They will abandon student based budgeting—a formula unveiled a decade ago under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel that provided a foundational amount of money based on how many students were enrolled…. Under the needs-based formula, every school will get at least four foundation positions, including an assistant principal, plus core and ‘holistic teachers.’… Schools will then get additional funding based on the opportunity index, which looks at barriers to opportunity including race, socioeconomic status, education, health and community factors.”

While undoing a market-based scheme for school funding and operations is clearly a moral imperative, the challenges appear daunting.  Karp continues: “This change was expected as Mayor Brandon Johnson and others have sharply criticized student based budgeting. However, it was unclear how it would play out, especially as the district faces a $391 million deficit for the next school year.  The shortfall is the result of federal COVID relief funds running out… District officials offered no information at a Board of Education meeting… on how the district will fill the budget hole.”

In addition to the threat of a serious financial shortfall, another challenge is the outcry from parents who have over the past two decades become a constituency for charter schools, magnet schools and selective high schools.  Mayor Johnson has tried to reassure parents: “(L)et me assure people that—whether its a selective enrollment school or magnet school—we will continue to invest in those goals… (A)ll I’m simply saying is that where education is working in particular at our selective enrollment schools and our magnet schools, my position is like any other parents in Chicago: that type of programming should work in all of our schools. And that has not been the case. Neighborhood schools have been attacked, they have been demonized, and they’ve been disinvested in, and Black and brown parents overwhelmingly send their children to those schools. So it’s not just demonizing and disinvesting in Black and brown schools, it’s demonizing and disinvesting in Black and brown people—and not under my administration.”

Although school choice plans like Chicago’s were originally premised on the idea of providing more choices for those who have few, in her profound book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Eve Ewing explains that families in Chicago do not have equal access in today’s school system based on school choice: “While choosing the best option from a menu of possibilities is appealing in theory, researchers have documented that in practice the ‘choice’ model often leaves black families at a disadvantage. Black parents’ ability to truly choose may be hindered by limited access to transportation, information, and time, leaving them on the losing end of a supposedly fair marketplace.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 23) Families dealing with poverty and its challenges are more likely to select a neighborhood school within walking distance of their home.

Mayor Johnson and his school board are facing a fraught political battle in the midst of severe budget challenges. Chicago school reform has exacerbated inequality. The families whose children remain in traditional neighborhood schools that have been undermined by school choice and student based budgeting have watched their their schools lose staff and programs their children need. At the same time, families who have benefited from charter schools, magnet schools and selective-enrollment high schools have now become strong supporters of the programs they have come to take for granted.

Mayor Johnson has been very clear, however, about what the past two decades of portfolio school reform, school choice and student based budgeting have meant for Chicago: “What has happened in the city of Chicago is selective enrollment schools go after students who perform academically on paper.  It’s a very narrow view of education. Let’s also ensure that other areas of need are also highlighted and lifted up.  That’s arts, our humanities, technology, trades…  It’s not like we’re asking for anything radical. We’re talking about social workers, counselors, class sizes that are manageable. We’re talking about full wraparound services for treatment for families who are experiencing the degree of trauma that exists in this city.”

When Did We Take the Wrong Road to Education Reform and Where Has It Taken Us?

This is the second of a two-part post.  On Tuesday, this blog quoted Diane Ravitch evaluating the impact of the 40-year-old A Nation at Risk report. She considers how A Nation at Risk changed our thinking about public education and shaped the public policy that has ensued since 1983, when President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education blamed the nation’s public schools for our economic challenges and sold policymakers on the idea that something radical must be done.

Standards-based school accountability struck policymakers as the solution, and a few years later, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top embodied the notion that teachers could be forced to raise test scores on demand. Today’s post will examine one example of the tragic wave of school reform spawned by the panic over A Nation at Risk.  The Chicago Public Schools, after a nearly thirty year experiment with test-based school accountability, are the microcosm of the disaster launched by the imposition of test-based accountability and neoliberal school reform.

Tuesday’s post quoted Ravitch summarizing what happened. Test-and-punish accountability, “overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.” And test-based accountability has driven the belief that, “the private sector will run schools more effectively than local government.”

Tuesday’s post also explored James Harvey’s assessment of the damage caused by A Nation at Risk. Now retired as Executive Director of the National Superintendents Roundtable but, in 1983, a staff person to the commission that produced the report, Harvey believes the Commission went drastically wrong in the drafting of A Nation at Risk.  

Chicago was an early experimenter with school reform based on test-based accountability, and the consequences culminated ten years ago when, in June of 2013—thirty years after A Nation at Risk was released—Chicago shut down 50 schools on the city’s South and West Sides. Chicago school reform with strong mayoral control under a fully appointed school board was accomplished in a 1995 state legislative plan carried out according to a neoliberal strategy in the decades since by a line of mayors and their appointed CEOs, beginning with Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan. The Renaissance 2010 plan rapidly expanded charter schools in competition with the public schools; the district built new exclusive magnet schools for high scorers; the district went to universal school choice; and the district put vulnerable public schools on a race to the bottom with student-based budgeting that reduced the school’s budget each time a student opted to choose a “higher scoring” school.  The idea was that all the competition would force educators to do better; instead Chicago school reform has dismantled the capacity of the public school district to serve the most vulnerable students in the poorest neighborhoods.

In her extraordinary book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, published in 2018, University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing explains which Chicago families and teachers were impacted: “Of the students who would be affected by the closures, 88 percent were black; 90 percent of the schools were majority black, and 71 percent had mostly black teachers—a big deal in a country where 84 percent of public school teachers are white.”(Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 5)

To trace —after ten years—the impact of Chicago’s massive public school closures on students, teachers and principals, families, and neighborhoods, WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times collaborated on an in-depth series of analytical reports. Chalkbeat Chicago has also published a profile of the impact ten years later. The findings reported in these updates confirm previous research.

Impact on the Neighborhoods

Here is how reporters for WBEZ and the Sun-Times—Sarah Karp, Nader Issa, Lauren FitzPatrick and Alden Loury—begin their series of reports:  “(O)ur series of stories will explore three core promises made: students would be better off after their schools were closed; their new schools would be transformed; former school buildings would be reborn as community assets.  These promises largely have never been realized… And the neighborhoods around the closed schools suffered. Amid continued population loss in predominantly Black communities, the immediate areas around closed schools saw steeper drops in the years after the closings, a Sun-Times and WBEZ analysis of census data found.  Census tracts with a majority Black population that included closed schools lost 9.2% of their residents between 2013 and 2018. Black census tracts with schools that did not close only saw a 3.2% population decline.”

What did Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration promise? “School officials promised all the empty buildings would be repurposed on an ambitious timeline. They’d be sold by the end of 2014 and their redevelopment underway by early 2015—which coincided with Emanuel’s bid for reelection. Today, only 20 buildings—or 43 % of the original facilities—are back in use. Most of them eventually became housing or offices or private schools. Few have been returned to use for the community, as neighborhood residents begged for before their schools were closed… The majority of people living near these buildings endure a hollow husk of a former school building as their neighbor. The blight hit the South Side and the West Side hardest. That’s where school enrollment had fallen most dramatically, prompting the closings, and where all but three of the 50 severely underenrolled schools were shuttered… Henson is one of 26 school buildings shuttered in 2013 that remain unused, many of them vacant. More than half are like Henson: They’re still owned by the city or the school system. Henson illustrates how difficult it is to redevelop in a residential neighborhood, particularly in a low income community.”

In her report for Chalkbeat, Becky Vevea describes the haphazard implementation of the closure process itself: “Desks, chairs, books, bulletin boards and everything else would be moved out—taken to other schools, warehoused, sold, or simply thrown away. Chicago Public schools would pay an Ohio-based logistics company to manage all the stuff from the shuttered buildings—a contract that would eventually double from $8.9 million to $18.9 million. Years later, metal desks, solid wood chairs, and other relics from the school closings would end up for sale on Craigslist.”

WBEZ and the Sun-Times describe the chaotic “plan” for redevelopment: “Originally, Chicago City Council Members were supposed to hold hearings to get community input, but neighborhood activists say they don’t remember any meetings. When Michael Scott, Jr. took over as alderman in 2015, there were no plans for Henson. In 2017, facing questions about the lack of movement, CPS hired a real estate brokerage firm to try to sell 30 campuses, including Henson. Today, most remain vacant or undeveloped.”

Impact on the Students

The reporters for WBEZ and the Sun-Times quote then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel promising, “the 13,646 K-12 students about to be displaced that they would be saved from their low-performing schools and have spots reserved for them in schools the system deemed better… Yet, a decade later, the promises Emanuel… made to those children haven’t held up.” Karp, FitzPatrick, Issa and Loury compare data about the academic trajectories of students in the closed schools and students in comparison schools that were not shut down: “The academic outcomes for K-12 students from the closed schools weren’t better than for children who attended similar schools that stayed open…. and their outcomes were far worse than the city averages… Of the children who could have graduated by the spring of 2022, only 62% did so from an Illinois public school—slightly under the number for students in the comparison schools and lower than for kids citywide. The results weren’t better, as Emanuel had promised… About 14% of the students (who didn’t graduate) are considered as having dropped out by state officials. The outcomes for the rest of the children remain a mystery—the likely possibilities include moving out of state, transferring to a private school, dropping out or remaining in CPS.”

The transition for students to so-called welcoming schools was implemented with neither sufficient preparation for the students being moved, nor for the students whose schools would receive an influx of students, nor for the teachers and other school staff at receiving schools. The University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research reported in 2018: “When the closures took place at the end of the 2012-13 school year, nearly 12,000 students were attending the 47 elementary schools that closed that year, close to 17,000 students were attending the 48 designated welcoming schools, and around 1,100 staff were employed in the closed schools.”  The report continues: “Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community.”

The director of the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research, Elaine Allensworth,  explained to reporters from the Sun-Times and WBEZ that the closings, “didn’t do anything to fix all the structural inequalities that are leading to lower outcomes in the first place. We definitely need different strategies than closing schools or sending students to different schools if we’re going to combat these larger societal inequities.”

Broader Impact of the 2013 Effect of School Closures

In 2018. the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research documented widespread community grieving across the neighborhoods where schools were closed: “When schools closed, it severed the longstanding social connections that families and staff had with their schools and with one another, resulting in a period of mourning… The intensity of the feelings of loss were amplified in cases where schools had been open for decades, with generations of families attending the same neighborhood school.  Losing their closed schools was not easy and the majority of interviewees spoke about the difficulty they had integrating and socializing into the welcoming schools.” “Even though welcoming school staff and students did not lose their schools per se, many also expressed feelings of loss because incorporating a large number of new students required adjustments.”

Chicago Public Schools today are the purest example of the application of the kind of public school reform that was a response to A Nation at Risk. Not only did Chicago actively promote competition with privatized charter schools, but in the process the reforms undermined the promise that the public schools would protect the rights and serve the needs of all of the district’s students.  Chicago Public Schools created paths to charters and magnet schools for high scorers and stranded children in the poorest neighborhoods in schools that were later shut down after student-based budgeting collapsed the schools’ programs and their enrollment. For 10 years, Chicago has littered its poorest neighborhoods with abandoned eyesores at the same time it has expanded education options for the city’s privileged and higher scoring students.  The catastrophe helped elevate Brandon Johnson in his mayoral election; it will be important to see if he and his new school board are able to turn the district around.

What is clear is that 40 years after A Nation at Risk spawned a movement to crack down on so-called “failing” schools unable to produce high test scores, our society has chosen to follow the lead of the 1983 National Commission on Excellence in Education by repeating what James Harvey condemns as that commission’s great mistake: the failure to consider “the troublesome issue of childhood poverty and unequal opportunity, a topic that commission leaders avoided.”

Will Chicago Be Able to Climb Out of the Deep Hole Dug by Neoliberal School Reform?

Today the Chicago Public Schools epitomize the much larger national problem of over twenty years of punitive, test-based school accountability and neoliberal “portfolio school reform,” by which a school district rapidly expands charter schools and manages the whole system through school choice.  There are encouraging signs that Chicago’s leaders are reexamining and trying to ameliorate a set of tragic problems, but it is clear that undoing over two decades of test-based school accountability is going to be complicated and difficult.

In 1995, Mayor Richard M. Daily got the Illinois Legislature to give the mayor and the mayor’s appointed school board power over the city’s public schools.  Paul Vallas implemented the plan. Later Arne Duncan launched Renaissance 2010, a plan to move toward universal school choice, open 100 new charter schools by 2010, and shut down so-called “failing” schools that couldn’t compete. In June of 2013, Rahm Emanuel shut down nearly 50 public neighborhood elementary schools—schools that were said to be under-enrolled and underutilized. In her book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing provided the data about exactly who suffered from these policies: “Of the students who would be affected by the closures, 88 percent were black; 90 percent of the schools were majority black, and 71 percent had mostly black teachers—a big deal in a country where 84 percent of public school teachers are white.”(Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 5)

Then in 2014, Emanuel and his appointed board instituted student-based budgeting.  Each school received per-pupil funding for the number of students enrolled, and schools with declining enrollment lost staff. This policy reinforced and deepened the school district’s commitment to competition among schools. As schools’ budgets began to drop as students moved to the schools with better reputations, principals in the under-enrolled schools had to increase class size and reduce staff including librarians, music and art teachers, special education teachers, and full time social workers. Student-based budgeting locked in place a race to the bottom for the most vulnerable schools.

It is encouraging that in recent months Chicago has taken steps to turn away from the past two decades of public school policy.

The first steps have been political. In July, 2021, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a bill into state law to phase in a return to an elected board of education.  In 2024, eleven members will be elected as part of a 21 member partially appointed board, and by 2027 the phase in of an elected board of education will be complete.  Then last month, Chicago elected a new mayor, Brandon Johnson, who had run on a platform that includes reducing student-based budgeting and fully staffing all of the district’s public schools.

There have also been important steps taken within the school district itself. Last week, Chicago’s school board, appointed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, established a new school rating system intended to reduce the branding of schools.  The school board voted to replace the old SQRP—School Quality Rating Policy—a system that rated schools primarily on their aggregate standardized test scores.  WBEZ’s Sarah Karp quotes board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland, who spearheaded the drive for the new plan: “Part of what started this was our communities being very clear about the harm that they felt from a rating system that didn’t just make them feel like it was something wrong with their schools, but something deficient with them as people, as communities, as parents… I want to say again publicly that we are done with SQRP.”

John Easton, an advisor to the development of the new plan, formerly an administrator in Chicago Public Schools, and formerly the director of the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education is quoted by Karp about the new plan: “This is a soft accountability policy that can be a model for the nation… We’re using a flashlight, not a hammer… The flashlight is to help us find that place where some support can help… that you’re not a bad school because you’re serving kids from impoverished and disenfranchised and disinvested neighborhoods.”

Education Week‘s Libby Stanford reminds readers that federal policy, under the Every Student Succeeds Act, the successor to No Child Left Behind, currently continues to require that states rate and rank their schools. But Stanford reports that in January, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona hinted at softer enforcement of this policy when he used the same language as Easton in Chicago. Cardona said standardized tests should serve as ‘flashlight’ on what works in education not as ‘a hammer’ to force outcomes.” Stanford reports that Cardona’s “statement reflects a shift in thinking since annual testing became federal law more than 20 years ago, and it echoes past comments from Cardona.”

Will Chicago’s new system work to eliminate the branding of some of Chicago’s schools as so-called “failing schools”?  Here, according to Chalkbeat Chicago‘s Mila Koumpilova, is how the new system is supposed to work: “The new approach does away with rating schools on a five-point scale from 1+ to 3… Under the new accountability policy, the district will compile a wide array of metrics and present them to parents and the public—rather than using a complex calculation to produce a ranking as the old system did. A new dashboard with that data will go live sometime during the 2024-25 school year, based on data from this coming school year. And while the policy aims to hold the district accountable for providing the money, guidance, and other resources schools need to improve, it does not spell out any consequences for campuses that are not making headway.”

The Chicago Tribune’s Sarah Macaraeg explains: “(T)he ‘Continuous Improvement and Data Transparency’ policy will instead measure a range of ‘indicators of success.’ Those include not only academic progress but also student well-being, quality of daily learning experiences, school inclusivity, and the capacity of staff to collaborate in teacher learning.”

Will rethinking school accountability in Chicago be accepted by the federal government? We will have to watch closely to see whether the U.S. Department of Education is fully behind rethinking the nation’s long philosophy of using aggregate standardized test scores to brand schools as successful or failing. Will the Department adjust school accountability enforcement according to the more constructive and less punitive accountability standard that Secretary Cardona has articulated?

And, equally important, will rethinking school accountability help break parents’ habit of automatically ranking and rating schools in a racially segregated, school-choice district like Chicago?  It is to be hoped that parents in Chicago will carefully examine the new, more qualitative analysis of each school’s characteristics. One hopes that public opinion will not smear together the more descriptive indicators about schools into parents’ own informal branding system influenced by race and economics.

In Chicago itself there is one very hopeful sign that could help erase the downward spiral of schools in some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.  In mid-April, the Chicago Sun-Times reported: “Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez said the school district plans to move away from student-based budgeting in the coming years… Student-based budgeting, which assigns funding to schools based on enrollment totals, has come under fire since its introduction a decade ago for exacerbating inequalities in the public school system. Under-enrolled schools often serve poorer areas with predominantly Black and Latino students. As those buildings lost students, they subsequently lost funding… Martinez said CPS wants to keep moving toward a system based on student and school needs. During the 2023-24 school year, the portion of the budget allocated based on school enrollment will decrease to 43%, he said. ‘I am optimistic that over the next year or so, we’ll have enough knowledge to be able to fully go away from SBB (student-based budgeting).”

Certainly if the Chicago Public Schools can once again fully staff comparable programming for students across its full system of public schools, the new rating system will begin to elevate the reputation of some of the schools where programming has been so seriously cut due to student-based budgeting. Ending student-based budgeting is an urgently needed reform.

We will all need to watch Chicago Public Schools grapple with the complexities of recreating a system of fully-staffed neighborhood public schools and to watch the Chicago school district create and implement a new more constructive school rating system.  We must recognize, however,  how hard it will be to undo the damage of marketplace branding and competition.  That said, we should be encouraged by Chicago’s formal steps to begin addressing structural injustice.

Unequal Access to Educational Opportunity Is the Story of Today’s America

A highlight of the Network for Public Education’s recent national conference was the keynote address from Jitu Brown, a gifted and dedicated Chicago community organizer and the national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance.  His remarks made me think about the meaning of the last two decades of corporate school reform and the conditions today in his city and here where I live in greater Cleveland, Ohio.  It is a sad story.

Brown reflected on his childhood experience at a West Side Chicago elementary school, a place where he remembers being exposed to a wide range of information and experience including the study of a foreign language. He wondered, “Why did we have good neighborhood schools when I went to school but our kids don’t have them anymore? For children in poor neighborhoods, their education is not better.”

Brown described how No Child Left Behind’s basic drilling and test prep in the two subjects for which NCLB demands testing—math and language arts—eat up up more and more of the school day. We can consult Harvard University expert on testing, Daniel Koretz, for the details about why the testing regime has been particularly hard on children in schools where poverty is concentrated: “Inappropriate test preparation… is more severe in some places than in others. Teachers of high-achieving students have less reason to indulge in bad preparation for high-stakes tests because the majority of their students will score adequately without it—in particular, above the ‘proficient’ cut score that counts for accountability purposes. So one would expect that test preparation would be a more severe problem in schools serving high concentrations of disadvantaged students, and it is.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 116-117)

Of course, a narrowed curriculum is only one factor in today’s inequity.  Derick W. Black and Axton Crolley explain: “(A) 2018 report revealed, school districts enrolling ‘the most students of color receive about $1,800 or 13% less per student’ than districts serving the fewest students of color… Most school funding gaps have a simple explanation: Public school budgets rely heavily on local property taxes. Communities with low property values can tax themselves at much higher rates than others but still fail to generate anywhere near the same level of resources as other communities.  In fact, in 46 of 50 states, local school funding schemes drive more resources to middle-income students than poor students.”

Again and again in his recent keynote address, Jitu Brown described the consequences of Chicago’s experiment with corporate accountability-based school reform.  Chicago is a city still coping with the effect of the closure of 50 neighborhood schools in June of 2013—part of the collateral damage of the Renaissance 2010 charter school expansion—a portfolio school reform program administered by Arne Duncan to open charter schools and close neighborhood schools deemed “failing,” as measured by standardized test scores. On top of the charter expansion, Chicago instituted student-based-budgeting, which has trapped a number of Chicago public schools in a downward spiral as students experiment with charter schools and as enrollment diminishes, both of which spawn staffing and program cuts and put the school on a path toward closure.

As Jitu Brown reflected on his inspiring elementary school experience a long time ago, I thought about a moving recent article by Carolyn Cooper, a long time resident of Cleveland, Ohio’s East Glenville neighborhood: “I received a stellar education in elementary, junior high, and high school from the… Cleveland Public School system… All of the schools I attended were within walking distance, or only a few miles from my home. And at Iowa-Maple Elementary School, a K-6 school at the time, I was able to join the French Club and study abroad for months in both Paris and Lyon, France… Flash forward to this present day… To fight the closure of both Iowa-Maple and Collinwood High School, a few alumni attended a school facilities meeting held in October 2019 at Glenville High School… Despite our best efforts, Collinwood remained open but Iowa-Maple still closed down… Several generations of my family, as well as the families of other people who lived on my street, were alumni there.  I felt it should have remained open because it was a 5-Star school, offering a variety of programs including gifted and advanced courses, special education, preschool offerings, and Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).”

In his keynote address last week, Jitu Brown explained: “Justice and opportunity depend on the institutions to which children have access.” Brown’s words brought to my mind another part of Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood less than a mile from Iowa-Maple Elementary School. If you drive along Lakeview Road between Superior and St. Clair Avenues, you see a neighborhood with older homes of a size comfortable for families and scattered newer rental housing built about twenty years ago with support from tax credits. You also see many empty lots where houses were abandoned and later demolished in the years following the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Separated by several blocks, you pass two large weedy tracts of land which were once the sites of two different public elementary schools—abandoned by the school district and boarded up for years before they were demolished. You pass by a convenience store surrounded by cracked asphalt and gravel.  Finally you pass a dilapidated, abandoned nursing home which for several years housed the Virtual Schoolhouse, a charter school that advertised on the back of Regional Transit Authority buses until it shut down in 2018.

My children went to school in Cleveland Heights, only a couple of miles from Glenville. Cleveland Heights-University Heights is a mixed income, racially integrated, majority African American, inner-ring suburban school district. Our children can walk to neighborhood public schools that are a great source of community pride. Our community is not wealthy, but we have managed to pass our school levies to support our children with strong academics. We recently passed a bond issue to update and repair our old high school, where my children had the opportunity to play in a symphony orchestra, and play sports in addition to the excellent academic program.

Jitu Brown helped organize and lead the 2015 Dyett Hunger Strike, which forced the Chicago Public Schools to reopen a shuttered South Side Chicago high school. Brown does not believe that charter schools and vouchers are the way to increase opportunity for children in places like Chicago’s South and West Sides and Cleveland’s Glenville and Collinwood neighborhoods.  He explains: “When you go to a middle-class white community you don’t see charter schools…. You see effective, K-12 systems of education in their neighborhoods. Our children deserve the same.”

In the powerful final essay in the new book, Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, Bill Ayers, a retired professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, agrees with Jitu Brown about what ought to be the promise of public education for every child in America:

“Let’s move forward guided by an unshakable first principle: Public education is a human right and a basic community responsibility… Every child has the right to a free, high-quality education. A decent, generously staffed school facility must be in easy reach for every family… What the most privileged parents have for their public school children right now—small class sizes, fully trained and well compensated teachers, physics and chemistry labs, sports teams, physical education and athletic fields and gymnasiums, after-school and summer programs, generous arts programs that include music, theater, and fine arts—is the baseline for what we want for all children.” (Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, pp. 314-315) (emphasis in the original)

Is Mayor Lori Lightfoot Trying to Return Chicago to the Arne Duncan Era?

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has appointed a new CEO for the Chicago Public Schools, and everybody agrees he faces myriad challenges. He is Pedro Martinez, currently the school superintendent of the San Antonio (Texas) Independent School District, someone who grew up among 11 siblings in Chicago and was himself educated in the Chicago Public Schools.

Martinez is also the board chairman of Chiefs for Change, the corporate-reformer education leadership organization spun off from Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd (Foundation for Excellence in Education).

For WBEZ, Chicago’s best education reporter, Sarah Karp introduces Pedro Martinez: “Turning to a non-educator with deep Chicago ties, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot named former Chicago schools official and a current San Antonio schools superintendent Pedro Martinez as the next CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Martinez, who was born in Mexico and raised in Chicago, will be the first permanent Latino leader in the school district’s history… Martinez worked as CPS’ chief financial officer under former CEO Arne Duncan… Martinez is an accountant who has been called ‘analytics heavy.’  And in San Antonio, he has expanded charter schools as well as partnered with private organizations to take over failing schools. These ideas have been popular in Chicago, but they have fallen out of favor in recent years… Martinez has never taught or run a school as principal. And, thus, in choosing him, Lightfoot is rejecting the input of parents and others who said they wanted someone with a strong instructional background with ‘boots on the ground’ experience… Martinez is a graduate of the Broad Superintendent Academy training program. Critics say the Broad Academy promotes school leaders who use corporate-management techniques and that they work to limit teachers’ job protections and the involvement of parents in decision-making.”

The past year has been tense for Mayor Lori Lightfoot and for Chicago’s teachers. There has been ongoing disagreement between the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Lightfoot about what constitutes, during the COVID-19 pandemic, safe reopening in a school district filled with old buildings, but current tensions are overlaid upon a long history of conflict between the mayor and the teachers union under the mayoral governance and mayoral appointed school boards the Illinois legislature established back in 1995. Last April (2021), it was reported that, “Defying Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill… restoring the ability of the Chicago Teachers Union to bargain with the city over a wide range of issues, including class size, layoffs and the duration of the school year… The measure repeals Section 4.5 of the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act, which has restricted the CTU’s bargaining power since 1995, when state lawmakers gave then-Mayor Richard M. Daley control of the school district after several long strikes.”

Then in July, Governor Pritzker signed a bill that that will phase in a fully elected Chicago school board by 2027: “Until now, Chicago Public Schools was the lone district in Illinois with a school board appointed by the mayor.  But under the new legislation, the Chicago Board of Education will transition to a hybrid board of elected and appointed members before fully transforming into an elected body by 2027.”

My clipping file tracks problems with mayoral governance and  corporate, test-based school accountability in Chicago way back into the mid-1990s, with the disempowerment of Chicago’s groundbreaking local school councils, which sought to engage parents, teachers, and the community into the life of the neighborhood schools. In 1995, the Illinois legislature established mayoral governance of Chicago’s schools, gave the mayor the power to appoint the school board, and denied the Chicago Teachers Union the bargaining rights guaranteed to other teachers union locals.  Then came Renaissance 2010, the massive experiment under school CEO Paul Vallas, that sought—under Arne Duncan’s leadership—to open a mass of new charter schools to replace neighborhood public schools deemed “failing.”  Later Arne Duncan replaced Vallas as CEO.

Chicago has been the centerpiece of an experiment with an education governance plan called “portfolio school reform” in which the administration manages traditional and charter schools as though the district is a business portfolio—investing in the best schools and shuttering the so called “failures.”  And the problems were exacerbated under Mayor Rahm Emanuel with “student-based budgeting.” When students left for a charter school, the public school which lost enrollment lost funding, class sizes exploded, nurses were laid off, libraries were shuttered and substitute teachers were even hard to find as the school declined.  A downward spiral began to accelerate, and at the end of 2013, the school district’s mayoral appointed board closed nearly 50 public schools, with African American children making up 88 percent of the students affected.

In a press release last week, the Chicago Teachers Union expressed understandable concerns about Martinez’s ties to these corporate, test-based accountability initiatives which have, over time, disrupted neighborhoods and failed to turn around the huge school district as promised: “Mr. Martinez returns to a different Chicago than the city he left in 2009, as we move toward an elected school board and embrace the return of full bargaining rights for teachers, paraprofessionals, counselors, clinicians, case managers, and librarians. Families, students, and community organizations are empowered leaders now, and have rejected the charter proliferation, the mass firing of Black female teachers, weakened worker protections, and top-down decision-making that were hallmarks of his time under former CPS CEO Arne Duncan.  Many of the failed strategies that our new CEO is accustomed to no longer exist in Chicago, as the experiments of education reform and privatization have proven to be a failure. Equity, justice and democracy, and student, parent, and educator voice are now at the forefront. Despite having no classroom or in-school experience, Mr. Martinez will have to be an independent thinker, a far better partner and collaborator than Mayor Lightfoot, and work with stakeholders to keep them safe, earn their trust, and meet high expectations.”

Karp reports: “In San Antonio, Martinez has partnered with charter schools and other private organizations to get them to take over challenged public schools.”

But in its press release, Chiefs for Change brags that Martinez has a strong record of improving public education for students in San Antonio: “During Martinez’s tenure, the number of… students attending low-performing schools has decreased by roughly 80 percent. Graduation rates have continued to rise, while dropout rates have continued to fall… In addition, San Antonio Independent School District has increased the number of students in dual-enrollment programs, allowing them to get college credit while still in high school… San Antonio Independent School District has also received national attention for its dual-language program, which existed in just two schools when Martinez arrived… and has since expanded to 61 campuses, more than half of all San Antonio Independent School District schools.”

What is clear is that Martinez faces enormous challenges posed by years of state policy and mayoral appointed school administrators who have alienated the district’s teachers and imposed unpopular experiments with school privatization and school closure which have undermined neighborhoods.

Because much has changed in Chicago since the time when Martinez worked for Arne Duncan as the school district’s chief financial officer, we must hope Martinez will take to heart the words of University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing in her book Ghosts in the Schoolyard, which examines the widespread 2013 neighborhood public school closures in Chicago:  “It’s worth stating explicitly: my purpose in this book is not to say that school closure should never happen. Rather, in expanding the frame within which we see school closure as a policy decision, we find ourselves with a new series of questions…. These questions, I contend, need to be asked about Chicago’s school closures, about school closures anywhere. In fact, they are worth asking when considering virtually any educational policy decision: What is the history that has brought us to this moment? How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it? Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 159)

Illinois Legislature Begins to Repair the Damage of Chicago School Reform

The detour into what we call corporate, test-based public school accountability began in Chicago. It involved an explicit effort to disempower unionized schoolteachers. And underneath it all was a corporate strategy that made assumptions about the wishes and needs of the city’s parents without consulting them.

According to Steven Ashby and Robert Bruno: “In November 1994, the Republicans gained a majority in the Illinois General Assembly… As 1995 opened, the new legislative session created a frenzy of anti-Chicago teacher ideas… After Mayor (Richard M.) Daley’s reelection to a third term in April, Republican leaders urged him to present a plan for school reform… Daley and the Republicans promptly negotiated a broader takeover of the Chicago school system. The plan gave the mayor a large measure of control over the system, which he had long sought… The new law did away with the School Board Nominating Commission, permitting Daley to handpick his own five-person school board. The position of superintendent was also eliminated, and Daley now had the sole power to appoint a school ‘chief executive officer.’ Further weakening the influence of the Chicago Teachers Union and its role in reform, at the mayor’s insistence the law also amended the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act… by banning teachers strikes for eighteen months, prohibiting bargaining over class size, layoffs, staffing and teacher assignments, eliminating seniority as a factor in filling teacher vacancies and limiting teacher rights to file grievances.” (The Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike, Cornell University. Press, 2016, pp. 28-29)

I have been tracking school reform since the mid 1990s, and my clipping file on the Chicago Public Schools is larger than any other. First the new plan disempowered Chicago’s groundbreaking local school councils, which sought to engage parents, teachers and the community in the life of the neighborhood schools.  Then came Renaissance 2010, the massive experiment in the expansion of charter schools and simultaneous closure of the neighborhood schools identified by standardized test scores as “failing.”

Rick Perlstein describes the launch of Renaissance 2010 by the city’s corporate establishment: “Travel back with me, then, to July of 2003, when the Education Committee of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago—comprised of the chairman of the board of McDonald’s, the CEOs of Exelon Energy and the Chicago Board Options Exchange, two top executives of the same Fortune 500 manufacturing firm, two partners at top-international corporate law firms, one founder of an investment bank, one of a mutual fund, and the CEO of a $220.1 billion asset-management fund: twelve men, all but one of them white—published ‘Left Behind: Student Achievement in Chicago’s Public Schools.’ (which declared:) ‘Chicago should have at least 100 charter schools… These would be new schools operating outside the established school system and free of many of the bureaucratic or union-imposed constraints that now limit the flexibility of regular public schools.’ Lo, like pedagogical kudzu, the charters came forth: forty-six of them, with names like ‘Infinity Math, Science, and Technology High School,’ ‘Rickover Naval Academy High School,’ ‘Aspira Charter School,’ and ‘DuSable Leadership Academy of Betty Shabazz International Charter School.'”

Since 1995, Chicago’s mayors and their appointed school boards have experimented in ways that damaged the city’s neighborhood schools, many of them shut down under a “portfolio school reform” plan that operated according to a theory similar to a business portfolio—eliminate the “failing” investments and buy more new, shiny charter schools. The mayor’s appointed board of education launched something called student-based budgeting at the same time the new charters were being launched and marketed with glowing promises. When students left for a charter, the schools which lost enrollment lost funding, class sizes exploded, nurses were laid off, libraries were shuttered, and substitute teachers were even hard to find as the schools declined. A downward spiral began to accelerate, and at the end of 2013, the school district’s mayoral-appointed board closed nearly 50 schools, over 80 percent serving African American students.

The University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research documented extremely negative effects not only for the students whose schools were shuttered but also for students at the so-called “receiving” schools and for the surrounding community across Chicago’s South and West Sides: “When the closures took place at the end of the 2012-13 school year, nearly 12,000 students were attending the 47 elementary schools that closed that year, close to 17,000 students were attending the 48 designated welcoming schools, and around 1,100 staff were employed in the closed schools.” “Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community.”

But something has begun to change in this spring of 2021. Twenty-six years since an Illinois legislature launched Mayor Richard M. Daley’s 1995 school reform plan, another Illinois Legislature has begun to turn turn away from corporate school reform.

In April it was reported that, “Defying Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill… restoring the ability of the Chicago Teachers Union to bargain with the city over a wide range of issues, including class size, layoffs and the duration of the school year… The measure repeals Section 4.5 of the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act, which has restricted the CTU’s bargaining power since 1995, when state lawmakers gave then-Mayor Richard M. Daley control of the school district after several long strikes.”

In May, Mayor Lightfoot’s appointed board of education terminated its long contract with the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) to turnaround the city’s so-called “failing” public schools. School “turnaround” was a central part of the ideology of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and Arne Duncan’s 2009 Race to the Top program. School districts were required under federal law to identify the bottom 5 percent of public schools according to their standardized test scores and to turn them around quickly. Chicago turned many of its so-called “failing” schools over to AUSL, a city-wide consultant.  Chalkbeat‘s Cassie Walker Burke explains this history: “Tapped in 2006 to steer improvements at some of the city’s lowest-performing schools, the Academy for Urban School Leadership’s roster currently includes 31 schools on the South and West Sides that predominantly serve students from low-income families. Of the network’s schools, 20 campuses—or 65%—were in good standing last school year and had one of Chicago’s higher school ratings… but the remaining 11 were flagged for remediation or probation under that system.” Walker Burke describes Bogdana Chkoumbova, Chicago’s chief schools officer, explaining why school district leaders have chosen to terminate AUSL management of the schools: “She said that in school-level meetings about the transition plan, parents and educators said they hoped to see district takeover improve school culture and climate and prioritize restorative justice practices. Participants also said they hoped phasing schools back to district oversight would yield better collaboration with other schools and school leaders.”

Then last Wednesday, June 16, the Illinois House voted to approve a bill already passed by the Illinois Senate to begin the process of restoring an elected school board to the Chicago Public Schools. The Sun-Times‘ Rachel Hinton reports: “Chicago will soon have an elected school board thanks to a bill passed by members of the Illinois House Wednesday over objections from Mayor Lori Lightfoot. The House voted 70 to 41 to advance the bill, handing another loss to Lightfoot, who has been vocal in her opposition to the prospect of an elected board. The bill will soon head to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who has voiced support for an elected board and is expected to sign the legislation… House Bill 2908, as amended, would create a 21-seat board in January 2025, initially split between 11 mayoral appointees—including the board president—and 10 elected members.  Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago, said the bill isn’t perfect but ‘this is a down payment on democracy.’… In a statement, the Chicago Teachers Union said the vote ‘represents the will of the people, and after more than a quarter of a century, moves our district forward in providing democracy and a voice to students and their families'”

Obviously the restoration of the fully elected board of education will be a long process fraught with several years of complicated politics. But there has been real concern in Chicago about the suppression of the voices of parents and teachers and the locus of power in Chicago in the powerful corporate establishment bent on pursuing ideological school reform for over twenty-five years.

In a profound 2018 book exploring the widespread closure of neighborhood schools during the years of mayoral governance, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing explores the meaning of school closures across Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood—the meaning for teachers, grandparents, and students. Ewing contrasts their love for storied community institutions with the technocratic arguments of school district officials: “The people of Bronzeville understand that a school is more than a school. A school is the site of a history and a pillar of black pride in a racist city. A school is a safe place to be. A school is a place where you find family. A school is a home. So when they come for your schools, they’re coming for you. And after you’re gone they’d prefer you be forgotten.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, pp. 155-156)

Ewing continues: “It’s worth stating explicitly: my purpose in this book is not to say that school closure should never happen. Rather, in expanding the frame within which we see school closure as a policy decision, we find ourselves with a new series of questions…. These questions, I contend, need to be asked about Chicago’s school closures, about school closures anywhere. In fact, they are worth asking when considering virtually any educational policy decision:  What is the history that has brought us to this moment?  How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it? Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 159)

What Is the Legacy of Renaissance 2010 School Choice in Chicago?

On Tuesday evening’s PBS NewsHour, I was surprised as I listened to an interview about the tragic gun violence in Chicago last weekend to hear the speaker name public high school closures as among the causes. Certainly exploding economic inequality, poverty, lack of jobs, the presence of street gangs, and other structural factors are contributing to this long, hot summer in Chicago. But Lance Williams, a professor at Northeastern Illinois University, blamed Renaissance 2010, a now-20-year-old charter school expansion program, for today’s violence.

Professor Williams expressed particular concern about the phase out of neighborhood high schools: “(Y)ou’re seeing the violence on the West Side and the South Sides of Chicago because, about 20 years ago, in the early 2000s, the city of Chicago implemented some very, very bad public policy. The most damaging of those policies was the policy of Renaissance 2010, when Chicago basically privatized, through charter schools, neighborhood public elementary and high schools.  It became a serious problem, because many of the high schools and communities that had long traditions of street organizations caused young African-American males to be afraid to leave out of their communities, going to new schools throughout the city of Chicago. So, basically, from the early 2000s, too many young Afrcan-American males haven’t been going to school, meaning that they don’t have life prospects. They can’t get jobs. They’re self-medicated to deal with the stress in their community. And it’s driving a lot of the violence.”

The other speaker in the NewsHour‘s interview, Tamar Manasseh, runs a volunteer organization providing community meals at the corner of Chicago’s 75th Street and South Stewart Avenue—meals that provide food, and meals that try to build community to compensate for the destruction of community institutions.  Ms. Manasseh explained: “And it’s not just about the kids. It’s about the wellness of the entire community… There are 100 other organizations just like me who are out here every day in their own way making a contribution to making communities better… Englewood will not have any public schools in the fall. And these kids that Professor Williams spoke of, they will have no options of a public high school in Englewood.”

The research literature has documented that in Chicago, Portfolio School Reform and the subsequent expansion of school choice has been undermining public schools, which have previously been central institutions binding communities together. This PBS NewsHour interview is the first I’ve seen in the mainstream press to connect the dots between the expansion of school choice and the shredding of the fabric of Chicago’s neighborhoods.

What was Renaissance 2010?  After mayoral control was established in 1995 in Chicago, Mayor Richard M. Daley introduced one of the first Portfolio School Reform plans—to launch marketplace school choice by quickly adding privatized charter schools. In a climate of competition, the school district would encourage families to choose a school. Then the school district would manage the district like a stock portfolio—phasing out weak schools and schools that would become under-enrolled due to competition. The school district would keep on authorizing new charter schools to keep marketplace competition alive. Renaissance 2010 was managed by none other than Arne Duncan, who later became the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, and after that, U.S. Secretary of Education.

The complication was that many very poor neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago were already losing population, and the expansion of competitive school choice accelerated the under-enrollment of neighborhood schools. Later, in May of 2013, Chicago Public Schools closed 50 “under-enrolled” schools on Chicago’s South and West Sides. These are the neighborhoods where today three more high schools are being closed and then consolidated in 2019 into one new high school. Now that Renaissance 2010’s Portfolio School Reform-School Choice plan has been operating for more than a decade, people are paying attention to what have, apparently, been its long-term consequences.

Here is how the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research describes the impact of the 2013 public school closures on Chicago’s South and West Sides: “When the closures took place at the end of the 2012-13 school year, nearly 12,000 students were attending the 47 elementary schools that closed that year, close to 17,000 students were attending the 48 designated welcoming schools, and around 1,100 staff were employed in the closed schools.”  The report continues: “Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community.”

The Consortium on School Research continues: “When schools closed, it severed the longstanding social connections that families and staff had with their schools and with one another, resulting in a period of mourning… The intensity of the feelings of loss were amplified in cases where schools had been open for decades, with generations of families attending the same neighborhood school.  Losing their closed schools was not easy and the majority of interviewees spoke about the difficulty they had integrating and socializing into the welcoming schools.”  “Even though welcoming school staff and students did not lose their schools per se, many also expressed feelings of loss because incorporating a large number of new students required adjustments… Creating strong relationships and building trust in welcoming schools after schools closed was difficult.. Displaced staff and students, who had just lost their schools, had to go into unfamiliar school environments and start anew. Welcoming school communities also did not want to lose or change the way their schools were previously.”

Jitu Brown is a Chicago educator and community organizer. He was also one of the leaders of a 34 day hunger strike in September of 2015—a hunger strike that eventually forced Chicago Public Schools to reopen Dyett High School as the only open-admission public high school in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood.

When the school reopened in September of 2016, this is what the Chicago Tribune’s  Marwa Eltagouri and Juan Perez Jr. reported: “Families living nearby once again have an open-enrollment high school in their neighborhood. Parents don’t have to worry about their children taking buses or trains to far-off schools. And they don’t have to send their kids to privately run charter schools if they want to take honors or Advanced Placement classes.  A first day of school at Dyett wasn’t supposed to have happened this fall. But after a yearslong protest by community leaders that included a 34-day hunger strike, Chicago Public Schools reversed its decision to close Dyett at the end of the 2014-15 school year.”

Eltagouri and Perez quote Jitu Brown describing the need for Dyett High School to reopen: “When you go to a middle-class white community you don’t see charter schools, contract schools or alternative schools. You see effective, K-12 systems of education in their neighborhoods. Our children deserve the same.”

Jitu Brown is also the Director of the National Journey for Justice Alliance.  Brown addresses the tragedy of school closures in his Forward to a new report, Failing “Brown v Board” published in May 2018 by the Journey for Justice Alliance:  “In education, America does everything but equity. Alternative schools, charter schools, contract schools, online schools, credit recovery—schools run by private operators in the basement of churches, abandoned warehouses, storefronts; everything but ensuring that every child has a quality Pre-K through 12th grade system of education within safe walking distance of their homes.”

Chicago Sticks to Portfolio School Reform Despite All the Evidence that It Isn’t Working

Inertia is a scientific term from physics: something in motion will stay in motion unless some kind of external force changes its speed or trajectory.  In a less technical way, inertia is also a principle applicable to social policy. Inertia and commitment to “implementing the plan” are such strong forces that they will block out evidence that the plan is not working—has never been working.  All evidence to the contrary, the plan just keeps on being implemented.  Take, for example, portfolio school reform in Chicago.

We’ve had over a decade now to watch what has happened in the second large school district to institute portfolio school reform.  (Mayor Michael Bloomberg had already launched a similar program in New York City.) Wikipedia, which can be trusted for such basic factual information tells us: “Renaissance 2010… was announced in June 2004 by the Chicago Public Schools and the City of Chicago. Renaissance 2010 called for 100 new schools by 2010. Under Renaissance 2010, the Chicago Public Schools closed over 80 public schools, and sought to create 100 charter schools by 2010. These schools were to be held accountable for test score performance through 5-year contracts while following one of three governance structures: charter, contract, or performance.”

The academic outfit that promotes portfolio school reform is the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington Bothell.  (CRPE is not an academic division of the University of Washington but is instead a Gates-funded think tank located at the university. That distinction is important.) CRPE says that portfolio school reform is a “problem solving framework” that operates as a cycle: “give families choice; give schools autonomy; assess school performance; schools improve or get intervention; and expand or replace schools.”  CRPE also lists seven components of a portfolio strategy: good options and choices, school autonomy, pupil-based funding for each school, talent-seeking strategy, schools choosing from an array of independent providers, performance-based accountability, and extensive public engagement.  All this, claims CRPE, will ensure “a great school for every child in every neighborhood.”

Chicago’s Renaissance 2010, Arne Duncan’s project before he became the U.S. Secretary of Education, epitomizes portfolio school reform. And Renaissance 2010 became the template for the sort of governance reform Duncan brought to the U.S. Department of Education as the basis for the ill-fated School Improvement Grant and Race to the Top programs.  The theory is competitive: you give parents school choice; you attach funding to the school on a per-student basis so that when students leave, their funding follows; you reward winning schools by keeping them open; and you punish losing schools by closing them. Chicago has experienced an unprecedented number of school closures on the mostly African American South and West Sides.

And today, February 28, 2018, the Chicago Board of Education will vote on another school closure or phase out plan centered in Englewood, the South Side neighborhood just west of the Dan Ryan Expressway. The board will close or perhaps phase out four high schools and one elementary school and set in motion a plan for a new high school to open a year in the future. Families have been furious that their high school students would be displaced over the next year. Protests have perhaps been effective enough that the school board may phase out rather than abruptly closing three of the high schools, which would allow current students to graduate from the schools they have been attending.  But nobody is proposing to end portfolio school reform in Chicago;  once a portfolio plan is in place, the CEO is hired not so much to run the public schools as to manage the portfolio plan.

Here are merely some of the factors that the theory of portfolio school reform seems to have missed.

First, as Chicago has continued to launch new charter schools and specialty schools and selective schools, parents have been enticed by the advertising along with the idea that at least at the selective schools, their children will study with a more elite peer group. Parents have been willing to try out the choice schools and have their children travel long distances to elite schools and thereby abandon the neighborhood schools, whose funding drops as children leave. This process has hollowed out the comprehensive neighborhood high schools, which have been left serving a very vulnerable population with a higher percentage of students in special education. Last week’s Chicago Sun-Times reported that there has even been cheating on the lotteries, cheating in which school leaders have been able to find space for their children or relatives’ children in more elite schools, leaving behind students without powerful connections. This is a lifeboat strategy gone bad—a system that saves the privileged and leaves behind on the sinking ship the children who lack means or power or extreme talent.

Reporter Sarah Karp for WBEZ News describes the response of Janice Jackson, the current CEO of the Chicago Public Schools: “Jackson casts the dire situation of these Englewood schools largely as the result of circumstances beyond the school district’s control, like a hurricane. Families make choices, she said, by moving out of the area or sending their children elsewhere—options she insists all families deserve.” Karp reviews the history: “Daley (former Mayor Richard M. Daley) and Duncan also wanted to apply pressure on poor performing neighborhood schools across Chicago by creating competition with new, privately run schools. To advance this goal, in 2004 Daley announced Renaissance 2010, a plan to open 100 new schools within the decade. Many of the new schools were charter schools. Those are run by private organizations but are publicly funded.  Englewood, where many of the schools were poor performing, got an influx of new schools. Between 2005 and 2015, CPS opened nine high schools within about two miles of Hope (one of the schools now threatened with closure)… Chicago has always tied school budgets to enrollment, but in recent years as CPS has adopted a market-based approach to education, the relationship has become stronger. Starting in 2013, CPS implemented student-based budgeting, where money follows students. That thrust schools into fierce competition for students.”  Karp calls all this “A death spiral.”

Chicago has experimented with portfolio school reform at the same time its poorest neighborhoods have been decimated by the foreclosure crisis. Population declined in very poor neighborhoods like Englewood due to the financial crisis, but there is evidence that destabilization of the neighborhood’s schools has also contributed to a trend of families looking for more stable school districts in which to rear their children.  In December 2017,  Kalyn Belsha for the Chicago Reporter tracked “thousands of black students leav(ing) Chicago for other segregated districts.”  Belsha describes families who feel pushed out of Chicago, a city that has come to feel unwelcoming: “Chicago was once a major destination for African-Americans during the Great Migration, but experts say today the city is pushing out poor black families. In less than two decades, Chicago lost one-quarter of its black population, or more than 250,000 people. In the past decade, Chicago’s public schools lost more than 52,000 black students. Now, the school district which was majority black for half a century, is on pace to become majority Latino. Black neighborhoods like Austin have experienced some of the steepest student declines and most of the school closures and budget cuts… (S)ome academics blame city officials for making it harder for poor African-Americans, in particular, to live in Chicago: They closed neighborhood schools and mental health clinics; failed to rebuild public housing, dispersing thousands of poor black families across the region, and inadequately responded to gun violence, unemployment and foreclosures in black communities. ‘It’s a menu of disinvestment’ says Elizabeth Todd-Breland, who teaches African-American history at the University of Illinois Chicago. ‘The message that public policy sends to black families in the city is we’re not going to take care of you and if you just keep going away, that’s OK.’”

Here is the conclusion of a March 2017, Roosevelt University study of how portfolio school reform may have contributed to this trend in Chicago: “CPS’ approach to saturating neighborhoods with declining school-age population with new charter schools is stripping all middle-class, working-class and lower-income children, families, and communities of education security, where schools are rendered insecure by budgetary cuts, deprivation, or closure. Education insecurity is the product of the school reform agenda focused on cannibalizing the neighborhood public schools in order to convert CPS into a privatized ‘choice’ school system. While new charter schools continue to proliferate in low demand neighborhoods, all CPS neighborhood public schools experience debilitating budget cuts that lead to the elimination of teaching professionals and enriching curriculum. The most vulnerable communities are stripped of their public schools, or their remaining neighborhood public school is rendered unstable by the proximity of new charter schools… The cuts and deprivation across CPS neighborhood public schools underscore the problem of opening too many new schools in a system caught in the vice grip of austerity—there are not enough funds to provide all schools with the resources needed to succeed.”

William Mathis and Kevin Welner, in a 2016 brief for the National Education Policy Center, The ‘Portfolio’ Approach to School District Governance, remind us that portfolio school reform has substituted accountability-based school governance changes for the more expensive and likely more effective reform that could have been tried: investing in addressing poverty and financially supporting the schools serving children in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.  Here are Mathis and Welner: “As policymakers and the courts abandoned desegregation efforts and wealth moved from cities to the suburbs, most of the nation’s major cities developed communities of concentrated poverty, and policymakers gave the school districts serving those cities the task of overcoming the opportunity gaps created by that poverty. Moreover, districts were asked to do this with greatly inadequate funding. The nation’s highest poverty school districts receive ten percent lower funding per student while districts serving children of color receive 15 percent less.  This approach, of relying on under-resourced urban districts to remedy larger societal inequities, has consistently failed. In response, equity-focused reformers have called for a comprehensive redirection of policy and a serious attempt to address concentrated poverty as a vital companion to school reform.  But this would require a major and sustained investment.  Avoiding such a commitment, a different approach has therefore been offered: change the governance structure of urban school districts.  Proposals such as ‘mayoral control,’ ‘portfolio’ districts, and ‘recovery’ districts (also referred to as ‘takeover’ or ‘achievement’ districts) all fit within this line of attack… School turnaround approaches have, in general, been very disappointing, in large part because of the problems with closures and charter schools. The churn in the system, loss of institutional knowledge and loss of culture results in community and school disturbance and instability. Closing even low-performing schools can prove disruptive as community support dissipates….”

We’ll need to watch what action is taken today by the Chicago Board of Education—an entity, incidentally, appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, not elected by Chicago’s citizens. Jitu Brown, the Chicago community organizer who was instrumental in the 2015, month-long hunger strike that eventually re-opened Dyett High School as a neighborhood high school and who leads the national Journey for Justice Alliance, is reported to be concerned by the kind of displacement that has been repeated endlessly across Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods in the past decade due to school closures: “Stopping the schools from closing, it’s only a small part of the issue. What is the vision for public education for working and low-income black families? Who shapes that vision?”

Brown’s question is really at the heart of the school choice debate. Should education for the children of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods be driven by the invisible hand of the school-choice marketplace as parents are lured by advertising to try out the latest charter school—and as their child carries funding from the neighborhood school? And what about a tiered system of selective schools and neighborhood schools, but where funding follows the child? Does the school district have an obligation to the children who are not selected or who elect to attend school in their neighborhoods?

Truth Telling by Chicago Educators

Chicago provided the model for school “reform” as we now experience it in America.  A decade ago Arne Duncan, then C.E.O. of the Chicago Public Schools, launched Renaissance 2010, whose purpose was to expand school choice by opening 100 new schools by 2010, many of them charter schools, and closing so-called “failing” public schools.  New Schools for Chicago, a supporter of Ren10, as it was called, provides this puff-piece history: “In June 2004, Mayor Richard M. Daley, then Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Arne Duncan, and leaders from the Chicago business community announced Renaissance 2010 (Ren10).  The goal of this bold initiative was to open 100 new schools and provide all students, regardless of socioeconomic background, with the opportunity to compete on the global playing field.  The Renaissance Schools Fund (RSF) was established by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club as the fundraising and strategic partner to the Renaissance 2010 effort.”

When Barack Obama became President of the United States in the fall of 2008, he brought Arne Duncan with him to Washington, D.C. as the Secretary of Education, and along came Ren10 as the school “reform” template that would be rolled-out nationwide in programs like Race to the Top and the school “turnaround” models in School Improvement Grants.

In Chicago, Ren10 was launched in June of 2004—ten years ago.  So how’s it going back where it all began?  Not so well — according to new reports and commentaries by those charged with educating Chicago’s children.

Yesterday, May 22, on the first anniversary of Chicago’s vote “to close 50, ‘turn around’ five, and co-locate 17 elementary schools” the Chicago Teachers Union released a report, Twelve Months Later: The Impact of School Closings in Chicago.  The report was produced by the Chicago Teachers Union Research Department which conducted interviews with “teachers from seven of the receiving schools, Chopin, Courtenay, Dett, Earle, Nicholson, Otis, and South Shore Fine Arts — to gather information about the fulfillment of CPS promises.  Additionally, researchers reviewed CPS material on the school closures, operating and capital budget documents, position files, vacancy reports, class size data, and other public data.”  Chicago’s mass closure of 50 schools in one year was the largest closure of schools and reassignment of students ever to take place in the United States.

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) reports that although the school closures were promised to save money that could then be directed to support the needs of children in receiving schools, neither have such economies been realized nor the investments in student support been accomplished.  Many teaching positions at receiving schools remain unstaffed, with especially serious consequences in schools that received a significant influx of students needing special education.  “The duration of the special education vacancies were longer than for all teacher types, and were also substantially longer at receiving schools than others.”  At Brenneman Elementary School the number of special education students doubled, raising the ratio of social workers to students to an unmanageable level—from 125:1 a year ago to 180:1 today.   CTU concludes: “Instead of going directly to receiving schools, a large portion of the transition budgets allocated through central office went to management costs, such as logistics, human resources, building monitoring, and safe passage programs implemented to address safety concerns.”  A contractor hired to manage moving logistics won the job in April of 2013 with a bid of $14,200,000.00.  By December of 2013, the actual cost to the district had jumped to $30,900,000.00.

Also promised were enrichments at the receiving schools such as science labs, new libraries, computer labs and i-pads for the students.  However, “Courtenay is currently without a science teacher and the science lab at Dett is being used as a fourth grade classroom…  Even at the receiving schools with brand new libraries — Leland, McCutcheon, Harvard, and Bass — only Leland has a librarian on staff.  Libraries without librarians are used for other purposes.  For example, teachers reported them used for special education classes at Chopin and recess rooms at Earle.  Computer labs at receiving schools were upgraded; however, only one fifth of these schools has a technology teacher on staff this year…  At Drake, $100,000.00 worth of iPads were stolen over the weekend preceding the first day of school.  None of the teachers interviewed have seen technology working smoothly in their buildings.”

While the rationale presented for massive school closure was under-utilization of the schools that were closed, CTU reports that much of the space lost in closed buildings had been used for enrichments and community services. Of the schools closed, 90 percent were majority black;  71 percent of closed schools had a majority black teaching staff.  “Just 2% of schools with a minority Black student population were closed.” “25% of all CPS schools with both majority Black students and staff were closed.”   One result of closing schools to address supposed under-utilization has become overcrowding at receiving schools.  Today, to address overcrowding, “More charter schools are opening, despite evidence that their students perform no better than students at CPS-run schools.  More money is being spent for selective enrollment schools, attended disproportionately by White students.  Adequate supports for schools facing challenging circumstances are not forthcoming.”

In concert with the release of CTU’s scathing report have been stunning letters and op-eds published this month in Chicago by school principals who declare they can no longer remain silent.  In a  letter published May 9 in the Chicago Sun-Times, Troy La Raviere, principal at Blaine Elementary School, one of the city’s highest performing schools (as measured by standardized test scores), declared, “Since 2011, CPS principals and teachers have experienced unprecedented political burdens.  Early on, teachers felt publicly maligned and disrespected by the mayor, leading to the historic strike of 2012.  While publicly praising principals in speeches and with awards, behind the scenes this administration has disregarded principals’ knowledge and experience.  They have ignored and even suppressed principals’ voices in order to push City Hall’s political agenda for Chicago’s schools.”  “‘You are Board employees,’ a central office official told a room full of principals at a meeting, ‘and when you speak, your comments must be in line with the Board’s agenda.’ He instructed us to have an ‘elevator speech…'”   “The world’s highest-performing school systems are built on the ideas of American education professionals ranging from John Dewey to Linda Dalrling-Hammond, ideas that recognize school improvement is not an individual race, but a team sport.  Yet, our own elected officials have been ignoring those ideas in favor of teacher-bashing, privatized choice, fly-by-night fast-track teacher licensing and over-reliance on testing—ideas that have not improved schooling in any nation that has tried them.”

In a column published by Catalyst-Chicago on May 12, Adam Parrot-Sheffer, principal of Mary Gage Peterson Elementary School, wrote:  “…the lack of principal and teacher voice in this dialogue—which my heroic colleague Troy LaRaviere has written about in a Chicago Sun-Times op ed—has turned  promising ideas into harmful practice.  When this is coupled with implementation so poor it borders on malpractice, it is time for significant changes in our approach… Unfortunately, when systems stop considering the humanity of those working within them, employees with power in turn begin to disregard those working with them within the system.  I have lost count of the number of times I have watched my colleagues and myself be disrespected in meetings or emails.  I have sat through lengthy budget rollout meetings where principals were spoken to with empty platitudes about how they are the ‘levers of change’….  When administrators have raised their concerns in these meetings, such as what to do when we see lunchroom employees in tears from being overworked as the district cut school positions by 33% to 50%, there is no response… We are in the business of developing people, but these days, there is a lack of development and support for those doing that work.”