Charting Chicago School Reform

Democratic Localism As A Lever For Change

Anthony Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, David Kerbow, Sharon Rollow, John Easton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367314927
• eBook ISBN: 9780429981371
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In 1989, Chicago began an experiment with radical decentralization of power and authority. Intertwining extensive narratives and rigorous quantitative analyses, this book tells the story of what happened to Chicagos elementary schools in the first four years of this reform. }In 1989, Chicago began an experiment with radical decentralization of power and authority. This book tells the story of what happened to Chicagos elementary schools in the first four years of this reform. Implicit in this reform is the theory that expanded local democratic participation would stimulate organizational change within schools, which in turn would foster improved teaching and learning. Using this theory as a framework, the authors marshal massive quantitative and qualitative data to examine how the reform actually unfolded at the school level.With longitudinal case study data on 22 schools, survey responses from principals and teachers in 269 schools, and supplementary system-wide administrative data, the authors identify four types of school politics: strong democracy, consolidated principal power, maintenance, and adversarial. In addition, they classify school change efforts as either systemic or unfocused. Bringing these strands together, the authors determine that, in about a third of the schools, expanded local democratic participation served as a strong lever for introducing systemic change focused on improved instruction. Finally, case studies of six actively restructuring schools illustrate how under decentralization the principals role is recast, social support for change can grow, and ideas and information from external sources are brought to bear on school change initiatives. Few studies intertwine so completely extensive narratives and rigorous quantitative analyses. The result is a complex picture of the Chicago reform that joins the politics of local control to school change.This volume is intended for scholars in the fields of urban education, public policy, sociology of education, anthropology of education, and politics of education. Comprehensive and descriptive, it is an engaging text for graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. Local, state, and federal policymakers who are concerned with urban education will find new and insightful material. The book should be on reading lists and in professional development seminars for school principals who want to garner community support for change and for school community leaders who want more responsive local institutions. Finally, educators, administrators, and activists in Chicago will appreciate this detailed analysis of the early years of reform.

1
Framing Our Analysis: Locating Chicago School Reform Within an Institutional Change Perspective

The past fifteen years have witnessed an unprecedented level of public attention to our educational institutions. A virtual industry of panels, commissions, research reports, and policy analyses has documented numerous problems and proposed a vast array of remedies. Efforts have moved forward to strengthen high school graduation requirements, to enforce stricter codes for student conduct and discipline, and to effect wholesale changes in instruction to deepen students' engagement with subject matter and promote higher order thinking.¹ Other reforms have been directed toward professionalizing teachers by promoting higher standards for certification, by changing the nature of pre-service education, by creating teacher networks, and by empowering teachers with greater decision-making authority at the building level.² Still others have emphasized reforming the grade-level organization of schooling, such as ungraded primary schools, and altering the basic social structure of schools to develop smaller, more personal, caring environments.³

In scanning this landscape of school reform, one quickly can become overwhelmed by the breadth and diversity of the efforts now underway. Literally every aspect of school organization and classroom practice has been challenged, and often quite radical alternatives have been proposed.

In striving for some larger, more comprehensive understanding of this broadbased discontent with existing arrangements, much attention has focused on the institutional structure of schooling in the United States, the educational problems associated with it, and the most effective approach to their redress.⁴ These analyses typically begin with the observation that how a school works (or fails to work) is shaped, in both obvious and subtle ways, by its external environment. In this regard, schools are viewed as "open systems," where the nature of core practices and their overall effectiveness depend on how these external influences operate. When we confront school failure on a massive scale, such as in Chicago and in other large urban centers, it seems highly plausible that the root cause of this failure is not inside each individual school but rather in the external environments that they share. From this perspective, pervasive bad school practices are symptoms of some larger external causes. In particular, how schools are governed is seen as the central problem.

The current governance structures for urban public education emerged late in the nineteenth century. The cornerstone of these arrangements was the public control of schools by democratically elected or politically appointed district school boards. These local boards hired a professional administration, consisting of a superintendent and central office staff, who created bureaucracies to control their rapidly expanding school systems. District operations were further embedded within state governments that have primary, formal authority for public education. The state institutions parallel the district: Each has a school board, a form of superintendent, and a specialized bureaucracy to support its work. In addition, the federal government—although taking a secondary role in some respects—has its own educational bureaucracy, with complex linkages to state-local hierarchy. These structures organize large-scale democratic control of public education. They afford various entry points for political influence and function primarily through a series of professionalized bureaucracies.⁵

The amount of political activity flowing through these structures greatly intensified beginning in the mid-1960s. Many minority and special interest groups, previously disenfranchised, were now "at the table."⁶ The issues and concerns raised here were especially profound in large urban centers, given their diverse and extraordinarily needy student populations. The new claims pressed on urban school systems resulted in a complex maze of programs, rules and regulations, and conflicting mandates.⁷ Judicial directives on students' rights, school desegregation, and inclusion of handicapped children brought one wave of reforms. Added to this have been pull-out programs for the education of the disadvantaged and separate classes for linguistic minorities. Layered on top are specialized curricular initiatives on such topics as drugs, AIDS, suicide, and sexual abuse. Recently, demands have come for more testing, new core curriculum, and increased school planning and accountability. Clearly, the list of externally imposed initiatives is long and grows each year.

There has been little thought along the way as to How individual schools are supposed to combine all of this to create an effective work environment for adults and students. Instead, each new initiative is typically layered in a disjointed fashion on top of the ones that came immediately before it. Few local participants are fully aware of the totality of a school's operations, the external constraints placed upon them, and the overall impact of these diverse initiatives on the school's sense of purpose and its organizational coherence. This was certainly true at Beacon School, and is a general feature of the larger system of which Beacon is a part. Ironically, this is "not an outcome that any of the major players would want or intend if acting alone. It is truly a product of the system as a whole, an unintended consequence of the way the system works."⁸ Most troublesome, critics argue that there is little reason for optimism that the current system can do anything about this, other than to continue to add more of the same.

This line of analysis suggests that fundamental change is needed in school governance arrangements. Absent this, ineffective school performance is likely to continue. While principals, teachers, parents, and interested citizens may work hard to promote better schools, the larger institutional system will continue to frustrate their best efforts.⁹ The governance of public education, as currently structured, is fundamentally incompatible with the organizational and instructional changes desired. Unless these arrangements are restructured, wide scale school reform remains unlikely

A Market-Based System of Schools

Inextricably tied to the growth of special interest groups, each pressing their distinctive cause, has been the expansion of centralized school bureaucracies.¹⁰ Typically, each new program or mandate is accompanied by a new central office department to administer and control its operation. Like the political mobilizing for each new policy initiative, the rules, regulations, and monitoring of these departments focus only on the selected aspects of school operations that each has been charged to redress. The collective effects of all of this specialized program activity, however, are no one's responsibility.

At the school building level, principals now confront a complex web of external control. The number of "downtown bureaucrats" who can block a proposed local action has increased dramatically. In some instances, these bureaucrats wield their power in petty or even despotic ways. Even under better, more cooperative circumstances, this structure greatly complicates local action and demands considerable inventiveness to circumvent, It has contributed to a broadly shared sense among school participants that they cannot effect solutions to the fundamental problems which they confront. Such a normative environment depresses subsequent initiatives and discourages entrepreneurship. Genuine leadership, under these circumstances, requires extraordinary personal commitment. It also often demands courage. The stories are legendary about those who tried to make change and were "savaged by the system." Prior to the passage of PA 85-1418, reform-minded principals in Chicago regularly had to resort to "creative insubordination" lest their efforts be crushed by someone downtown.¹¹

Such analyses of the problems of America's schools have played a central role in the growing advocacy for a market-driven system of education. The direct democratic control of school boards and the centralized bureaucracies that institutionalize various political interests are seen as the major obstacles to improvement. Advocates for choice argue that markets should replace direct democracy by school boards as the primary control mechanism. They claim that this approach is more likely to stimulate initiative at the school building level, afford parents a much greater measure of influence over the kind of education received by their children, and eliminate bureaucratic waste. More specifically, these proposals would strip away the accumulated bureaucracies and regulations which market advocates claim have crippled innovation. Much greater authority would be extended to school site leaders to shape their work environs. Relieved of constraints, locally empowered and stimulated by profit incentives, it is argued that more effective schools and more efficient use of public resources would result.¹²

While market proposals vary in their details, they share some common features. They all require a continuing public agency to establish and maintain at least a minimal regulatory apparatus to assure that accurate information is broadly disseminated about educational services and that fair access to these services is afforded. The agency's primary function would be granting vouchers to parents and empowering them to choose among an array of schools which would have to compete with each other. The ability of any public authority to expand its activity beyond this purview would be deliberately constrained. Government would set up the system and then "get out of the way." Schooling would be much more akin to a private commodity which, like any other good or service, involves an exchange in the marketplace. Society would rely primarily on the "invisible hand" of the marketplace to discipline these exchanges, and would only turn to public regulation as a last resort. The seeming simplicity of this control mechanism, especially when contrasted with the political conflict and bureaucratic snarls that often engulf public education, makes this vision very appealing.

Nonetheless, these proposals have drawn many critics. Much of this attention has focused on issues of educational equity.¹³ Existing evidence from other public services where markets currently operate, such as health care and post-secondary education, raise questions about how well the poor and minorities fare under these systems.¹⁴ Some legitimation for these concerns can also be found in studies of existing school choice programs.¹⁵ In general, there are reasons to worry that unless regulatory systems are carefully crafted to assure that quality schools are located near where poor people live, and that those people have good information about them, a market system might be even more inequitable than current arrangements.

Proponents of school choice have also been criticized for ignoring the social aims of education. School choice arguments are almost exclusively framed in terms of the individual academic benefits that supposedly will accrue to those exposed to a market system of schooling. However, schools also serve important social and political purposes. Historically they have played a central role in extending not only skills and knowledge, but also those habits of heart necessary for a vital democratic citizenry and convivial free society.¹⁶ From this perspective, the public has a legitimate continued interest in the direct control of America's schools. They are the primary social institutions that shape our future society, and, in this, all citizens have a stake.¹⁷

Systemic Reform as an Alternative to Markets

Market initiatives and school vouchers are not the only educational reform agenda which develops out of an institutional critique of the current structures of public school governance. Like market critics, advocates for systemic reform also believe that the institutional arrangements surrounding schools significantly impede reform.¹⁸ In fact, advocates for systemic reform voice many of the same complaints, and often use the same phrases to describe the dysfunctional state of affairs created by current educational governance arrangements.¹⁹

Kather than directly challenging the basic political structure of large-scale democratic control, however, this perspective argues for a systemic change within existing structures. Educational policy needs to be more coherent, this perspective says, and the various components of policy need to reinforce one another. Instead of emphasizing rule accountability for specific processes and services, schools should become outcome accountable. As an alternative to the current maze of conflicting mandates, schooling should be driven by a coherent system of educational goals. Content standards would define the knowledge to which students should be exposed, arid would include explicit criteria for judging student performance. New assessments linked to these standards would provide evidence about the adequacy of students' and schools' work. Coordinated with this would be major reforms in pre-service education and a substantial increase in the professional education of existing teachers to support their efforts to achieve academic excellence with all children. Binding together this new common agenda for education would be broadly shared commitments both to the democratic values of individual respect, equality, civic participation, and social responsibility, and to the intellectual dispositions necessary for full participation in a complex modern society, such as active learning, sustained discourse about ideas, and intellectually rigorous examination.

In terms of specific governance changes, systemic reformers seek to increase the authority of both states and local schools while constraining the activities of school districts, including their boards, superintendents and central administration. More specifically, systemic reform seeks to rationalize and legitimize state authority around a coherent system of instructional guidance. The state would establish educational goals that incorporate high academic standards for all students, provide the necessary resources to support those standards, create an accountability system linked to the standards, and coordinate efforts to strengthen pre-service education for teachers and in-service staff development programs. In tandem with these activities, individual schools would have more flexibility and authority to create local work conditions more conducive to the best efforts of teachers and students. Finally, districts would act as intermediaries between the state and individual schools, supporting the instructional guidance initiatives emanating from the state and assuring that resources and programs are equitably distributed so that all children have an opportunity to meet state standards. Concomitant with their new and reduced r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1 Framing Our Analysis: Locating Chicago School Reform Within an Institutional Change Perspective
• 2 Politics as a Lever for Organizational Change
• 3 Catalyzing Basic Organizational Change at the Building Level
• 4 Instructional Change
• 5 Testing the Basic Logic of the Chicago School Reform Act
• 6 A Closer Look at Actively Restructuring Schools
• 7 Major Lessons from the Initiating Phase of Chicago School Reform
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index