Retention | Zero Tolerance Policy | School Funding | Local School Councils | Renaissance 2010
Education Grades
“Every day our officers do a good job protecting the people of Chicago, and we will give them even more support. We will do that through the modern technology that gives Chicago’s police the ability to chart overnight crime, predict crime patterns, identify suspects more quickly and deploy personnel more efficiently….I challenge our leaders in the Police Department to take full advantage of these modern resources and develop new and bolder ways to fight crime—especially gangs, guns and drugs—in our city.”
Mayor Daley, Inaugural speech May 2002
When the State of Illinois gave Mayor Daley control of the Chicago Public Schools in 1995, he received unprecedented powers of appointment and financial management—and the short-term results were spectacular. Only weeks after he named new staff, dozens of new programs were launched and the budget deficit was eliminated.1 However, after 12 years of mayoral oversight of the nation’s third-largest public school system, the results have not all been positive. At the time of this writing, the school district is once again threatened with a major financial crisis after experiencing severe program and personnel cuts in the final months of 2006, including reductions in special-education staff.2
Given questionable methods of data collection and interpretation, concerns abound as to whether progress truly is being made in such critical areas as reduction of dropout rates and increases in college enrollment and completion. Test scores in some areas are up, but many believe this is because test instruments have been changed, creating a situation in which reporting has lost credibility and reliance on these standardized tests is widely discredited.3
Chicago is also losing something that made it unique: a highly democratized style of education.4 Parents today are given less opportunity to participate in the decision-making process, whereas the authority of elected local school councils, formerly a check on both the local level (school principal) and the macro level (superintendent or school board) have been greatly diminished.
On the positive side, dozens of new public schools have opened, many of good quality and many more full of promise. Some communities that waited decades for new public schools or new facilities finally have them. A core of high-caliber public schools has grown over the past two decades, attracting enough new families to reverse the pattern from one of loss and of shrinkage to one of overall growth in the numbers of CPS students.5
Many of the most important issues facing CPS revolve around fundamental matters of justice and equity. From a policy standpoint, there are problems in effectiveness, as judged by graduation rates and college enrollment; justice, as judged by rates of suspension, expulsion, and incarceration of young persons; social ownership of public spaces and participatory rights to those spaces; and adequacy of funding/resources. Each of these domains is complex, and no magic potion can cure any or all of these ills.
Too often, misdirected “quick fixes” have been the recourse of the current administration. While these may provide some short-lived good news, high-school graduation rates continue to hover around 50 percent of the number of entering freshman.6
Any assessment of the Mayor’s performance with respect to the schools must review not only progress, but also CPS’s general direction. The introduction of Renaissance 2010 (in 2000) embraced the growing trend of relinquishing city control of schools in favor of private management, thus weakening the public’s “ownership” of the schools, especially in the city’s most economically distressed and educationally underserved communities.7
A close examination of recently implemented policies, new school constructions and the Renaissance 2010 Plan raises serious questions. To date, equity in the school system has been the most egregious shortcoming in Chicago’s education revolution.
An example of policy behavior that widened the inequality gap was the highly publicized abolition of “social promotion.” In 1996, recognizing that many schools were failing to produce high performance as judged by test scores, the school district, under Mayor Daley’s leadership, announced the abolition of social promotion.8 As a result, thousands of students were forced to repeat one or more grades. When surveyed, students said they found the event extremely stressful, rating only the loss of a parent or sight as a more anxiety-filled event.9 Parents and activists protested this policy, arguing that “flunking” children produces ever more dropouts.
When the retention program began in 1995, only 1,624 students in grades 3, 6 and 8 repeated a grade. By 2002, the number had climbed to 12,000—the peak year for the number of students retained. Those students were concentrated in elementary schools that served the highest numbers of low-income and minority students. African American students were four times as likely to be held back as white pupils, and Latino students were three times as likely to be held back.10
Chicago students who are held back do no better, and often do worse, than students who are socially promoted.
These students often end up in special education, where their achievement definitely does not improve, or where they drop out entirely. Students held back in eighth grade increased their chances of dropping out to 57 percent from 44 percent and those young people who had been previously held back and then failed again in eighth grade dropped out at an alarming rate of 78 percent. Additionally, there are serious civil rights issues that must be considered, as minority students, whose schools are likely to suffer from teacher shortages and high turnover, are retained disproportionately to their more affluent, generally white counterparts.11
The retention policy was quietly modified over the past two years,12 with no public announcement, after if became painfully clear that the rule was doing more harm than good. Far from narrowing the “achievement gap,” this policy actually widened the chasm between academically high-achieving and low-achieving students, driving countless scholars out of the school system altogether. The cost to the quality of life of the city cannot be calculated because the exit numbers are unknown.
School safety in is a top concern of parents, yet there is no evidence that inequitable application of the school district’s code of discipline, with “zero tolerance” as a core principle, has made schools safer. Instead, we have seen an increase in the number of in-school arrests, suspensions and expulsions, without a corresponding increase in programs offering alternative pathways to justice and safety.13 Because of federal funding cuts such as the elimination of the Safe and Drug-Free Schools monies, alternatives such as increased counseling and individual coaching, gang interdiction and after-school recreation have been reduced or eliminated.
In 1995, the State of Illinois passed legislation mandating a minimum one-year expulsion for any student caught in possession of a weapon on school grounds.14 CPS expanded upon that law, instituting an aggressive Zero Tolerance policy with a list of 11 mandatory expulsion offenses, including nine for which a student may be arrested (including fights between two or more people), and 28 for which a student must be arrested (including vandalism and false activation of a fire alarm.) Similarly, the grounds for suspension, which bars a student from school for a set period, also were significantly expanded.15
The Zero Tolerance Policy has exacted a severe toll on Chicago’s student population. On an average day more than 266 suspensions are enforced by CPS and, in 2002-2003 (the most recent data available), more than 29,700 children were suspended from its schools.16 Charter Schools have averaged higher suspension rates than their public counterparts.17 Suspensions deny students access to education for a set number of days, but expulsion—3,000 in the 2002-2003 school year alone—18 ends a child’s access to public education, and is often accompanied by an arrest. In that same 2002-2003 year, 8,539 youths were arrested at school, almost 10 percent of them 12 and under.19
The majority of these arrests did not involve serious crimes—more than 40 percent were for simple assault or battery, offenses that involved no serious injuries, weapons or, often, anything more than a threat or minor fight.20 Police reports illustrate that many students have been charged with aggravated assault, which does involve use of a weapon, even if the “weapon” was the child’s hands or feet. Some Chicago public defenders have questioned the nature of the cases sent to them, and protest that they are being forced to defend students for participating in snowball fights.21
Not only are these disciplinary actions not creating an environment of safety in the schools—they essentially guarantee a bad outcome for the youthful “offenders,” as research has demonstrated a clear and proportionate relationship between early arrests and expulsions and juvenile incarceration.22
Each of the following examples can be construed as a civil rights issue, disproportionately affecting minority youth. In the 2002-2003 school year, African-American students constituted 51 percent of total enrollment, but 76 percent of suspensions and almost 78 percent of expulsions. Similarly, between 1999 and 2003, African-American students made up 84 percent of all suspended-elementary school students. Perhaps unsurprisingly, African-American students also represent the majority of the arrests —77 percent in 2002-2003.23
More troubling, nearly three-quarters of all students referred for criminal prosecutions are classified as special-needs students, with at minimum some type of learning or behavioral disability. They are, in other words, being criminally charged for behavior arising from a disability.24
While everyone agrees that security is necessary, Chicago’s schools are becoming increasingly militarized. CPS has a huge security budget, $53 million in 2003-2004, and armed, uniformed Chicago police officers in every high school. There is a reliance technological devices such as metal detectors, heavy police presence, video surveillance and other prison-style mechanisms.25 This equipment and staff are expensive and may create the illusion of safety, but they don’t seem to be making schools safer. In fact, a Chicago highschool teacher commented in a report that the security guards often were unprofessional and, themselves, created a disturbance.26
In 1995, using his new powers to repair budget shortfalls of the early 1990s, Mayor Daley boosted new-school construction and renovation, and completed new projects in neighborhoods most in need of new schools.27 Unfortunately, these initial exertions did not have long-lasting effects. For instance, numerous new elementary schools were added in the densely populated Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods. But this early spending could not be sustained, because the basic funding formula used by CPS has yet to be reformed. Today, despite a handpicked school board, millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation, other grant money and a powerful board of foundation partners, CPS again finds itself in financial trouble.28 The administration plans to plug its projected $328 million deficit by reducing expenditures by $87.5, increasing revenues by more than $165 million and securing $75.5 million in transfers from reserves to the operating budget. It also plans to increase the property tax levy by the maximum amount allowed, the tenth time to do so since 1996.29
Curiously, there seems to be no clear explanation for the system’s current financial fragility. Moreover, this year’s budget is purported to contain “… contradictory, inconsistent and unsubstantiated budget calculations and staffing numbers, contradictory special-education enrollment figures, and hundreds of undercounted central office staff.”30
According to Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, even without its revolving door of monetary shortfalls and tenebrous budgets, Chicago would still have a school-funding problem—it is endemic to the entire state.31 However, CPS budget decisions have made things worse and created disgraceful resource disparities between schools serving low-income students and those designed to serve higher-scoring, generally higher-income students. Indeed, CPS recently recalibrated the equation with which it decides how to mete out federal Title I money, intended to improve the academic achievement of disadvantaged students.32 Until two years ago, schools with the highest poverty rates benefited from a steep sliding scale, giving these poorest schools proportionately more federal discretionary money. This year, the scale shifted considerably, with hundreds of thousand of discretionary dollars going to relatively better off schools, forcing poorer schools to make larger cuts than required by the projected budget shortfall.33
Unique to Chicago, Local School Councils, introduced in 1988, have proven a highly successful form of democratic local-school governance.34 Comprising parents, teachers, community residents and high school students, LSCs are legally empowered to make critical decisions about spending, hiring of the principal, and other major policy matters affecting their schools.
When LSCs were established, many critics questioned their capabilities, skeptical that they would continue to function over the long-term. Perhaps the most vocal critic was the administration itself—Paul Vallas, then CEO of CPS, said the councils were being filled by incompetents, and that its members were felons and the homeless.35 But other than specific problems at individual schools, LSCs on the whole have managed well the affairs of their schools, and are the basic unit of accountability to whom principals report. They also have resulted in increased parent and community engagement and many more volunteer hours. Indeed, the average LSC member spends 11 hours per month on official duties, and 17 hours per month beyond that, volunteering in the school. 
Across the school system, parent and community LSC members volunteer about 120,000 hours per month in their schools.36 Chicago’s LSCs represent a major opportunity for African-American and Latino grassroots leaders to become elected public officials in their communities. About 1,800 African-American and 700 Latino parents and community residents serve on Chicago’s LSCs, and these members represent the vast majority of elected officials of color in Illinois.37
Despite their record of success LSCs have seen their powers systematically worn away over the past decade. A loophole in Illinois law allows CPS’s central office to have control over the removal and placement of ‘interim’ principals when the school is placed on academic probation, a provision that has been exploited since Mayor Daley assumed oversight of the schools. Also, most new charter, contract and “small schools” are not required to institute an LSC board (although many require a community “advisory” board).38
In 2004, Mayor Daley announced an agenda to completely revamp the city’s schools system. The plan, called “Renaissance 2010,” or “Ren 10,” called for closing 60 “underperforming” CPS schools and replacing them with an assortment of 100 charter, contract and performance schools.39
This tactic of replacing large, struggling schools has become all too familiar in many Chicago neighborhoods. As Renaissance 2010 moves toward its objectives, at least 60 existing neighborhood schools are slated to be, or have been, closed. The vast majority have been in African-American neighborhoods that serve very-low-income students.
Individuals and community groups worry about the school closings and about what happens to children shuffled from one neighborhood to another as schools are closed. This destabilization is particularly troublesome, because neighborhood schools, whatever their shortcomings, are among the most reliable and stable institutions in a community. Schools in low-income neighborhoods often provide not only academic learning, but also early or preschool education; recreational, social and health services; after-school care; and two meals a day.40 For the 10,000 homeless children who attend CPS schools, the profound impact of school closings is cruelly magnified.41 In materials provided to Chicago Coalition for the Homeless in a lawsuit brought against CPS, the district acknowledged a time lag of up to six months for students to recover academically following a school transfer—their attendance and performance drop, they are more likely to repeat a grade and they are less likely to graduate than their peers.42
In several cases, schools eliminated under Renaissance 2010 have not been replaced. In a particularly egregious instance, the neighborhood school has not been replaced, but a charter school has been granted in its stead to a web-based, on-line virtual “schoolhouse.” CPS spokesman Malon Edwards stated that the district wanted to offer “diverse and innovative opportunities for every student in the system” and that “this school could provide opportunities for those who are gifted, those who struggle academically, students who might be homebound because of a medical condition, or for other reasons.”43 The opening of this school has caused much controversy, not only due to the many philosophical debates as to the efficacy of such a school, but because it is operated by K-12 Inc., a software company established by William Bennett, an ultraconservative educational theorist known for publicly making racist comments.44
Many other issues related to school closings and openings under Ren 10 have come to light. The majority of start-ups are charter schools, which exclude the teachers’ union and do not require LSCs. The governance and student-admissions processes are opaque. The community has no input into hiring of staff, selection of the principal or approval of expenditures.
In fact, most new schools opened as part of Renaissance 2010 do not require popularly elected LSCs. In cases where local management is handed over to private management companies, the disempowering of local neighborhoods will be complete, as supervision by local school councils will not be required.
Some of these concerns could be overlooked if it was clear that the Renaissance 2010 plan was working, but reports of the new schools’ performance are contradictory and confusing.
There seem to be small signs of success, but they are minimal at best. The most independent information shows Chicago charter schools to have slightly higher rates of graduation and lower drop-out rates, and a higher percentage of students reading at or above standards in the eighth grade. High-school test scores remain on par with the district as a whole.46 Some excellent schools seem to be emerging from the process, but the program also has opened the way for cronyism and the granting of schools to political allies rather than by merit.47 Meanwhile, school closings are concentrating the most at-risk students in fewer, low-performing schools, while novelty charter, military and contract schools draw the most capable students and families and access the resources of the business and foundation community.48
Retention
A policy that forced thousands of students to repeat one or more grades, retention widened the achievement gap bet ween high-achieving students and low-achieving students, driving countless out of the system altogether. Those retained, or held back, disproportionately attended schools serving students of color from extremely poor households. While this program was quietly cut, the true cost of this strategy is uncertain as the exit numbers (those that dropped out or did not graduate) are unknown.
Zero-Tolerance Policy
While safety clearly is a top priority for parents, the zero tolerance policy has failed to substantially increase safety, and instead has produced an increase in the number of in-school arrests, suspensions and expulsions—without a proportionate increase in programs offering remediation or alternative-learning programs for those forced to leave school. This issue significantly affects youth of color and special-needs students.
School Funding
While school funding problems are not unique to Chicago, Chicago Public Schools increasingly are seen as financhially unaccountable, offering only shady budgets, unsubstantiated budget calculations, inconsistent staffing numbers and variable enrollment figures. The system also has shifted its allocation methodology, increasing the disparity between schools serving low- and high-income students.
Facing a projected $328 million budget deficit for 2007, CPS plans to plug the gap through $87.5 million in reduced expenditures, more than $165 million in increased revenues, and $75.5 million in transfers from reserves. The city also will increase the property tax levy by the maximum amount allowed.
Local School Councils
Local School Councils are a highly successful form of participatory community governance. They provide parents, teachers and students the opportunity to have real authority and say in the day-to-day happenings in their schools, including hiring the principal. Unfortunately, their power is being eroded with the institution of the Renaissance 2010 plan as charter and contract schools, which do not require LSCs, begin to dominate the school scene.
Renaissance 2010
Seven years into the Ren 10 plan, some excellent schools seem to be emerging from the process, but the program also has opened the way for cronyism and political maneuvering. Meanwhile, school closings are concentrating the most at-risk students in fewer, lower-performing schools, while novelty charter, military and contract schools draw the most capable students and families and access the resources of the business and foundation community.
Operating the nation’s third-largest public-school system is a huge challenge. Funding is always an issue, particularly as Illinois schools are endowed primarily through property taxes—a questionable method that inevitably creates a multi-tiered system. The deterioration of buildings, combined with elimination of federal funding (even as federal mandates increase) puts enormous pressure on the district.
Bad decisions also have diminished the effectiveness of the system. The retention and zero-tolerance policies have been detrimental to low-income and minority communities—and these plans were put into place despite research that indicated they would fail over the long term.
While the movement towards small schools in the Renaissance 2010 plan may be justified, the lack of community input and the concerted attempt to erode the control of LSCs and the teachers’ union are extremely troubling.
The City of Chicago earns: C
It is extremely difficult to anticipate how Chicago schools will perform in the next few years because it is uncertain which schools will be closed, what aspect of the budget is inflated, and whether the new charter and contract schools will really perform better than traditional schools.
However, while the efficacy of specific policy initiatives may be discussed endlessly, it cannot be denied that Chicago is failing its school children. How can Chicago receive a passing grade in education when almost 50 percent of its children don’t graduate from high school? When reading scores are so dismal, and the disparity between poor and affluent schools continue to grow? When the criminalization of children continues and the dropout rate increases, and data repeatedly illustrate just how few of the city’s young adults graduate college?
This lack of a future grade is not given lightly. It is given out of a deep sense of frustration and fear that Chicago Public Schools are headed in the wrong direction; that too much focus is given to creating high performing schools while the majority of children are allowed to fall through the cracks, that the first goal of the city is to create a system that’s better for those who need it least, while disregarding the needs of those who need it the most.
When a child does not get educated, society as a whole suffers and bears the cost. Looking at the methods CPS currently employs and its potential failures, that cost may be high indeed.