Revolution needed

National Review, Oct 7, 1991 by Arlynn L. Presser

IT BEGAN as a simple get-together in the office of Hedges East principal Steven Hara to schedule the next meeting of the local school council. It ended with school-council president German Gonzalez holding down the hapless principal so that school-council secretary Beatrize Lepe could get in a punch to his face. Though Mrs. Lepe and Mr. Gonzalez were charged with battery, the Hispanic community's activist group, United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), was immediately assured by Chicago public-schools superintendent Ted Kimbrough that an investigation would be mounted into charges that Hara provoked the attack by failing to implement a school budget approved by the local school council and by his allegedly condoning the distribution of an inflammatory flier attacking Hispanics.

While Hara's face has recovered, Mrs. Lepe's punch struck all 540 schools in Chicago's district. Over and over, Chicagoans ask, "Is this any way to reform our schools?"

Chicago's reform movement began in 1988 with high hopes. After all, the school system was so bad--named by then-Secretary of Education William Bennett as the worst in the country--that it was difficult to imagine anything worse. Much of the problem, it was believed, was with the increasingly centralized, increasingly unwieldy school bureaucracy, which was trying to keep track of hundreds of schools, thousands of teachers, and hundreds of thousands of students. By placing power in the hands of those who care the most about the quality of education--parents--Chicago hoped to put the brakes on its students' accelerating dropout rates and downward-spiraling test scores.

Instead of turning to individual parental choice, however, the reformers opted for collective power, in the form of local school councils made up of parents, neighborhood residents, teachers, and principals. They placed their faith in collective consensus-building, not in a free market's ability to spur excellence.

The school councils were given the responsibilities of hiring and negotiating employment contracts with principals, specifying the school's educational goals, approving curriculums and budgets, and making recommendations on hiring and firing. With 5,400 school-council members, all working for the goal of better education in Chicago, hopes were very high indeed.

But Chicago is as Balkanized as any other large urban community, and the school councils quickly became a new source of strife. Operation PUSH, long a powerful player in the centralized school management, depicted the reform movement as a racist maneuver--noting that decentralization was occurring just when blacks were coming to power. PUSH never galvanized its members for school-council elections, whereas the Hispanic group UNO aggressively pursued spots on the councils and made no secret of its desire to use them as a springboard for greater power within the city.

Within months of their election, two Hispanic-dominated councils had been sued for racial discrimination in their firings of non-Hispanic principals. Half a dozen teacher and/or student boycotts occurred when councils dissolved into factional fighting. Further, council members reported hostility from the school-board headquarters and the superintendent's office--some councils had to haggle with the central office to get something as simple as approval to change dead lightbulbs. The teachers' union also threw a monkey wrench into the reform plans, battling councils that trie to discipline or fire incompetent teachers. "What the councils managed to do," charges Professor Daniel Polsby of Northwestern University School of Law, "without getting rid of any of the clumsy bureaucratic superstructure that accumulated to administer all the mandates and programs and what-not, is add another layer, a very highly politicized layer, of governance."

In December 1990, the Illinois Supreme Court declared the 1988 Reform Act unconstitutional because parents of schoolchildren were given greater weight in selecting council members than were other citizens. The Illinois General Assembly--aided by lobbyists for community groups, business groups, the teachers' union, and the school board--is putting together a new reform package that will, it is hoped, survive the scrutiny of the courts. But few in power have suggested that it might be time to examine the very foundation of the reform movement.

Placing parents in greater control of their children's education was the original aim of the movement, and yet, at every step of the way, the power of parents has been reduced--by community groups intent on building their own power base, by a centralized management determined to hold onto power, by a teachers' union trying to save its own neck, and, now, by the Illinois Supreme Court.

Where reform advocates seem to have veered off course is in the assumption that parents can best make decisions for their children by meeting with other parents and forming a consensus. By placing faith in collective action instead of individual choice in a free market of educational alternatives, school reformers did not hold true to their original premise that parents are the people most interested in their children's education.