Reform school confidential; what we can learn for three of America's boldest school reforms

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1992 by Katherine Boo

From Chicago and Cincinnati to Washington and San Diego, decentralization of school administration is the latest banner of the reform crusaders, and its premise is a sound one. By cutting bureaucracy and loosening central office control, principals and teachers can be more responsive to the needs of their particular kids. And without the central office gobbling up funds, they'll have more money to respond with. Yet a peek behind the press releases suggests that this new trick is nothing against one of the oldest; bureaucratic inertia.

When William Bennett called Chicago the "worst school system in the country" back in 1988, he was stepping onto a pretty sturdy limb. Half the students dropped out before graduation, and high school achievement scores ranked in the lowest 1 percent of American schools. The administration, on the other hand, was doing fine. Central office workers were spending twice as much every month to trim and water the plants in their offices as they handed out for school supplies in the city's poorest elementaries. Meanwhile, layers of administrators couldn't even accomplish their most fundamental task: getting teachers into classrooms. Every day, thousands of students arrived at school to find neither a teacher nor a substitute in front of the class. "It's just a fact of life," one administrator reassured the Chicago Tribune at the time. "It's always been like this."

Finally, Chicagoans' frustration erupted. Unprecedented public, business, and press support led to the 1988 reform legislation that set a cap on the size of the administration and reallocated money to the schools. An astounding 17,000 people--mostly parents--ran for 4,300 seats on the newly empowered school councils in 1989, and more than 300,000 people turned out to vote. But by last year, a third of the council members had quit, frustrated; only 3,000 ran for the empty seats. What went wrong? Well, if you think you can't fight City Hall, try the school administration, whose "Club Med mentality." as parent Ron Sistrunk dubs it, has proved as durable as the roaches in the lunchroom.

Consider the number-one decentralization "strategy" issued by the administration: "Disassemble the Central Service Center" at the central office. A perusal of the restructuring plan shows what it really means isn't dismantling, but renaming--as the "Central Resource and Training Center." Another job-preserving technique comes under the heading "eliminat[ing] administrative impediments": not cutting staff or streamlining procedures, but researching and writing a series of procedure manuals that include development of "a master matrix ... of the stakeholder groups."

How do administrators get away with this rearguard action? Easily. School boards come and go; parents get frustrated with inertia and arcana. Thus administrators have been able to wait out "reform" until public interest wanes. And that's apparently what Chicago Superintendent Ted Kimbrough intends to do. In fact, all this harping over administration sort of bores him. Instead, he says, "We need to focus on the classroom."