Navigating a restless sea: The continuing struggle to achieve a decent education for African American youngsters in Chicago

Journal of Negro Education, The, Winter 1994 by Ayers, William, Klonsky, Michael

The wholesale swindle in Chicago, then, is neither incidental nor accidental; rather, it is an expression of the smooth functioning of the system. Speaking of the educational "strategies of failure" a generation ago, Stein (1971) concluded:

This is a massive accomplishment....It took the effort of ...teachers, administrators, scholars, and social scientists, and the expenditure of billions of dollars to achieve. Alone, however, the "professional" educators could not have done it. They needed the active support of all the forces of business, real estate interests, trade unions, willing politicians, city officials, the police, and the courts. . . . Perhaps an even greater achievement of the schools has been their ability to place the responsibility for this extraordinary record of failure upon the children themselves, their families, and their communities. Social scientists engage in learned disputes as to whether it is heredity or environment that makes the child of poverty an inferior form of humankind--but the assumption of his inferiority is not disputed, except by his parents and by the child himself. (p. 159)

If one notes that U.S. schools are stuck in time, a reflection of a vanishing industrial age, then the struggle for adequate education in Chicago for those students who are traditionally "ripped-off" and locked out will be seen as a struggle for all youngsters. Decentralized, flexible, multicultural, small schools can benefit the whole society.

THE SCHOOL REFORM MOVEMENT IN CHICAGO

William Bennett, Ronald Reagan's flamboyant Secretary of Education, flew from Washington to Chicago in late 1987 and proclaimed at an airport press conference that Chicago's public schools were "the worst in America" (Chicago Tribune, 1988). His comments made the national news, and that single superlative became headlines around the country. In Chicago, the reaction to Bennett's statement was decidedly mixed. Critics and some reformers welcomed the attention. Parents felt simultaneously attacked and indignant. Principals felt assaulted and further diminished. Politicians saw it as a calculated move by a conservative Republican administration to undercut Harold Washington, Chicago's popular and progressive mayor, the city's first African American chief executive. Teachers saw it as a cheap shot at the progress and accomplishments of those who toil in the schools. Practically everyone noted that Bennett's quips would not be accompanied by any commitment of federal resources and that his rhetorical excesses were uttered in the midst of a massive national retreat from support for public schools and public school children generally and the wholesale abandonment of poor, urban youth and African American families in particular.

The notion that Chicago schools were the nation's worst touched a nerve, and the phrase stuck. Within months, a lengthy Chicago Tribune series on the state of the city's schools began. The series, entitled "The Worst Schools in America," was eventually edited, published as a book, and distributed widely throughout the city (Chicago Tribune, 1988). No one really cared to debate whether Chicago's schools were better or worse than the schools in other large cities such as Detroit or New York, or whether they were just "awful" or "truly terrible" rather than "the worst." No one cared to point out the ways in which Chicago was merely a case among cases, a typical collapsing urban system. It was enough to know that the schools were failing Chicago's children massively, a fact that was well-established and deeply felt by late 1987.