How Big Business Has Driven Chicago Public School Reform for Over a Century
For generations, Chicago’s private power brokers have tried to shape the school system according to the management principles of the day, whether it’s the hierarchies of 19th-century industry or the disruption of 21st-finance.
WBEZ’s excellent education reporter, Becky Vevea—not surprisingly, an alumna of Catalyst Chicago, Chicago’s excellent education magazine—has a great piece as part of WBEZ’s Curious City series: “Were Chicago’s Public Schools Ever Good?”
It’s a great question, not just because, as Vevea unsurprisingly says, “as an education reporter, I’ve heard many versions of this question during my time covering Chicago Public Schools.” More broadly and philosophically, it’s a good question because nostalgia is a powerful influence on how we think about the systems around us. Survivor bias, in particular—things that are good, from books to ideas to technologies tend to last, and because they last, they connect us to history, and color that history in rose.
And Vevea comes across such memories in reporting the piece. “For me the golden era was my time at Metro High School,” the head of Evanston’s District 65 tells her, about one of Chicago’s early magnet schools. But:
Magnet schools became isolated islands of success, but if you didn’t get into one, public education was a mixed bag.Among other problems, inequalities persisted. Danns says when schools started to integrate, local trade unions pulled support from Washburne Trade School. An article from the Chicago Tribune in 1986, mentioned that in 1963 fewer than 2 percent of apprentices at Washburne were black.In other words, even with years of effort on the part of the district, a career-ready curriculum remained out of reach for large swaths of CPS students.
A couple years ago I looked into this question as well. One of the fascinating things I found had to do with the city’s notorious “Willis Wagons,” which live in infamy as a symbol of racism—Benjamin Willis, the school superintendent, crammed black students into aluminum trailers, the kind you see as temporary offices on construction sites.
The Willis Wagons were undeniably bad. Not only did they serve to maintain school segregation, they were aesthetically a symbol of that divide: cheap and temporary structures sitting next to the solid, august, historical school buildings that evoked the city’s commitment to education. But what they addressed, however poorly, was also terrible: massively overcrowded classrooms and the widespread use of split-shift scheduling that deprived students of hours of instruction every day.
Vevea’s piece also reminded me of a fascinating work of history on Chicago’s schools, School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago, 1880-1920, by Dorothy Shipps, who used to run the Consortium on Chicago School Research. It also traces patterns throughout the system’s history, but specifically about the system—how it was run and the power brokers that ran it. Take this paragraph, which sounds like it could be written about CPS today:
[Commercial] Club members self-righteously believed that the rapidly growing public schools could simultaneously upgrade the masses, preserve order, and provide young workers. They sought to vocationalize, economize, and rationalize schooling, steering it by judicious application of the same governing principles they thought best for their own businesses: keep taxes low, organize the work “scientifically,” and, above all, trust in management. Labor groups provided an alternative version of schooling that emphasized worker democracy in governance, social change through education, and equal access for all students to the highest levels of public schooling. Teachers federations and industrial unions fought to maintain teacher autonomy, union control over workplace skills, and a secure flow of public funding.
Only this was the 1880s, the very beginnings of the city’s public school system. Shipps follows this thread of technocratic, business-inspired management back to the 19th century, when University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper chaired the 1898 Commission on Educational Reorganization. Harper’s commission recommended an “independent business manager” who would “mimic ‘the executive in any well-conducted business enterprise.’” It also recommended “performance-based promotion,” and “established ‘efficiency’ as the primary performance criterion for teachers.”
Generally, the Commercial Club and its ilk were successful in shaping Chicago’s schools through the 20th century. One Chicago superintendent, William McAndrew, who served for four years in the 1920s, described How Big Business Has Driven Chicago Public School Reform for Over a Century | Chicago magazine | Politics & City Life May 2015:
