Local School Councils Persist, Inject Democracy into Chicago Public Schools
After today, this blog will take a short break for the rest of this holiday week and return on Monday, November 30. Good wishes for Thanksgiving!
In 1988, after the sudden death of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, the Illinois Legislature did something unusual. It created an experiment in truly democratic school governance in Chicago: the idea that parents, teachers, and community members would stand for election to local school councils whose members would have considerable power including the hiring of the school principal. When top-down school governance was instituted in 1995 by Mayor Richard M. Daley, who appointed Paul Vallas and then Arne Duncan to run the school district, the power of the elected local school councils faded. Arne Duncan brought Renaissance 2010, whose goal was to expand school choice, shutter so-called “failing” schools, and open 100 new schools—the very top-down school “reform” that has dominated Duncan’s tenure as U.S. Secretary of Education since 2009.
But the 25th Anniversary issue of Catalyst-Chicago features a retrospective examination of the elected local school councils that have persevered in many of the city’s schools: “Of all the reforms that have swept through Chicago Public Schools in the past 25 years, the creation of local school councils is one of the few that persists.”
Chicago’s local school councils have faced challenges from the beginning. Catalyst quotes Sokoni Karanja, an activist in the Bronzeville neighborhood who helped lead the movement to support and maintain what Chicago calls its LSCs: “In the first few years they were very effective and we saw major turnarounds at some schools. And there are still diehard parents that maintain their commitment to the LSCs, although there has been continuous reductions in their power.”
Catalyst interviews Dion Miller Perez who chaired the Chicago office of what was the Cross-City Campaign for Urban School Reform and who was elected over the years to three LSCs: “There was a fickleness of funders supporting parental involvement in a grassroots way. There used to be more foundation money for LSC training and parent involvement in general. That doesn’t exist anymore.”
Elaine Allensworth, of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago comments on school improvement in the early 1990s, though she is hesitant to attribute the growth in test scores solely to direct democratic involvement of parents through the LSCs: “In that period just after decentralization, we do see improvements in a lot of schools. A lot of schools did show improvements in student test scores, though it seemed to be related to the economic conditions in the community…. Then we start to see (scores) flatten out when mayor control came in.”
Catalyst ‘s anniversary issue features two parents who have been deeply involved through their LSCs. These interviews expose not only the commitment of deeply involved parent leaders but also the challenges to parent involvement for schools in poor and working class communities. Sabrina Jackson, part of the LSC at Perkins, Bass Elementary School in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, was involved to the degree that she could be as a parent employed full-time and attending community college through the years of her four children’s Local School Councils Persist, Inject Democracy into Chicago Public Schools | janresseger:
