Chicago Experiment : Firms Hope Own School Earns an A

Lawndale is a poor place west of Chicago’s downtown Loop business district, a preserve of familiar urban American ills. The housing is substandard. The infant mortality rate is greater than in some developing countries. Unemployment is high. Gangs and drug pushers operate unchecked.

And the children in this place do not learn.

Half of those who start classes in Chicago’s public schools--called the worst in the country by former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett--never finish. And many who do graduate cannot read or subtract or reason as well as suburban students.

“The school system . . . is on fire,” says Chicago executive Joe Kellman, who was raised in Lawndale. “The kids are inside the burning building while the firemen are standing outside arguing over where the fire started, denouncing the fire, but not putting a drop of water on the blaze.”

Unprecedented Step

And so, convinced that the failure of urban schools to educate inner-city children is undermining the country’s political and economic future, 16 of America’s biggest corporations have taken an unprecedented step toward reform.

The corporations--including Sears Roebuck & Co., United Airlines, Helene Curtis and Baxter International--have opened their own private school to teach up to 300 Lawndale children, mostly blacks and Latinos.

They are funding and managing it in the hope that it will become a catalyst for national educational change and the first in a network of similar institutions in urban areas from New York to Los Angeles.

The Corporate/Community School is being operated as a private research laboratory to prove that children raised in poverty, in drug- and crime-plagued urban communities can learn as well as suburban children.

Less Funds for Bureaucracy

The tuition-free private school will try to find and perfect methods for teaching inner-city children. And it will attempt this at a cost of $4,100 per pupil, about what Chicago schools spend in Lawndale, but with more money going directly into education and less into bureaucracy and management.

Housed in a renovated, two-story, yellow brick building that once served as a neighborhood Roman Catholic school, the Corporate/Community School opened in September and now has 150 students, half of its ultimate enrollment. Eventually it will house classes from preschool through eighth grade. The present pupils, who range in age from 2 to 9, were randomly selected by computer from about 1,000 applications from the neighborhood, in an effort to replicate the range of skill levels and behavior problems found in public schools.

“Those 1,000 applications sent a very powerful message,” says Elaine C. Mosley, the school’s principal. “They said that parents in this community are just as concerned about the quality of education as parents in the suburbs.”

The concern is not limited to parents.

“At my other school the kids were always fighting and cursing at the teachers,” says Nikkeya Elmore, 7, who spent three years in a Chicago public school. “It was a bad, bad place.”

“They’d write bad words all over the girls’ washroom and spray paint stuff on the windows and walls,” says Katrina Bennis, 8.

Unhappy Memories

“The teachers were mean. If we didn’t have our gym clothes, the teacher would hit us with a stick,” says Tanzanique Howard, 8. “The teachers were always yelling at us.”

At the Corporate/Community School, there is more hugging than yelling. Mosley, who makes daily rounds and knows each child by name often embraces them.

“This place will work because it is filled with people who believe the kids are the center of everything we are doing,” says Mary Kathleen Irwin, a veteran teacher, author and scholar. “These kids come first. I’ve worked in the public schools for years, and I know how they take their little hearts and minds and grind them up.”

Public education officials nationally cite widespread poverty and the social environment in poor communities to explain the below average performance levels of inner-city students on national achievement tests. They contend that massive infusions of new money are needed to tackle the problem.

If the Lawndale school is successful, its corporate backers believe, Chicago’s educators and city and state political leaders will be forced to adopt its techniques. Executives behind the project will not be specific, but they hint that once the school begins to show results they will marshal their formidable, collective political clout to lobby government for reforms.

Chicago school administrators are officially supportive of the project, but privately skeptical, and perturbed that the corporations have acted unilaterally.

And others interested in school reform say they doubt that Chicago school officials will use the Corporate/Community School as a model. “They have good schools within their own system that they don’t emulate,” says G. Alfred Hess Jr., executive director of the Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance, a nonprofit watchdog group.

“I’m not sure the system is capable of reforming itself,” says Ronald J. Gidwitz, president of Helene Curtis Industries, who joined in the Lawndale effort after years of working for change within the Chicago school system. “This is a very bureaucratic institution which has finely honed skills in self-preservation. . . . . (It is) unwilling to look towards the kind of radical reform necessary. . . .”

“The idea is not that corporate America is going to take over the education system . . . but to set certain standards of urban educational development that work,” says Vernon R. Loucks Jr., chairman of Baxter International, who helped convince other Chicago-based corporations to contribute a total of $2 million to open the school, which currently has funding for three years.

Some Profound Differences

The differences between this school and the average Chicago public school are profound. For example:

--Children can be left at the school as early as 7 a.m. and picked up as late as 7 p.m., a measure that helps working parents but also keeps students away from the street culture that competes with school for their attention each day.

--The actual school day is 75 minutes longer than the public school day.

--Preschoolers also attend, on the theory that learning begins early and that the sooner children get into a school setting the better their chances of success.

--The school year is longer, with classes held year-round, again to keep the children away from the streets and in the belief that year-round schooling is better for the students.

--Classes are arranged around skill levels, and there are two adults in every classroom, a teacher and a teachers aide.

--There are 25 students in each elementary school class and 16 in each preschool class.

--Teachers have extraordinary flexibility within their classrooms, and there is no formal curriculum forcing teachers to give every student the same work from the same book. Education is tailored to the needs of individual students and to their environment. Teachers are free to be creative.

As a result, the older students were quickly taught to think of Lawndale differently. First they studied all the different kinds of places people live, and then they studied creatures they see every day--rodents. And they engaged in some contemporary archeology by examining what people have discarded in a nearby vacant lot.

Gets Parents Involved

And the school is involving parents.

Families with children in the preschool classes received home visits before their children started school.

“We want to look at each child’s cultural background and at each family because we are forming a partnership with the kids and the parents,” says Dorothy Miller, director of the school’s preschool program.

Eventually parents of all the children will be visited or will visit the school for parent-teacher conferences and parents will be encouraged to share in the process of educating their children. There are plans for libraries for parents, including an audio library for adults who cannot read. Plans also include adult literacy classes and courses leading to a high school degree.

A range of social agencies will also operate from the school, making it the hub of services to both the children and their parents.

Unlimited Possibilities

“We want the school to function so that the parents will see themselves as learners . . . and see that the possibilities for improving one’s life are unlimited,” says Mosley, a veteran teacher, counselor and administrator who was hired as principal after a nationwide search.

The school’s seven teachers, selected from more than 200 applicants, bring a range of urban and rural classroom experience to the Corporate/Community School. All were selected for their records of creatively working with children. They earn about 10% more than Chicago public schoolteachers, who work a shorter day and shorter year.

“We all left security behind,” says Harlean Sterrenberg, who gave up a career teaching in rural Illinois to work in the corporate school. “We left contracts that have sick leave and tenure, and we left those things with the confidence that we were a good team and that we could make a difference.

“And we’re not trying to show that we can do it with all the money in the world. I taught eight weeks without books. There is no library yet. I use this for science,” she says holding up a book titled “Science on a Shoestring.”

‘Teaching on a Shoestring’

“That’s how I’m teaching--on a shoestring. Chicago teachers can’t (argue) that that’s why they’re failing. We’re doing without too.”

Chicago education officials say they will consider findings that come out of the corporate school experience but caution that what works in this school may not work in a system with almost 600 schools, 23,000 teachers and over 400,000 students--more than two thirds of them from poverty-level households and almost 10% for whom English is a second language.

“I think we must recognize that, just like in industry, a small business can turn around much more quickly and respond to different needs and changes in style much quicker than a big corporation can,” says Frank W. Gardner, president of the Chicago Board of Education.

“How long is the money going to last?” asks school Supt. Manford Byrd Jr. “I hope they didn’t create it just to last three years. And I don’t know if you can run a school (even) for 10 years and be certain that what you found was not just an aberration.”

While skeptical that the corporate school will have any direct impact on Chicago’s education, school reform advocate Hess says that one benefit of the Lawndale project will be a heightened interest by big business in education and “business people getting clear that the excuse our kids are poor is not a valid excuse.”

Discounts Impact

“We don’t have any doubt it will benefit the kids who attend. We know they can create a successful school,” says Donald Moore, executive director of Designs for Change, an advocacy group working to reform Chicago’s public schools. “We don’t think it will have much impact on the public school system, which they say is their goal. . . . I haven’t heard any clear plan on how they are going to have an impact on the public schools. The people in the public schools are always looking for a reason to dismiss any model that is put up before them.”

The Corporate/Community School is the result of a friendship between two remarkably different Chicago businessmen, Joe Kellman, who has only an 8th-grade education, and Vernon Loucks, a graduate of Yale and Harvard.

Kellman, 69, whose immigrant father pulled him out of a Lawndale public school to help in the family business, is president of Globe Glass & Mirror Co., with 70 branches nationwide. A philanthropist and a racehorse owner, Kellman founded the Better Boys Foundation a quarter century ago in an effort to offer Lawndale children an alternative to street gangs.

For the last 20 years Kellman has traveled the country trying to interest big business in education. But it took a meeting with Loucks, 54, for the idea to take shape.

Loucks, the chief executive officer of Baxter International, a medical and hospital supply company with $6.2 billion in sales last year, agreed that educational reform needed new muscle. Loucks called other chief executive officers, lining up support. Loucks also assigned a Baxter executive, Walter L. Kraus, who once helped to run the business end of the New York public schools, to serve as executive director and business manager for the corporate school.

“I had never done anything like this before in my whole life,” Loucks says, “ . . . But damn it, if we don’t find a way to get at the fundamental cause of this, as opposed to trying to put fingers in the dike at the high school level, we are never going to get this problem solved.”

Charles Ruder, Sears Roebuck’s vice president for corporate public affairs, says: “If there were an earthquake, and the street opened up tomorrow in front of Sears Tower, everybody would respond quickly, and we would make things happen. We have that disaster, and it is the school situation, and people don’t know it yet . . . nobody’s moved to action. But I think pressure is building.”

“Those are the kids that are going to replace you, me and the rest of us,” says Kellman. “How can they be ignored?”