Control of Public Schools at Stake in Chicago Vote

By her own admission, Olivia Perea is shy and she gets flustered when trying to express herself in English.

But the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant, fed up with conditions at overcrowded, gang-ravaged Bowen High School on the city’s far South Side, has thrust herself into the thick of what may be the nation’s most radical experiment in school reform and political action.

One of Perea’s six youngsters entered Bowen in 1981 as part of a freshman class of 600 students. Only 150 were still around by senior year. Of those who did graduate, tests showed only 14% could read at or above the national average.

For years, Perea says, she and other Bowen parents have been after principal James Ahern to tighten security and toughen academic standards. “He would never pay attention to us,” she recalled. “He would just reject us as meddlers.”

That could change--dramatically. In a sweeping attack on the city’s bloated and woefully ineffective educational bureaucracy, voters this week will elect 540 new parent-dominated local councils to take the lion’s share of control of schools in the public system here, the nation’s third largest with 410,000 students. Perea and a slate of other Latino candidates are campaigning for the Bowen panel and, if they win, plan to fire Ahern if he doesn’t shape up to their satisfaction.

In some ways, the stakes in the school election are no different from those in other Windy City political wars. A treasure trove of jobs and contracts is up for grabs. Political insiders are meddling in some of the campaigns. Vote counting shenanigans are a real threat.

And debate over not just candidates but the reform concept itself breaks along racial lines. Whites and Latinos enthusiastically favor change, while resistance to it has largely come from self-styled progressive black political leaders and the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push, which has ties to old-guard educators. Opponents say that parents lack the expertise to make crucial educational and spending decisions and warn that reform could result in the firing or demotion of many veteran school employees who are black.

But, make no mistake about it, this election is different. For starters, the field of candidates has ballooned to 17,000, so many that the balloting will stretch over two days on Wednesday and Thursday. A few are professional politicians or activists, but most are novices like Perea.

“It’s probably the largest experiment in grass-roots democracy this country has ever seen,” declared Dan Solis, executive director of the United Neighborhood Organization, a coalition of Latino groups.

Educational experts say the Chicago plan, which will drastically reduce the role of the central school board, may be the broadest educational revamp ever attempted in urban America.

“It’s one of a kind, it’s unprecedented,” declared Michael Kirst, an expert in school governance at Stanford University.

The program doesn’t dissolve the citywide Board of Education or eliminate minimum educational standards and classroom requirements. But it trims back the board’s bureaucratic support staff and shifts much of its authority over curricula, spending and personnel to new 11-member governing councils at each school.

Principals, once as entrenched in their jobs as federal judges, lose tenure and can be reappointed or sacked by the new councils. In turn, the program loosens rigid work rules imposed by strong school employee unions, giving principals more power to discipline bad teachers and force more productivity from support staff.

A key example: Under a longstanding arrangement with the building engineer’s union, most of the school buildings are closed by 4 p.m. daily, effectively locking students and parents out of after-school activities that are routine in most other cities. That should change under the reform plan.

Election rules are confusing, but voters will pick six parents and two community representatives to sit on each panel. The councils will also include two teachers, to be selected by faculty members at each school, and the principal.

School decentralization is by no means a unique concept, but no other major city has tried it on the scale of Chicago. The local councils will be able to buy their own textbooks and spend discretionary funds--up to one-third of the budget at some schools--to develop new courses, add staff and underwrite extracurricular activities of their own choosing.

Although untested and highly controversial, the reform drive was fueled by widespread frustration over the performance of a system that had come to symbolize the collapse of public education in urban America. In 1987, then-Education Secretary William J. Bennett called it the nation’s “worst.”

Dropout Rates High

Last year’s dropout rate averaged 43% and was much higher at inner city schools like Bowen, where about half of the 1,800 students are black, half Latino and the vast majority from low-income families. At more than half of the city’s high schools, average college entrance exam scores routinely rank in the bottom 1% of the nation.

Despite resistance from tenured educators and entrenched administrators, such dismal results led a coalition of anxious parents, nervous politicians and business leaders to demand a top-to-bottom shake-up of the schools. “On the whole, the situation is so desperate that anything would be an improvement,” said Herbert J. Wallberg, an educational research specialist at the University of Illinois.

The pivotal event proved to be a lengthy 1987 Chicago teachers strike, which was finally settled by an infusion of cash from the Illinois Legislature. The lawmakers’ price, however, was wholesale reform.

Elements of the scheme are to be phased in over several years, as students eventually will be given the option of choosing to attend any public school they wish within the city. But at the heart of the plan are the powerful new local councils, designed to promote parental involvement and force educators to be less rigid and more accessible to parents and students alike.

‘More Accountability’

“Research shows that the smaller the school district, the higher the achievement level,” explained Donald Moore, executive director of Designs for Change, a children’s advocacy group that helped develop the reform legislation. “That’s basically because there’s more accountability, not only through the school board but through informal channels. If you’re dissatisfied with what’s going on in your local school, then chances are that some board member is a neighbor of yours and you can go over and talk to them.”

Charles Almo, appointed interim school superintendent after the Board of Education fired veteran school chief Manford Byrd a few months ago, said the new arrangement was designed to force teachers and bureaucrats out of their ivory towers.

“Before, we simply left everything to the professionals,” Almo said. “Teachers worked in isolation, that was part of the trade-off for their low salary . . . . One of the jobs of the principal was to protect teachers from outside interference. Well, no more. Because it’s not interference, it’s collaboration.”

Critics of reform disagree. The Rev. Bernard Taylor, who is monitoring the school revamp for Operation PUSH, said the program amounted largely to “window dressing” that masked inadequate funding levels for the schools. Taylor said many parents running for the school councils were unprepared for the kinds of hands-on spending and academic decisions they would have to make if elected.

Point to Prejudice, Politics

And Taylor charged that reform advocates were motivated more by prejudice and politics than a desire to improve educational standards. Many of the workers who have already lost jobs as part of the realignment plan are black, he noted. The most prominent of them, Byrd, is a member of Operation PUSH and a close political ally of Jackson.

“It is very political,” Taylor claimed. “ . . . It (reform) was designed basically by white organizations.”

True or not, many of those involved in the reform drive admit that they have secondary agendas. For example, Lu Palmer, a prominent black political activist, said he is running for a seat on the council at Wendell Phillips High School, in part, because he wants to funnel service contracts at the school to black-owned businesses. More importantly, Palmer said, he wants to ensure that the school curricula include an “Afro-centric” approach to education that emphasizes black history and black culture.

“Why should we be learning all this business about Washington and Lincoln and not learning about our own heroes?” Palmer said. “ . . . The first thing we have to do is get black children to have an entirely different perception of themselves.”

Sees Unifying Force

Solis, the UNO leader, said the school elections have proved useful in unifying the Chicago Latino community, which in the past has shied away from active involvement in politics. Under special rules for the school elections, candidates can run for councils and parents can cast ballots without having to prove they are citizens, legal residents or even registered voters.

“This legislation has become a very good vehicle for empowerment of the Hispanic community,” Solis explained. “ . . . It is going to make it possible for a very large proportion of our community to get involved in the democratic process that had always seemed closed to them before. Once they get elected and once they get a taste of voting, it’s going to become much easier for them to become involved in other arenas.”

Candidates like Dinah Mirelez, who is running for the Bowen council, have more immediate concerns. Although she’s a Bowen alumnus, the 33-year-old mother of three says there’s no way she would send her children to her alma mater when they get old enough unless conditions improve drastically. “The gangs, the graffiti, just the general sense of not having any hope, is terrible,” she explained. “The place is dying and we’ve got to turn it around. I figure if I start working at it now, by the time they’re (her children) ready for high school, it’ll be better.”

Researcher Tracy Shryer contributed to this story.