Learning Reform the Hard Way

Shrieking fire alarms have interrupted classes nearly once a day this fall at King High School--signs of a long-burning blaze that will not be easily doused.

The deafening horn blasts piercing the daytime silence around the South Side school are triggered neither by real flames nor an obsession with fire drills. They are false alarms, yanked over and over at fire boxes inside King’s tunnel-like corridors by the students themselves.

A few are pranks. But many more amount to a kind of anonymous protest, a veiled response to sweeping changes made in recent months at King and throughout a blighted public school system seen for years as the nation’s worst.

The klaxons have become so routine that King students amble to their lockers to grab their coats before spilling outside. Some bring their lunch trays with them, wolfing down their food as they stand shivering in the frigid winter air. Dozens simply leave, truants drifting off toward shabby tenements and housing projects beyond.

“It’s a reaction,” said Carl Lawson, King’s new principal. “When you pull an alarm, you want people to hear you. It’s their way of saying they don’t like what’s been going on here lately.”

Lately, King High’s weathered classrooms and scarred halls have been made a laboratory for one of the most ambitious urban “back to basics” school reform efforts ever tried. Even in its earliest stages, Chicago’s toughened new stance--a firm demand for higher test scores in core subjects like reading and mathematics before students can graduate--is being viewed as a trailblazing marker for other school systems.

It was recently championed by President Clinton as an antidote for decades of education failure. “I want what is happening in Chicago to happen all over America,” Clinton said.

But for Chicago’s strict regime to truly work, it has to take root and endure in beaten schools like King, an academy that 11 weeks into its year floundered in chaos even as its reformers dreamed of far-off success.

King is a place where new administrators are still hampered by their inexperience, teachers are roiled by infighting and frozen with cynicism, and students are daunted by great expectations and distracted by everything from the lure of gangs to the squalls of their own newborns.

These are some of the odds that have smothered big-city education reform for decades. If there are glimmers of hope in Chicago, they are, so far, little more than that.

“Before everybody says how great things are, they have to see what goes on here,” said Jonathan Morales, 17, a King senior who sat as classmates jeered an angry Lawson when he tried to speak to them during a morning assembly.

High School Gets Radical Therapy

After years of churning out poorly equipped students, King was “reconstituted” last summer, one of seven Chicago high schools designated as failing and in desperate need of radical therapy. Under orders from school officials, King’s former principal was ousted, nearly half its 62 veteran teachers were exiled and its 700 students were put on notice that graduation is no longer a sure bet. Yellow-and-black uniforms and identification tags are now mandatory. Teachers are struggling to comply with orders exhorting a quantum leap in standardized test scores next March.

The high school--a namesake of Martin Luther King Jr.--is one of the worst performers in Chicago’s 557-school system, but it is not alone in its failure. Lurking beyond its turmoil are even thornier political and social hazards that have continually swatted down reform efforts.

The city’s popular mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been hailed for taking sole responsibility for his downtrodden schools after the Illinois Legislature gave him sweeping education authority that few urban mayors possess. Daley sent a blunt-talking trusted aide, former budget director Paul G. Vallas, to the superintendent’s office. Three years into his reforms, Vallas takes credit for the highest graduation and attendance rates in a decade and early indications that test scores are on the upswing.

“We think when you make greater demands, children will respond positively,” Vallas said.

But as Daley and Vallas have recast the school system along a traditional centralized chain of command, they have made enemies among old reformers who fear city schools are sacrificing real learning for quick test results. Both men are viewed in some quarters as pursuing a hidden agenda, intent on creating a system of well-financed “island” schools to anchor housing for middle-class families while the rest of the city’s schools struggle with sustenance funding and higher standards that they can never quite meet.

“All this squabbling is so unproductive,” said Barbara Sizemore, dean of DePaul University’s College of Education and a controversial superintendent herself in the early 1970s in Washington, D.C. “You have the old reformers sniping at the new reformers and vice versa. It’s what’s kept our schools in the dark so long. It’s not one or the other. There’s value in both sides.”

Sizemore is not watching from the sidelines. She and education academics from a half-dozen Chicago colleges are working as paid consultants with failing schools. They have turned the district into their testing ground, applying prized theories they hope to see replicated throughout the system.

“If it works, they’ll look like geniuses,” said G. Alfred Hess, a Northwestern University education professor who is on the president’s committee on school reform. “So far, the evidence is fairly meager.”

Impatient for Improvements

Vallas is impatient for improvements. Nearly 150,000 of the district’s 430,000 students were required to take remedial summer classes after performing badly last year on tests. About 2,000 were held back a grade. Only 8% of King’s underclass students matched median national passing scores on reading tests last year. Lawson wants to see 15% attain “grade” when tests are taken again in March.

Improvements have “to be lasting,” Vallas said. “This isn’t going to be assembly-line education anymore.”

At each of the 30 Chicago schools under Sizemore’s School Achievement Structure program, she stresses “direct learning,” urging teachers to focus heavily on basics and hone students’ test-taking abilities. Attendance and performance charts are mandatory on every classroom wall.

Sizemore also has a sentimental stake in the school’s success. Thirty years ago, as the principal of a now-razed high school just blocks away from where King stands, she oversaw the plans for King’s construction.

“The blueprints sat on my office floor for three months,” she said on a recent tour during King’s school day. “This was supposed to be the premier performing arts high school in the city. Look at it now.”

Students drifted noisily to class in the halls like crowds at a tailgate party. Teachers still shellshocked by the firing of their comrades last summer reacted sullenly to every new suggestion for change. Lockers were scrawled with graffiti. Ceiling tiles lay askew everywhere.

And always, it seemed, at the worst possible moment, there was another fire bell, the grating electric forecast of a dashed dream. So many alarms rang one week in November that an exasperated Lawson offered a $100 reward out of his own pocket for information on the culprits.

It was worth it. Each false alarm costs the city $2,000. “You’re talking 25 guys, five trucks,” said firefighter Tom Ruane, trudging out of the school in his yellow protective suit. “We got better things to do.”

When another alarm sounded that afternoon, Clementine Smith sighed: “We’re losing. The kids are running the school.”

Smith, 48, is Sizemore’s point person at King, a former Joliet school principal who taught in Chicago schools in the late 1970s. Like the teachers she now counsels, Smith watched reform programs come and go, each leaving schools further adrift. Now she tries to persuade King teachers that this reform--this time--is different.

“They have to realize this is a new day,” Smith said. “Everybody’s on board this time, from the mayor on down. The people who just sit there are going to be left behind.”

Many education experts believe that it is Daley’s determination to succeed that gives Chicago’s reform effort its potential for success. Ironically, it was Daley’s own father, Richard J. Daley, who set the costly pattern for mayors who followed--paying lip service to reform but unwilling to sweep away years of patronage, lucrative contracts and obstruction by powerful unions.

“Decisions have been made for years on noneducational grounds,” said James G. Cibulka, a professor in the University of Maryland’s Education Policy Planning School and a former Chicago school administrator. “Back in the ‘60s, we wanted to use school buildings after school hours for tutoring and different programs.” But objections from custodians, whose union was close to the senior Daley, blocked that effort. These days, 417 schools have after-school reading programs.

Even more “unthinkable” in the ‘60s, Cibulka said, was Vallas’ decision to buck the city’s teachers’ union to weed out teachers seen as failures.

With Daley behind his school chief, the union has been effectively tamed. But at King, where 28 of 62 teachers were transferred out last summer, veterans are cold to replacements, unimpressed by Lawson’s pleas for togetherness and stressed by the pressure of working under constant review.

“We’re living in a fishbowl,” said Claudette Terry, a chemistry teacher and the teachers’ union representative on the campus. “The administration has all kinds of excuses, but to us it looks like a maneuver to lower the schools’ salary cap. Now they have more money to use for their wish lists.”

Lawson insists that savings from the dismissal of veteran teachers are negligible. The staff was slashed, he said, only to remove incompetents.

He partly blames his students’ malaise on a whispering campaign by disgruntled teachers. Since the summer, worried seniors have heard rumors that King was in danger of closing. “We had to go to Dr. Lawson and beg for a graduating-class yearbook. Last year, the school was so messed up, we didn’t get one,” said Leniseal Wavley, 17, the senior class vice president.

Lawson, who on weekends plays jazz trombone in South Side taverns, tries to win over students and teachers with patience, good humor and culture. He even had a classical music station pipe in Grieg and Mozart over the hall intercoms. Not everyone is lulled. Teachers still ache for Lawson to get tough with disruptive students. And some security guards--themselves under fire for failing to turn in students who lack ID tags and proper uniforms--have been heard howling dog-like in the halls, mocking opera music on the P.A.

‘Sabotage’ Plagued Early Efforts

Even the school’s previous administration seems to have left an imprint on the year’s chaos. When Lawson and his newly hired staff arrived for the start of the school year, they found file cabinets dented and broken, overhead projectors and computers missing, auditorium chairs torn. The school’s entire file of spring test scores was hidden in a little-used vault.

“Sabotage,” Lawson fumed.

Smith wonders whether only a removal of the entire teaching staff could give Lawson the free hand he needs. But Lawson insists that he can win veterans over despite their suspicions.

The teachers’ dim view is not completely unfounded, some education experts warn. Jennifer O’Day, a professor in the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Educational Policy Studies, says that even in San Francisco, where reconstitution was pioneered in 1984 as a tactic to right segregated schools, success has not been sure or immediate. Some altered schools seem to be thriving; others have made little headway.

“The problem is that school policy people have the mistaken belief that once you reconstitute a school, you start from scratch,” O’Day said. “But they’re still working in a school that’s failed. There are long-standing issues of distrust and anger and defeat that take years to overcome.”

King’s sense of drift reaches beyond to parents who wonder when real reform will come. Mary Jones, a 1972 King graduate and former welfare mother who works with pregnant students at the school, says many parents gave up on King long ago. Drug addiction, alcohol, early births and joblessness are more pressing concerns in their lives. “I tell them to give their kids one hour to help with their schoolwork. They look at me like I’m an alien,” Jones said.

Those who do care scheme to send their children to schools with better reputations. As an elementary school principal, Lawson watched as well-funded magnet schools--which offer accelerated courses in a special area, such as math or the arts--wooed his best students away. Last summer’s scouring at King only deepened the wounds. While the Chicago school system’s attendance rate rose to 91% last year--up from an average of 89% a decade earlier--King’s daily attendance barely topped 82%.

Critics of Chicago’s tough-minded reforms see King’s enervation as an example of what lies in wait for the majority of the city’s poorest, struggling schools. “What we’re seeing is social engineering at its crudest,” said Julie Woestehoff, a 1988 reformer who heads Parents United for Responsible Education, an activist group.

Some Question the Mayor’s Goal

Mayor Daley’s ultimate aim, they insist, is the creation of a system of top-notch schools that may attract the affluent but will rarely be accessible to the city’s poor, who make up nearly 80% of the student population.

Middle-class families, Daley said in a 1996 interview with The Times, “like the city, they like everything I’m offering. But they still can’t send their child to school a block away, just can’t. So what are they all doing? Not just white, but blacks, Hispanics, Asians, everyone--they all move out.”

Already, critics charge, Chicago officials have laid plans to tear down a school near the notorious Cabrini-Green housing projects and erect a new one closer to the affluent Gold Coast neighborhood. Vallas has good reason: Cabrini-Green has lost residents as its old towers have been razed for new low-rises.

But critics also point to Vallas’ recent proposal to ensure that all Chicago magnet schools reserve 30% of their population for students from the immediate neighborhood. While Vallas contends that the move would widen Chicagoans’ access to the magnet schools, some activists worry that it is a smoke screen to channel new development around new schools in wealthier areas.

“Look, most magnet schools in poor neighborhoods already have 30% of their populations coming from nearby,” Woestehoff said. “What’s happening here is they’re making it easy for developers to tell well-off moms and dads: ‘Here’s a wonderful half-million-dollar condo, and your kids will get preference for the local magnet school.’ ”

Boasting extensive plans for school construction, Chicago officials respond that they are combing their system for examples of well-run neighborhood schools that can be duplicated in any community--poor or affluent. A search committee of business leaders is studying the district’s successful schools, said Phil Hansen, the district’s accountability chief, “to see what we can use as models. No neighborhood is being left out.”

Lost in the arguments over the future, said Lawson, are the realities that three years of change have already set in motion. As long as he is getting new teachers, as long as more students accept their new uniforms, as long as more walls are covered with posters touting academic success, Lawson remains patient--even when another screaming fire alarm implodes one more school day.

King already is unable to compete with nearby magnet schools in drawing the best students, Lawson reasons, “so what’s the difference? Even if I take the cynical view and agree that this is all designed to help the middle class, so what?

“They’re not going to persuade thousands of middle-class families to move into Chicago until my school and all the others like it are doing better. A lot better.”