For Chicago, Promise Lies in Failure

Forget about summer vacation.

That’s the message nearly a third of this city’s elementary school population is adjusting to after being told by Chicago officials that they will have to repeat a grade unless they pass remedial summer classes.

At a time when most graduating eighth-graders are looking forward to an idyllic three months before entering high school, about 7,400 Chicago students face a long summer in classrooms they thought they had seen for the last time. Of those, at least 2,000 will likely have to repeat the eighth grade, Chicago school officials say. Altogether, about 150,000 children out of the school system’s 420,000 will be required to take remedial courses this summer.

In Chicago, where politicians like to project a rough hide, the school system is reveling in its newfound toughness. If kids by the thousands must take summer school or repeat a grade, so be it.

“No other big-city school system even comes close,” Paul Vallas, the Chicago schools’ chief executive officer, says proudly of the sheer numbers affected by the requirement.

Vallas and his cadre of hard-nosed reformers subscribe to the notion that schoolchildren should not only be faced with the hard reality of academic failure, but that they can work through it and be better prepared by having survived it. In a nation where parents often try to shelter their kids from life’s harsh lessons, Chicago’s public educators believe children as young as 6 and 7 are better off being flunked and held back, as long as it prepares them for the future.

“We’re creating an environment where what is rewarded is academic achievement, and we’re instilling that at an early age,” Vallas says. “That means there are consequences for nonperformance.”

This year, students as young as third grade are being forced to take summer school for failing to meet minimal standards in reading and math. Next year, Vallas suggests, those requirements may be extended to the first grade.

Expecting children to sink or swim at an early age was once pervasive in American schools. But the liberalization of education philosophy, the tightening of local funding, the flight of white students to the suburbs, the growing access of colleges and the general decay of city life all have left most municipal school systems either unable or unwilling to enforce tough standards on a mass scale.

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In recent years, some big-city school systems once again have begun to embrace standards, but none with the messianic fervor of Chicago. Here, where the system has been maligned for decades for its dilapidated schools, high dropout rates and poorly equipped graduates, authorities are cracking down with the stern demeanor of a dour schoolmaster.

This is what Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley ordered after the Illinois Legislature gave him wide latitude in 1995 to overhaul the schools. Daley is convinced that improving the schools is the key to Chicago’s survival, the only way to reverse a long exodus of blue-collar and middle-class families.

“What am I gonna do?” Daley asked, imagining himself in the role of a potential Chicago resident in an interview with The Times last year. “Am I gonna stay in the city? Well, I can’t send my child to public schools in the city. Well, why? Just look at it. They like the city, they like everything I’m offering, but they still can’t send their child to a public school a block away or two blocks away or five blocks or eight blocks away, just can’t. So what are they all doing? They all move out.”

Many school-reform experts agree with Daley on the role that improving urban schools can play in stabilizing a city’s population and tax base. But some observers worry that the sudden rush to enforce standards will turn off as many students as it saves, leading to a growing dropout rate.

“There’s a long history in this country of flipping back and forth between [liberalizing] social promotion and stiffening retention policies,” says Anthony Bryk, director of University of Chicago’s Center for School Improvement. “The problem is, when you stiffen up, you expand the dropout rates.”

Vallas is just as certain that will not happen. As their standards tighten, he says, Chicago schools are providing more counselors, after-school training and diversion programs and more crackdowns on truancy to ensure that students get “the help they need to meet the challenges we’re giving them.”

And for children who are daunted by the stigma of having to repeat a grade, Vallas says the taint of failure can be removed by educators who teach them to look at their setback as an opportunity.

“Kids will perceive it the way the adults show them how to perceive it,” Vallas says. “The bottom line is, we want them to finish the job the right way, even if it takes an extra year. As long as the job is done, so what? Assembly-line education is finished in Chicago schools.”