Chicago School Reforms Hold Lessons for L.A.

When Los Angeles school trustees announce this week the hiring of a new top administrator to regain control of the vast district, they will undoubtedly say the occasion represents a fresh start and a promising opportunity to make progress.

No doubt, too, there will be many skeptics who will wonder whether the appointment of an interim superintendent--no matter what his qualifications--will be enough to set the troubled school system on a truer course.

Will test scores, which now show that fewer than one in four students are reading at or above the national average, improve? Will communities that are in desperate need of new schools see them built? And, perhaps most important, will public confidence in the 700,000-student district be restored?

The same questions were in the air in Chicago nearly five years ago when what was often termed the worst big-city school district in the nation was the target of a hostile takeover. The Illinois Legislature essentially declared the school district to be financially and educationally bankrupt and handed over the keys to Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Chicago’s experience since then indicates that even in severely troubled urban school systems, the right choice of top management can lead to educational improvement. Chicago test scores have gone up four years running, the school district’s $3.3-billion budget is in the black for the fourth year in a row, and enrollment is up for the third straight year after a long slide.

Even President Clinton has taken note, praising Chicago schools’ aggressive assault on the practice of social promotion, which means moving students to the next grade even if they haven’t learned essential skills.

Before the dramatic turnaround began, Chicago’s school system had sunk far lower than Los Angeles Unified. Corrupt hiring, in particular, was draining large amounts of money away from the city’s education budget. Even so, there are lessons that Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school district, can learn from Chicago, the third-largest.

The first lesson, many here say, is to hire a charismatic leader--even if that person does not have experience as an educator.

Charismatic Leader Helped Turn Corner

After Daley took control of the schools in 1995, he hired Paul G. Vallas, a former legislative staff member and budget manager for the city of Chicago with no prior education background. Vallas, tall, balding and seemingly everywhere at once, has since come to personify the district’s rebound.

On Friday, for example, Vallas spoke in the hangar-sized entry hall of the Field Museum of Natural History to more than 1,500 teachers in their first year on the job. Afterward, Vallas waded into a sea of teachers as eager to meet him as they would be to see a rock star.

“People want to kiss his ring and ask for things,” said Bev Tunney, president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Assn.

As each one stepped close, Vallas reached out and enfolded their hands in both of his, squeezed an elbow or put his hand on a shoulder. Then, in the midst of the crowd and over the sound of the school orchestra playing, he listened to their concerns about large class sizes, a weak principal, an unsatisfactory job assignment and so on.

Usually, he was already aware of the issues they were raising--listing, for example, the strengths and weaknesses of a particular principal. He took notes and in almost every case offered to follow up--with a school visit, a telephone call to their home or a contact from a subordinate.

“I’m all over the place and I talk to everyone under the sun,” Vallas said in an interview later. “But if I weren’t talking about issues of substance, it wouldn’t work.”

Vallas said the first thing he did when he took over--and the first thing that must be done in Los Angeles--is to restructure the district’s management.

A finance team Vallas installed saved about $50 million a year by renegotiating the district’s contracts with health care providers. He hired people from outside to manage the district’s non-education functions, such as transportation and school maintenance, and got rid of about 500 carpenters, electricians, plumbers and the like, contracting instead with private companies.

At the same time, Vallas and Daley went to the Chicago principals association and asked for their recommendations on who should be the district’s top education official. The person Vallas chose, Cozette M. Buckney, was a highly regarded high school principal who also served on the association’s board of directors.

“You need to get a good team of the best educators in the system, who know how to turn around schools, rather than go outside the system,” Vallas said.

Even as he was reaching out to principals, Vallas did the same with the Chicago Teachers Union. In Los Angeles, labor relations between the district and its teachers have been uneven. In Chicago, things had been far worse, with eight strikes in the previous 15 years.

But Vallas got in the union’s good graces by offering a four-year contract that included annual raises of 3% or more. Tom Reece, the teachers union president, said Vallas’ financial package had credibility because of his budget expertise.

“We didn’t get rich, but it was fair,” Reece said. Now, he added, the union and the school district are working as partners although things aren’t always smooth.

“The hard part is adjusting to a partnership when you’ve been fighting with someone and they’ve been blaming you for everything,” he said. “We had to recognize that, yes, we had some problems.”

To maintain good relations, Vallas and Reece meet monthly to discuss whatever issues arise. In addition, the district established what Vallas calls a “common sense committee” to address the concerns of teachers without requiring them to file a grievance.

In 1996, Vallas and the school board, which Daley also appointed, formed an “accountability” office and named a top-level administrator to run it. That same year, the district put on probation 109 schools--campuses where only 15% or fewer students were scoring at the national average in reading. An additional 31 with slightly higher test scores were put on a “watch” list.

For each of the schools on probation, the district supplied a “turnaround” team consisting of either a principal and teachers or an outside consultant.

24 Chicago Schools Got Off Probation

Under California’s school accountability law, the state can require schools to improve their test scores by at least 5% or face state intervention. But the Los Angeles school district could establish a more rigorous policy locally, to reach more schools and deal with problems it identifies independently, Vallas noted.

In the past three years, 24 of the original schools on probation have improved enough to get off the list, even though the standard has been raised. Meanwhile, the percentage of elementary school students reading at or above the national average has risen from 26.5% to 34%; those at or above the national average in math have gone from 30% to 42%.

Now, in a move that’s controversial with many principals, the district is trying to accelerate the pace of improvement by creating a highly structured curriculum that specifies which lessons are to be taught day-by-day and even what to assign for homework. Written by a group of the district’s top teachers, the lesson plans are voluntary, except for the weakest teachers in the lowest performing schools.

“You don’t have to take our advice but you still have to be responsible for the outcomes for your children, and there’s consequences if they don’t do well,” said Buckney, the district’s top education officer. “This gives principals the ability to go in the classroom and see what students should be learning and to have something to compare it to.”

In Los Angeles, the district has mandated that low-performing schools choose one of three reading programs that focus on phonics and other basic skills. That policy is supposed to take effect next spring.

Repairs to ailing buildings in Chicago, along with the district’s accountability policies and the requirement that students in grades three, six, eight and nine be held back if they don’t master certain skills, all have helped restore public confidence.

“There’s still work that needs to be done,” said Randi Starr, executive director of the McDougal Family Foundation, which has provided grants for projects within the district. “But I think the community is feeling very optimistic, with cause.”

That sense of growing support for the school district was in evidence at the museum. An umbrella organization of the city’s major museums sponsored the event, which was aimed at helping teachers use the museums’ collections and exhibitions to enrich lessons. Each teacher also was presented with a membership to the museums.

Jacqueline Atkins, executive director of the museum group, said her organization’s willingness to participate in the project showed that “now there is a structure in the public schools that will allow effective use of our resources. This is a true collaboration and a validation by the museums of the schools.”

The role of Vallas in creating that positive impression of the schools cannot be underestimated.

Among the teachers Vallas greeted at the museum was a contingent from McDowell Street School on the city’s south side. They had come to complain that the school has no gym, no library and no lunchroom. Even though the school’s test scores are good, said Fran Baptiste, a third-grade teacher who is a 35-year district veteran, “we feel that we’re working against the odds and you can only do that for so long.”

Not only did Vallas hear them out, he agreed to come visit. And the teachers were ecstatic and cheering as they walked away.

“I like Vallas, I like his spirit,” Baptiste said later. “He’s approachable, he’s available and he’s touchable. You don’t feel like you’ve got a problem and there’s nobody there.”

That, she said, represents a significant improvement. “I’ve been through the drudges, you understand.”