Decentralization and Three Sources of Power

• In Event: How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools: Chicago's Story

Abstract

When Secretary of Education William Bennett declared Chicago’s schools to be the “worst in America” in 1987, Chicagoans were angered by the public shaming, but few disagreed. Graduation rates hovered in the low 50 percent range, and standardized test scores were in the upper 20 to low 30 percentile range. Thirty years later, and prior to the pandemic, data on Chicago Public Schools (CPS) tell a different story. The Consortium’s research reported a systemwide graduation rate of 80 percent, with the largest improvements made by Black and Latino males. Moreover, average high school ACT scores rose substantially, more AP classes were available, more students enrolled in them and passed, and more went on to college and graduated within six years. At the elementary level, analyses by the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project showed that Chicago students were achieving 1.2 years of learning for a year of instruction, and these enhanced learning gains placed the CPS above 96% of school systems in the country.
All of this occurred amid seemingly conflicting governance reforms--community control and mayoral takeover. It is a story of many neighborhood schools improving, as a hundred others were closed, and a similar number of new schools, mostly charters, were created. And all of this happened in a highly segregated city with a long history of institutional racism with entrenched disparities in healthcare, housing, employment, and education. How did such progress emerge under such unlikely circumstances?
Our answer involves several parts. First, Chicago’s reform effort benefited from broad-based democratic participation and civic capacity building that was decades in the making. These resources developed through its labor movement, its civil rights struggles, and its community organizing in opposition to the city’s and the district’s discrimination, corruption, and control. This activism set the stage for three very different sources of power to bring their distinct energy, ideas, resources and expertise to the reform enterprise: Grass roots pressures from the “bottom up” emerged from neighborhood schools and communities in the run-up to reform and its early years; influences on the system from the “outside-in” through numerous individuals and institutions, some of which were active in the city’s civic space from the start and persisted throughout, and some joined later; and constructive use of “top-down” power from the Central Office, which was weak initially but grew in significance over time.
Second, from one angle of view the “radical” decentralization that Chicago enacted was a confrontation with its own racist past, rather than a denial that there was racism and classism at the core. It was an assertion that parents and community members through their Local School Councils could make better decisions about who should teach their children and what and how their children should be taught than a central office ever could. Even as expanded mayoral control took hold, and market-based solutions were introduced, the spirit of decentralization continued to function as the DNA for much of what followed—a moral force to defend, focus, and sustain reform.

Authors

• Anthony S. Bryk, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
  Presenting Author

• Sharon Greenberg, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
  Presenting Author