Education Election – Parents Empowered

With more school closures than anywhere else in the nation, arguably, the Windy City is the canary in the coalmine for public education privatization. It is also the incubator for citizen activism. We see it in the schools. It is also on display during elections. Remember, 4,384 parents and community members appear on the April 2014 ballot.

In Chicago, local control is more than a issue. It is a reality in education. And people know it. Everyday folks work to have a voice. This year, four thousand three hundred and eighty four [4,384] candidates are running. The goal is to be an LSC [Local School Council] adviser. What does that mean? What do they do? How could what occurs in Chicago affect or inspire citizens in other cities? Let us look at the history and examine what we might do.

The Reagan Administration’s report said we were A Nation at Risk. Secretary of Education William Bennett called Chicago’s public schools the “worst in the nation.” And the people, in frustration, sought a way to ameliorate the situation. Mayor Harold Washington was a critical catalyst for the School Reform movement. His steadfast commitment to strong community voices in public schools shepherded a vision, the birth of Local School Councils were brought into being.

Contrary to the tale most historians tell. It was not the Chicago Teachers strike of 1987 that called people to take action. It was frustration and more so the realization that it was time to organize. Of course it also took legislation.

In April 1987, Chicagoans United to Reform Education [CURE] held a citywide conference at Loyola University that drew 400 people. Its position paper (“Needed: A New School System for Chicago”) called for local school councils with authority to hire (and fire) the principal and teachers, establish curriculum, control lump-sum budgeting, and develop a school improvement plan; principals and teachers would have more say, c:entral administration would be lessened. From the time the CURE plan was announced in April1987, Designs for Change began carefully laying the groundwork to build political and . popular support.

Local School Councils (LSCs) were created by the Chicago School Reform law of 1988. LSCs are duly-elected bodies at nearly every Chicago Public Schools (CPS) elementary, middle and high school. The Councils are intended to be committees comprised of parents. That said, without exception, the LSC chairperson must be a mother, or a father, or possibly a child’s legal live-in guardian.

The Local School Councils are not advisory bodies – the LSCs have real decision making authority in the schools. These Local School Councils hire the school principal, and evaluate him or her each and every year. Councils decide whether or not to renew a principal’s contract after four years, and most notably, they approve the entire school budget and annual strategic plan (called the school improvement plan). These are the strongest school site-based management systems in the nation, and perhaps Local School Councils will become a model? After all, LSC’s do well for our schools and with our children, or did before recent interventions. [Oh, be cautious during this next election! Familiarize yourself with the candidates. See Below.]

According to The Big Picture, a Designs for Change research report, Breaking Up a Rigid Bureaucracy and Creating Local Initiative was quite helpful…it helped the children and their schools. “Research analyzing elementary school achievement over the past 15 [1990 – 2005] years in Chicago reveals 144 public inner city elementary schools — all of them low-achieving in 1990 — that have shown substantial and sustained improvement in reading test score gains, with the typical school in this group now reading at the national average on the Iowa Reading Test.” The number of students in these schools reading at or above the national average has more than doubled.

The most consistent characteristic of these schools is that all adults work together to improve education. Teachers, parents, Local School Council, principal, and community agencies labor as a team. The study states that the most effective and long-lasting improvements occurs when schools take swift advantage of major authority granted by the legislature in the 1988 reform legislation. The Local School Councils built on their success and will once more as long as we are active. Please Vote, but first become more informed. Acquaint yourself with the candidates!

There’s an election in the city of Chicago Monday and Tuesday that you may not even have heard about—and thousands of candidates are running.

Local School Council elections happen every two years (Mayor Rahm Emanuel thinks he voted in the last one). Just about every Chicago public school has a council—something like a mini school board. (Charters don’t have LSCs, but there’s a bill afoot to change that.) Councils are made up of six parents, two community members, two teachers, and one “non-teaching” school staffer. The councils are unique in the nation because they have some real power. They hire and fire the principal, and along with the principal they determine parts of the budget and curriculum, and outline the school’s strategy for improvement.

Under mayoral control of the schools, the councils’ power has been scaled back; schools on probation get less say over budgets and principal selection. Many of Chicago’s new schools and privately managed public schools have only “advisory” LSCs.

Despite that, and despite many schools struggling to get enough candidates to fill their council, there are still 4,384 parents and community people running for local school councils this time around, along with 1,736 teachers and other school staffers. Elections at grammar schools are Monday, at high schools Tuesday. Polls are open 6a.m. to 7p.m.. Any Chicago resident can vote—no citizenship or voter card needed. Candidate statements must be posted in each school and made available for the public.

WBEZ filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the list of candidates from all schools (we’re not sure why the school district doesn’t post this list for the public, or why it takes a FOIA and 10 business days to produce it). We present it here, along with a few things we noticed about the candidates:

• Indicted state representative LaShawn Ford, who denies allegations of bank fraud, wants to become a community representative at George Rogers Clark Elementary.
Ninth Ward Alderman Anthony Beale, who most recently ran for U.S. Congress (he came in third in the special election to determine who would replace Jesse Jackson, Jr.) is on the ballot as an incumbent community representative at Brooks College Prep, which is in his ward.