Reinterpreting Urban School Reform: Have Urban Schools Failed, or Has the Reform Movement Failed Urban Schools?

9. Parental and Community Empowerment: The Chicago Model

209 Chapter 9 Parental and Community Empowerment: The Chicago Model Kathryn Nakagawa One of the major school-reform experiments using parent and community involvement was created by the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988. The Act created a number of changes to a centralized system, among the most important being the creation of “local school councils” (LSCs) at each of the nearly 600 public schools in Chicago. Each LSC is comprised of six elected parents, two elected community members, two teachers, the principal, and, at high schools, one student representative. The LSCs were given much more authority than had ever been tried with other attempts at local control. In the 1988 Act, the LSCs were given responsibility for hiring and firing principals, designing and approving budgets (particularly overseeing discretionary funds), and creating local school improvement plans (Hess 1991). Many proponents and observers of the Chicago school reform lauded it as a historically significant reform (e.g., Elmore 1991; Fine 1995), as seen in its description by Katz, Fine, and Simon (1997): Reform represented a historic achievement—the most radical restructuring of an urban school system and its relation to its communities in a century. Reformers in the city had created an unprecedented multiracial, cross-class coalition dedicated to school improvement through democracy. (132) It is not an overstatement to note that the overriding discourse of the Chicago school reform was one marking it as a momentous change in school policy. This discourse arose both from the process through which the reform was created and from the amount of control given to parents and community members in the reform. Does the Chicago reform live up to its reputation? This chapter considers the creation of the Chicago school reform and its outcomes thus far. In particular, the chapter asks, How did the LSCs operate, and to what extent did parents and community members become substantive partners in the process of school reform? Using the “critical -empirical” method, I argue that, to judge the historical significance of this reform, it is important to understand whether and how the primary mechanism for reform—parent and community involvement —worked. To do so, I contrast the underlying theory of the “empowered” parent/community role mandated by the Chicago reform with the more traditional parent/community role, one of “enablement” (Lewis and Nakagawa 1995). Parent Empowerment versus Parent Enablement Parent empowerment is one way that active parent participation is being promoted in the schools. In particular, Concha Delgado-Gaitan (1991) discusses parent empowerment as the key for minority parents to have a role in the schools. In her work, she traces the development of a group of Mexican immigrant parents in California and how they worked together to gain an active, vocal, knowledgeable role in the schools. Her work serves to exemplify how parents, working separately from the school, can become empowered in their parent role. However in some instances a greater role for the parents, one that should promote a more empowered role, is mandated by legislation . The belief is that by bringing parents into the system and “empowering” them with more control over how the school functions, reform will occur. This is what the Chicago reform did. Does such a mandated role, one that allows parents more voice in the school system and more rights to help decide curriculum, budget, and hiring, actually empower? With respect to parents and schools, much of the legislation that mandates parent involvement is to make it possible for ethnic-minority and lower income parents to have greater voice in the school system. That is, for those groups that have been poorly served by the public schools, parent participation is seen as crucial to rectifying the situation. For instance, Title I requires home-school compacts and parent involvement in schools that receive such funding (Improving America’s Schools Act 1994), and some charter school legislation also requires a parent involvement component as part of the school charter (Becker, Nakagawa, and Corwin 1997). 210 Kathryn Nakagawa The Chicago School Reform, based on an ideology of participatory democracy, was seen as an opportunity for improving schools for those who were least well-served. As Hess (1995) wrote, “The Chicago School Reform Act empowered the parents of ‘at-risk’ students by giving them the opportunity to win democratic control of local school councils governing their schools and by providing extra resources to the schools enrolling the most low-income students” (21...