The Education Mayor: Improving America's Schools

6. Accountability and Urban High Schools: The Challenge of Improving Instructional Practices

113 C H A P TE R SIX Accountability and Urban High Schools: The Challenge of Improving Instructional Practices THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS OF THIS BOOK HAVE EXAMINED mayoral control as a strategy to improve student achievement in low-performing school districts. These chapters have discussed how mayoral control facilitates an integrated governance arrangement in which authority at the systemwide level is streamlined and political incentives converge to target resources to lowperforming schools. In this chapter, we turn to Chicago’s experience with mayoral control between 1995 and 2000 with the specific interest of examining how the governance approach affects teaching and learning in low-performing schools. Past studies on mayoral control have tended to focus on whether the governance approach increases district civic and political capacity. In contrast, we explore macro–micro linkages between city and district governance arrangements and changes in classroom practice by focusing on how principals and teachers in Chicago responded to the accountability agenda initiated in the early years of mayoral takeover (Cuban and Usdan 2003; Henig and Rich 2004; Wong et al. 1999; Wong and Shen 2003). Through our multilevel analysis, we show that mayoral control created political conditions in Chicago that allowed for an alignment of goals and strategies aimed at improving school and student achievement that were particularly conducive to a high-stakes accountability agenda. At the same time, we discuss the limitations of this kind of large-scale reform for substantively altering classroom teaching and learning. Although prior district-level studies of mayoral control have important implications for school and classroom practice, few have linked district-level authority to empirical analyzes of school and classroom practices. Increasingly, 114 CHAPTER SIX districts are understood to play an important role in providing support for school reform and improving teaching and learning (Hightower et al. 2002; Honig and Hatch 2004; Louis, Febey, and Schroeder 2005; Wong and Rutledge 2006). Districts serve as important mediators between federal and state policy, on the one hand, and schools, on the other. Further, districts often set conditions for instructional improvement and are well poised to address issues of intradistrict equity (Hightower et al. 2002; Honig and Hatch 2004; Marsh 2002). Yet districts can only facilitate policy coherence and organizational collaboration among major actors if they have both the internal support from faculty and staff and the external support from parents and community members. The research on district influence has focused little on the conditions that give districts the capacity to take on large-scale reform. Mayoral control represents an important way that districts can garner support from multiple constituencies for ambitious school- and classroom-level change. Chicago’s experience with mayoral control is particularly instructive of the extent to which the alignment of political actors under mayoral control can facilitate the implementation of an accountability agenda aimed at improving school and student achievement. In 1995, the Illinois State Legislature gave Mayor Richard M. Daley control of the school system. With this new authority, the mayor appointed a School Reform Board of Trustees and chief executive officer (CEO) for the school district. In the first year of mayoral control, the new administration took several important actions to strengthen fiscal and political support for the school system. The following year, the CEO, Paul Vallas, and the School Reform Board of Trustees launched an educational accountability agenda focused on raising standards and improving student performance. In this chapter we examine how mayoral control provided the context for school and classroom reform in high schools in Chicago. The chapter draws on qualitative case studies we conducted in three Chicago high schools to address the following questions: (1) How did mayoral control facilitate systemwide reform? (2) What form did systemwide reform take? (3) How did principals and teachers implement the district’s accountability agenda? (4) How did district policies shape instruction? Though the depth and sustainability of the reforms launched under mayoral control remains an ongoing empirical question, there is little doubt that mayoral control created conditions conducive for large-scale change in Chicago schools. Through this multilevel qualitative analysis, we identify the mechanisms used by the district to implement reforms in Chicago’s high schools and consider, in particular, the implications of mayoral control for classroom teaching and learning. Accountability and Urban High Schools 115 MAYORAL CONTROL AS A DISTRICT REFORM As discussed earlier in this book, mayoral control reduces competing political actors and strengthens the school district’s political capacity...