Accountability and Support in Chicago: Consequences for Students

Accountability in Chicago in the 1990s derived from progressive reform legislation adopted in 1988 and 1995. The Illinois General Assembly in 1988 passed the Chicago School Reform Act (P.A. 85-1418), which included a set of goals, a redistribution of the school district's resources, and a decentralization of decisionmaking to the school level. The central goal of the legislation was for Chicago's students to achieve at levels comparable to students across the nation (that is, meet national norms in reading and math), both districtwide and at each individual school in the district. ¹ Taking decisionmaking about school improvement out of the hands of a stultified and entrenched district bureaucracy was seen as a key strategy to encourage student achievement. The locus of accountability was moved from bureaucrats in a central hierarchy to local school councils, elected by parents and community members, with the power to hire and fire principals.

The 1988 reform act emphasized setting high expectations for student achievement, giving schools the opportunity to change, and fostering professional development that would enhance teachers' instructional capacities. It also tried to address the will to change by making principals' tenure subject to the decisions of local school councils composed primarily of parents, community representatives, and teachers. ² The legislation had a very cumbersome mechanism for the central Board of Education to intervene in failing schools (a so-called educational bankruptcy provision then being pioneered in the state of New Jersey). However, these various restructuring mechanisms were not strong enough to overcome resistance to change in some faculties. By 1993, the Consortium on Chicago School Research had suggested that roughly a third of the city's elementary schools were making serious efforts at change, a third had added multiple--and at times conflicting--new programs, and a third had not changed at all. ³ There was general agreement across the city, bolstered by declining achievement scores, that the school-based management reforms of 1988 were not working as well in the high schools.

About the same time that the consortium was putting forward its elementary school study, the Quest Center of the Chicago Teachers Union, with the support of several large foundations, initiated a partnership with the Council on Basic Education and the Chicago public schools (CPS) to develop a set of standards for student learning at the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. The first draft of these standards was developed by 1995 and printed on a large wall chart that was distributed to every Chicago public school for comment and response. Teachers working with the Quest Center to restructure their schools began to develop assessments to measure whether students were meeting these standards.

The General Assembly in 1995 adopted the second set of reforms by amending the 1988 reform act to place responsibility for the central operations of the school district more squarely in the mayor's hands while expanding the power of the district's central administration to control its own finances and to hold individual schools accountable for improving student achievement. On July 1, 1995, a new Reform Board of Trustees and a new administrative team headed by Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Paul Vallas took control of the school district. Both the board and the top five administrators were directly appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley.

The first challenge facing the new administrative team was the fiscal insolvency of the district. Early in the reform years, the Board of Education had granted salary increases totaling 27 percent over four years, but it did not have the revenues to sustain those costs. By the fall of 1993, the district had accumulated such a large budget deficit that it could not open school. After a prolonged struggle, the General Assembly allowed the school district to borrow $400 million to balance its budget for two years, during which time both the governor and...