A bold experiment to fix Chicago's schools
With Mayor Daley's plan to open 100 new schools--two-thirds of them to be privately managed--the city has become a leader in the effort to tap the private sector for help

By Tracy Dell'Angela and Jodi S. Cohen
Tribune staff reporters
Published June 27, 2004

With its ambitious proposal to reinvent Chicago's worst schools, the city has become the biggest player in the boldest experiment now under way in urban school systems: inviting the private sector to fix what's wrong with public education.

Deep-pocketed businesses and foundations have poured millions of dollars into urban education in such cities as New York, Boston, Milwaukee and Los Angeles, launching charter schools, contract schools, small schools--anything that might work where all else has failed.

In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley last week announced a sweeping plan to open 100 new schools by transforming the city's worst high schools into small schools and remaking clusters of elementary schools on the South and West Sides. The effort will be seeded with $50 million in private donations and will rely on private groups to manage two-thirds of the new schools.

The idea behind such reforms is that moribund schools can improve if they are liberated from the constraints of bloated bureaucracies and union contracts. And if enough of the little upstart schools succeed, the argument goes, it will change the way business is done in the districts as a whole--in the same way that smaller airlines such as Southwest and ATA forced the big boys to shed their inefficiencies.

"The name of the game is to take a tired government monopoly and make it into a high-performing public enterprise," said billionaire home builder Eli Broad, who said he expects to support Chicago's expansion of charter schools with his education foundation. In the past five years, the Broad Foundation has committed more than $400 million to support new ideas and innovative leadership in the nation's largest urban school systems.

"Competition makes a lot of sense, and it makes a lot of difference," Broad said. "If they make progress, the rest of the system is going to catch on."

Critics say the danger of this approach is that the rush to innovation brings in untested ideas that might not work. These districts also rely on a flow of money that may dry up when the job of teaching the cities' most challenging populations proves tougher than expected for businesses accustomed to bottom-line results.

"Years from now, when 2010 does arrive, none of the people ballyhooing this program will still be in this system," said Clarice Berry, president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association. "These are not career educators asking to come and take these schools. They are not in it for the long haul."

Some past experiments in privatization have proved problematic. In Hartford and Baltimore, for example, management contracts with the firm Education Alternatives Inc. were canceled early after widespread complaints about union busting, cookie-cutter curriculum and neglecting special-education needs.

The plan announced in Chicago represents a new approach: creating a marketplace of ideas in which many private interests have a chance to prove their mettle.

"This kind of dramatic transformation of schools is a relatively new thing that leaders have considered to turn around underperforming schools," said Sandy Kress, a former senior education adviser to President Bush. "Yet this cannot just be an exercise in moving management from one group to another. That's change for change's sake. The real question is: Do we have strong leaders taking over these schools, people with proven track records of turning around schools and making research-based decisions on how to teach children?"

Private-sector involvement has been embraced in New York City, where educators courted private donors willing to invest $41 million to help create 50 new charters in the next five years. In a plan similar to Chicago's, New York school officials will give the charter schools space in their buildings and provide start-up funds.

New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said the initiative has brought in new educators and ideas that would not have been possible before in the nation's largest school system, with 1.1 million children in 1,200 schools. "These are people who are willing to be accountable and willing to take a risk, but are not willing to work in a large, labyrinthine, bureaucratic system," Klein said. "What you want to do is bring in new blood, new talent."

In Boston, nearly 10 percent of students attend independently run "pilot schools" with the flexibility to decide their budgets, curriculum and school policies--an initiative that has attracted millions in private donations from the Gates Foundation and local philanthropies. The Boston Foundation, for example, granted $50,000 to $100,000 to schools that converted from traditional to pilot schools.

The pilot schools boast relatively high student attendance rates, lower percentages of students who transfer, and some of the lowest suspension rates. On state tests, the schools score better on average than the district's neighborhood schools.

The schools are reviewed every four years, and none has been closed for poor performance since the initiative was launched in 1994. "They outperform the district on virtually all indicators," said Dan French, executive director of the Center for Collaborative Education, a group that works with the pilot schools.

The pilot schools recently have come under fire, however, from the teachers union, which originally supported the program but wants the pilots to comply with traditional overtime policies. Community members have criticized the schools for not including enough students with disabilities.

While the charter school movement is young, its failures have taught school districts some important lessons about what models work better in inner-city systems. One of the original charter players, San Francisco-based KIPP, has grown from one school in the Bronx with 50 children to 31 schools in 13 states, including two in Chicago.

KIPP spokesman Steve Mancini said the schools have succeeded because they stress a simple maxim: Hire top teachers who work longer days in a structured environment. Students attend KIPP schools every day from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., plus every other Saturday and three weeks of class in the summer. Nearly 90 percent of the students are minority; 80 percent are low-income.

"Public education doesn't have to be an inefficient bureaucracy," Mancini said. "We believe charter schools are public schools, funded by the people and accountable to the people."

Still, the business of education is not simple. Teaching children is far different from flying airplanes, and measuring success is a complicated equation that takes years. In one Chicago KIPP school's first year, test scores generally showed improvement over the school it replaced a year before. But 4th-grade math scores plunged to 2.4 percent of pupils performing at the national average from 10.3 percent.

During Daley's speech last week, he challenged business leaders to take on the challenge for the long haul.

"Do what we did as a city nine years ago when we took control of the schools. Put yourself, your reputation and your resources on the line for children," Daley said. "That's what it will take for us to create a school system that is outperforming the nation."

That appeal proved irresistible to the partners at the Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal law firm, which will become the first company in Chicago to sponsor its own charter school. The firm believed that investing $1 million--and the collective resources of 700 Chicago-based employees--on the school was far more rewarding than spending the money on a swanky party for its 100th anniversary.

The firm plans to open a charter elementary school in the North Lawndale neighborhood by the fall of 2005. It has spent nine months researching the idea and assembling a group of educators, including an experienced principal, who will borrow ideas from the best charter schools to build a model they can sell to the Chicago district.

The firm's senior partners, Errol Stone and Don Lubin, said they were inspired by the charter program at North Lawndale College Prep, which was cited by the mayor as a "runaway success."

"We are not in the education business ... but what we bring is creativity, energy and a willingness to experiment," he said. And we bring to this enormous human resources from our staff," he said. "It's not big business taking over education. It's really big business lending a hand. The ultimate outcome is controlled by the public sector, as it should be."

But Clive Belfield of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, based at Columbia University, warned that Chicago could risk failure if the district allows untested organizations to manage schools--especially those with the most challenging students.

"If you become reliant on these private providers, it's possible they can close up in any given year," Belfield said. "We could be setting ourselves up for a big liability in the future if we have to maintain these schools."

One urban education expert said Chicago's reform success will depend on the district's willingness to allow outside innovation and not cave in to special interests that want to preserve the status quo.

"There is a national appetite from communities and schools to create room for innovation," said Tim Knowles, executive director of the Center for Urban Education at the University of California at Berkeley. "One thing that is so stunning about Chicago is the fact that they are undertaking it on this scale and at this pace."