Research Should Guide the Debate About Chicago's Local School Councils
Original Framework and Rationale for Chicago's Local School Councils
Findings from "LSCs -- Local Leadership At Work" (CCSR)
"The 1988 Chicago School Reform Act represents the most radical attempt to restructure an urban school system in the last hundred years."
--Historian Michael Katz
Chicago's
Local School Councils:
What the Research Says
by
Donald R. Moore & Gail Merritt,
Designs for Change
January 2002
Research Should Guide the Debate About Chicago's Local School Councils
In 1988, the Illinois General Assembly created Chicago's Local School Councils - elected decision-making councils that have significant power, at each of Chicago's 550 public schools. These 550 Local School Councils (LSCs) joined such other elected Illinois decision makers as the state's 900 local school boards and 2,700 city, town, and township councils.1 Indeed, Illinois has more elected units of local government than any other state in the country.2
Thus, the idea of local control of schools and municipalities is widely accepted across Illinois, outside the Chicago city limits. Yet grassroots democracy inside Chicago (in the form of the city's Local School Councils) has sparked widespread interest and controversy-- for at least two reasons.
First, Chicago school reform has attracted attention because shifting authority for key decisions to elected school-level councils is unprecedented in a major urban school district. As education historian Michael Katz commented:
"The 1988 Chicago school reform law represents the most radical attempt to restructure an urban school system in the last hundred years. For most of the twentieth century, reforms rearranged the furniture in big city school systems; Chicago's 1988 school reform moved the walls. It redefined the governance of schools, the conditions of teaching and learning, and the relations of schools to their various communities."3
Supporters of this major reform argued that creating Local School Councils (one of several major changes brought about by the Chicago School Reform Act) would help catalyze substantial improvements in the quality of Chicago public education.4
A second major reason that Chicago reform has received special scrutiny is that many have expressed skepticism that elected Chicago parents and community members in many of Chicago's neighborhoods have the capacity to provide the leadership needed to improve their children's schools. For example, one school reform critic said that creating Local School Councils was like "turning the asylum over to the lunatics."
Given that there are more than 550 LSCs, opinions about the effectiveness of LSCs have varied, and those with different opinions can cite specific school situations to support their views that LSCs are effective or ineffective.
Chicago's first Local School Councils were elected eleven years ago, and researchers have now conducted a number of studies of LSC effectiveness. This research, which uncovers overall patterns across 550 schools, should be the critical basis for reaching conclusions about how well Chicago's dramatic restructuring effort has worked.
This report summarizes the findings from two major studies that analyze the effectiveness of LSCs:
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Susan Ryan, Anthony Bryk, et al. (December 1997). Charting Reform: LSCs - Local Leadership at Work. Chicago: Consortium on Chicago School Research.5 This is the most comprehensive study of the nature and activities of LSCs, based on a systemwide survey of parent, community, principal, and teacher LSC members in a representative sample of schools.
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Designs for Change (October 1997). What Makes These Schools Stand Out: Chicago Elementary Schools With a Seven-Year Trend of Improved Reading Achievement. Chicago: Author.6 This study analyzes the practices of elementary schools that substantially improved reading achievement from 1990 to 1997 - including the issue of whether these successful schools have more effective Local School Councils.
This report also briefly reviews some additional evidence that bears on current policy issues related to Local School Councils.
In the Interpretative Summary that ends the report, we draw conclusions about key public policy issues concerning Chicago's Local School Councils based on existing research.