TABLE OF CONTENTS

The overall viability and accomplishment of Chicago's LSCs is not clear cut. The issue is not whether they should exist, but how they can be strengthened.

Providing high quality education and assistance that reaches most LSCs will require developing an infrastructure that does not currently exist.

Chicago's Local School Councils:
What the Research Says

by Donald R. Moore & Gail Merritt,
Designs for Change

January 2002

• As the Consortium on Chicago School Research determined, "The vast majority of LSCs are viable governance organizations that responsibly carry out their mandated duties and are active in building school and community partnerships..." The overall level of viability and accomplishment of Chicago's LSCs is so clearly established that the issue is not whether they should exist, but how they can be further strengthened.
• When judged against the standards set by the most effective LSCs, the impact of a large percentage of LSCs on educational quality and student achievement can be dramatically strengthened. Further, while the need for improvement is clear cut, the path to making these needed improvements is also clear cut and feasible.

• LSC members typically have good educational backgrounds -- they are significantly better educated than the average Illinois resident.
• The typical LSC meets at least monthly, nearly always has a quorum, and has two or more active committees. Parent and community LSC members devote an average of 28 hours per month to helping their school.
• The clear majority of Local School Councils are carrying out their key duties of principal evaluation, principal, selection, school improvement planning, and school budget development effectively. 50%-60% of LSCs are characterized by Consortium researchers as "high functioning."
• One of the distinctive characteristics of elementary schools that were low-achieving in 1990, but made sustained reading test score gains over the next decade, is that these successful schools had an effective LSC, as judged by the school's teachers. In general, those elementary schools that have shown major improvements in student achievement have been characterized by school-level initiative on the part of the principal, teachers, and the LSC. Low-achieving elementary schools that were taken over by the central administration in the late 1990s made very limited achievement gains.
• Many LSCs have helped build collaborative partnerships between the school and other community resources.
• LSCs comprise the vast majority of African American and Latino elected officials in Illinois. LSC members strengthen these skills for civic participation through the experience of serving on their LSC.
• In a city that is notorious for its political corruption, all objective evidence points to the fact that very few LSC members use their office to engage in corrupt activity.

• About 10%-15% of LSCs are enmeshed in sustained conflict, are inactive, or have engaged in unethical behavior. 
• 25%-33% of LSCs are "performing well but need support." They are fulfilling their basic legal duties, but are not proactive in providing leadership to their school. Such LSCs are unlikely to contribute significantly to making fundamental improvements in student learning.
• Among the 50%-60% of LSCs that the Consortium characterized as "highly functioning" and proactive, about 15%-20% consistently scored at the very highest levels on the Consortium's rating scales (i.e., all LSC members strongly agreed that all desirable practices were being carried out for each critical LSC activity -- such as school improvement planning). Thus, among the highly functioning LSCs identified by the Consortium study, there is still room for significant improvement in a substantial portion of them, if they are judged by the most rigorous standards.
• About 50% of elementary schools showed substantial improvement on the Iowa Reading Test from 1990 to 2000, or maintained scores above the national average.77 One reasonable standard for judging LSC effectiveness over time is to look at the bottom line of test score achievement.
• There was no significant improvement between 1990 and 2000 in student achievement or in dropout rates in Chicago's high schools, once changes in the nature of the students entering high school were taken into account.78 Chicago's high school LSCs must move to a new level of effectiveness if they are to help solve this complex problem.

• From the earliest stages of the 1988 school reform, the school system's Central Board and central office staff have attempted to interfere inappropriately in LSC decision making (for example, by pressing LSCs to hire or rehire favored principal candidates). This interference has increased dramatically since 1995. It is essential for pressure to be brought to bear from the top school system leadership and through political action to stop this type of interference.
• As noted earlier, LSC "training" frequently fails to meet key standards for effective adult education, such as providing educational experiences at the point when the LSC is actually carrying out a key responsibility, analyzing the LSC's concrete situation as an integral part of the educational process, and following up formal sessions with "over-the-shoulder" assistance.79 Providing such educational experiences to a significant number of LSCs will require a major financial investment (or redeployment of resources) and the development of an infrastructure capable of providing this education that currently does not exist. To be effective, this support effort must be independent of Chicago's Central Board and administration. A major resource in developing this infrastructure are current and former LSC members in schools with exemplary LSC leadership.
• Educational experiences for LSC members typically place a heavy focus on the specifics of carrying out legally-mandated responsibilities and fail to focus sufficiently on the actions that LSCs can take to improve educational quality and student achievement as they exercise these responsibilities.80 For each of the Five Essential Supports for Learning indicated in Table 7, the implications for LSC knowledge and effective action can be readily spelled out. For example, in evaluating principals, LSCs can obtain and examine data about the number of teachers in their school who are not fully certified and the steps that the principal has taken and can take to solve this problem. The new infrastructure for educating and assisting LSCs must place a major focus on helping LSC solve these educational quality issues.
• It is unlikely that the changes in the education of LSCs described above will occur or that the central administration will end its interference in LSCs' efforts to improve their schools unless more LSC members become skilled advocates capable of impacting systemwide and state policy. Thus, an essential objective for improving the education of LSCs should be to prepare more LSC members as effective advocates for policy change.