Parent Power's First Big Test

By Susan Tifft

The cafeteria at Chicago's Morgan Park High School was jammed, and tempers were rising. Only a week earlier, the school's new eleven-member, parent-led governing council had voted not to renew principal Walter Pilditch's contract. The move had sparked violent protests among students, parents and teachers, resulting in seven injuries and ten arrests. Now council president Calvin Pearce was gamely trying to get on with other pressing matters.

But many in the crowd would not cooperate. They demanded to know why principal Pilditch, a 21-year veteran, had been fired. When the council refused to discuss the reasons, Cheri Dybus, mother of a Morgan Park junior, rose and stormed out of the room. "They don't know what they're doing!" she said. "It's a political power trip. Pilditch has raised the scores of these children. These people don't represent me!"

Morgan Park is one of a handful of schools that have been shaken by turmoil in recent weeks after principals were ousted by local councils. The dismissals were the first big test of a revolutionary decentralization scheme launched last fall by the city of Chicago. Under the plan, locally elected councils -- composed of six parents, two community residents, two teachers and an ex- officio member, the principal -- were put in charge of each of Chicago's 541 public schools. The aim was to shift authority from the city's bloated board of education to local neighborhoods. But giving parents the power to hire and fire principals, approve budgets and develop long-range plans for improving student performance has so far proved to be more of a headache than a panacea for the nation's third largest school district.

The problems erupted early this month, when about half of the school councils were required to decide whether or not to retain their principals. A majority of those 270 panels chose to keep their current principals; 49 did not.

Protests immediately broke out at half a dozen schools where popular principals were let go. When Spry Elementary School principal Benedict Natzke was fired after twelve years on the job, some teachers deserted their classrooms to lobby for his reinstatement. Many students were divided in their loyalties. "The council is holding the school hostage," says Natzke. "Now we're worse off. We have local bureaucrats."

Some of the bitterest clashes have taken place in schools where Hispanic- dominated councils have ejected non-Hispanic principals, leading disgruntled teachers and parents to conclude that race, not competence, was the real reason for dismissal. Language differences have only exacerbated the mounting anger and frustration. "All members of the council should speak Spanish and English," one member of a predominantly Hispanic council told Catalyst, a publication that is monitoring Chicago's decentralization efforts.

Some parent-power advocates say that allegations of racism are part of a campaign to undermine the city's experiment in school-based management. Others play down the tensions. "There may be some places where issues of race and ethnicity overrule competence, but overall that is a small percentage," says Michael Bakalis, professor of education policy at Loyola University in Chicago and a former state superintendent of education.

Parent-led councils have also been handicapped by their lack of training, particularly in budgetary matters. The city's board of education has promised help but has been slow to deliver it, giving rise to charges that the central bureaucracy is not committed to change. "The concept is real good, but they have set us up to fail," says Leroy Johnson, whose daughter is a ninth-grader at Morgan Park High School.

Advocates of reform continue to believe the radical restructuring of Chicago schools will ultimately help lower the city's 41% dropout rate and raise college entrance examination scores, now ranked among the lowest in the U.S. "Who has the purest commitment to the education of children?" asks State Senator Arthur Berman, who chaired the committee that drafted the 1988 decentralization law. "The answer is the parents."

Other cities might dispute that theory. New York City decentralized in 1969; since then, many of the 32 district school boards have become nests of political patronage and criminality. A third are currently under investigation for charges ranging from embezzlement to drug dealing. At the same time, there is little doubt that many old-fashioned centralized school boards are in need of major overhauls. In October the state of New Jersey stepped in and took over the Jersey City school district because the system was found to be rife with fiscal mismanagement.

The Chicago turmoil, meanwhile, is far from over, and more trouble could erupt this week. Uno, a Hispanic group active in the principals controversy, is expected to pack a meeting of the board of education. Unquestionably, the highly charged atmosphere robs students and teachers of precious classroom time. But, for the moment at least, many Chicagoans take some comfort in the notion that parent-led councils, while imperfect, could not possibly make the city's beleaguered school system any worse. "All we've done now is empower people to make decisions that may or may not be right," says Professor Bakalis. "It's a mistake to believe only people with Ph.D.s know what to do."

With reporting by Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago