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Page 1 of 7 By Pauline Lipman
[Editor’s note: The following article was
published in the American Educational Research Journal, Summer 2002,
Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 379–419. It is reprinted in Substance with the
permission of the author and the AERA. This article was originally
published for Chicago readers in the March-April 2003 issue of
Substance and is reprinted here now because of its relevance to
Renaissance 2010 and No Child Left Behind. Pauline Lipman is an
Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Foundations in Education at
DePaul University, 2320 N. Kenmore, Chicago, IL 60614. Her research
focuses on race and class in urban education, the social-cultural
context of school reform, and critical policy analysis. She can be
contacted through Teachers for Social Justice. www.teachersfor
justice.org]]
Synopsis:
This article examines current Chicago
school reform in the context of economic restructuring, the drive to
become a “global city,” and the cultural politics of race. The
discussion focuses on high stakes testing and accountability policies
and on new, special programs and schools. My analysis is based on data
from four qualitative case studies of Chicago elementary schools,
school system data on the nature and geographic distribution of
differentiated programs and schools, and examination of labor force
trends and economic development policies.
Contrary to the discourse of equity that frames Chicago
school reform, I argue that the current policies exacerbate existing
race and class inequalities and create new ones. The policies promote
unequal educational opportunities and experiences and produce
stratified identities with significant implications in Chicago’s new,
highly stratified work force.
As a whole, Chicago’s reforms support the inherent
inequalities of global city development, gentrification, and the
displacement of working class and low-income communities, especially
communities of color.
I argue that education policies are part of a cultural
politics of race aimed at the control and regulation of
African-American and Latino youth and their communities. The paper
concludes with proposals toward the democratic reconstruction of urban
education policy.
Chicago’s high-stakes testing, “no social promotion”
policy, and system of accountability have become a national model for
urban education reform. Despite publicity about rising test scores and
claims of a “vastly improving system,” there is little critical
examination of the genesis of these policies, of whose interests they
serve, of their social implications, or of their meanings for teachers,
communities, and most of all, the nearly one-half million students in
the Chicago Public Schools, 90 percent of whom are students of color
and 84 percent of whom are classified as low income. This article
contributes to a socially and culturally situated discussion of
relationships between school-level meanings and districtwide effects of
policy, on the one hand, and political–economic and cultural contexts,
on the other.
I discuss Chicago school policies in the context of the
restructuring of Chicago’s economy and the drive by corporate,
financial, and political elites to make Chicago a “global city”
(Sassen, 1994). My central argument is that, contrary to the discourse
of equity that frames Chicago’s “reforms,” current policies actually
exacerbate existing inequalities and create new dynamics of inequality
with important implications for students and for the future of the city
as a whole. I contend that the policies sharpen existing differences in
opportunities to learn and that they produce segmented student
identities with significant ramifications in Chicago’s restructured
economy and work force. Although there are new educational
opportunities for a small number of students, the vast majority,
primarily students of color, attend schools organized around basic
literacies that are likely to prepare them primarily for low-wage jobs.
My data also suggest that Chicago Public School policies undermine
culturally relevant teaching (1) and pedagogies that promote critical
approaches to knowledge. I also contend that the policies and the
cultural politics of race that surround them contribute to the control
and regulation of African-American and Latino youth and have important
consequences for the city’s spatial reorganization and displacement of
working-class communities, especially communities of color.
As capitalism is restructured globally, some cities are
driven to the margins of the global economy while others fight for
position as global cities. Under conditions of simultaneous global
economic dispersal and integration, global cities are marketplaces of
global finance, major sites for producing innovations central to the
informational economy, and places where global systems of production
are organized and managed (Sassen, 1994). New York, Los Angeles, and
Chicago have been described as global cities (Abu-Lughod, 1999). These
urban centers have become the concentrated expression of the
contradictions of wealth and poverty that typify globalization (Sassen,
1994). These contradictions are paralleled by new forms of social
segregation and dislocation and glaring disparities in the use of, and
access to, urban space. New inequalities among and within cities
clearly have implications for urban schools. In Chicago, the drive to
become a “world class city,” with its increasing race and class
polarization, forms the social landscape on which the trends and
tensions of educational policy are played out. The intersection of
educational policy and this broader social-economic dynamic is at the
heart of my analysis.
The 1988 and 1995 Chicago School “Reforms”
In 1995,
the Illinois State Legislature passed a Chicago school reform law that
gave the city’s mayor responsibility for the Chicago Public Schools
(CPS). Chicago’s Mayor Daley appointed his Chief of Staff, Gery Chico,
to head the CPS Board of Trustees (which replaced the Board of
Education) and his Budget Director, Paul Vallas, as CEO of schools.
(When test scores leveled off in spring 2001, Vallas and Chico resigned
and Daley appointed new leadership.)
The Vallas–Chico administration installed a highly
regulatory regime centered on high-stakes tests, standards, and
remediation. Schools that fail to perform at minimum levels on the Iowa
Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) in the elementary grades and on the Test of
Academic Proficiency (TAP) in high school are put on a warning list or
on probation; or their leadership and staff can be reconstituted by the
central office. (The ITBS is in addition to the Illinois State
Achievement Test, ISAT.) Low test scores also carry severe consequences
for students, including retention at benchmark grades 3, 6, and 8 and
mandatory summer school. Eighth-graders aged fifteen years or older who
fail the test in summer school are assigned to remedial transition high
schools. Bi-lingual education is also limited to three years for most
students, after which they are tested in English with the same
consequences as monolingual English students. Accountability measures
are backed up by new remedial programs, including after-school
programs, transition classes with reduced student–teacher ratios,
summer school, and transition high schools. Starting in 1995, the board
also initiated new magnet college-preparatory high schools, advanced
academic programs, and vocational academies. In 1997, it established
academic standards and curriculum frameworks to standardize the
knowledge and skills to be taught in each grade.2
Under the current regime, teachers’ work is
increasingly governed by the technical rationality of teaching specific
skills, employing centrally man-dated curricula, and, in some
low-scoring schools, using scripted direct instruction. Beginning in
fall 1999, the board issued a semiscripted standard curriculum for
grades K–12 based on its mandated summer school curriculum. Although it
was optional, Vallas predicted that in five years 80 percent of
teachers would be using it. In addition, a new high school test for
core academic subjects, the Chicago Academic Standards Exam, is being
phased in to count as 25 percent of students’ final grade, thereby
dictating a significant portion of what is taught in high school core
subjects.
The 1995 policies are layered over the 1988 Chicago
School Reform Act, which established unprecedented democratic
participation in school governance through local school councils
(LSCs). The majority of those serving on the LSCs are parents and
community residents. LSCs have the power to hire and fire principals,
approve annual local school improvement plans, and allocate Chapter 1
funds.3 Although there was substantial variability in the effectiveness
of LSCs, their level of participation, and the degree to which they
sparked innovation (Bryk, Sebring, Kerbow, Rollow, & Easton, 1998;
Shipps, 1997), at least in its first few years, the 1988 reform
energized broad grass-roots participation in school reform (Katz, Fine,
& Simon, 1997; Catalyst, 1990, February; 1991, June). However, by
1995, the mayor and business leaders were impatient with the pace of
school improvement and with ongoing contention with the unions. They
colluded with the Republican state legislature to recentralize the
system under the mayor’s control. 4
The “democratic localism” (Bryk et al., 1998) of the
LSCs continues tofunction in tandem with recentralization, albeit in an
increasingly weakenedform.5 The nature of this relationship of
democratic local control and centralized accountability is varied and
complex. The pages of the Catalyst, a monthly magazine that has
chronicled Chicago school reform since 1990, record wide variation in
the vitality of LSCs since 1995. The influence of centralized policies
on schools also varies. However, reports in the Catalyst and my own
school-level data indicate that, in general, grassroots participation
and local power (embodied in LSCs) has been substantially compromised
by the overriding impact of CPS’s recentralization and accountability
reform (see Lipman, forthcoming, 2000).6
Critical policy analysis
My approach departs from
much that has been written about recent Chicago school reforms. The
grassroots, democratic–popular thrust of the 1988 reform and its impact
on school improvement has been widely described and debated (e.g.,
Allensworth & Easton, 2001; Bryk, Sebring, et al., 1998; Hess,
1991; Katz, Fine, & Simon, 1997; Kyle & Kantowicz, 1992;
Shipps, 1997). There has also been some analysis of the racial politics
of the 1988 reform and its implications for the system’s
African-American leaders (Lewis & Nakagawa, 1995). And there is
substantial research on outcomes of the policies initiated since1995
(e.g., Bryk, Thum, Easton, & Luppescu, 1998; Newmann, Lopez, &
Bryk, 1998; Roderick, Bryk, Jacob, Easton, & Allensworth, 1999;
Roderick, Nagaoka, Bacon, & Easton, 2000; Smith, Smith, & Bryk,
1998). However, despite wide interest in Chicago school reform and its
national significance, there is little analysis of its relationship to
the political economy or cultural politics of the city, especially the
cultural politics of race. And there is little attention to what
Chicago schools are educating students for.
To address these issues, I borrow Grace’s (1984)
notion of “critical policy scholarship”—policy analysis that is
theoretically and socioculturally situated and generative of social
action. I link an empirical analysis of Chicago’s educational policies
with a “political analysis of their genesis and social meaning” (Apple,
1998). I am interested in the observable consequences of policy and its
ideological force — the ways in which policy texts and dis-courses are
a form of symbolic politics (Gusfield, 1986) or political and cultural
performance (Smith, Heinecke, & Noble, 2000), not only regulating
educational content and practice but defining which knowledge, values,
and behavior are considered legitimate. Through their definition of
public problems and the solutions they pose, policies organize
consciousness around shared understandings of educational issues and of
specific social groups, e.g., African-American students and educational
failure. Thus educational policies are part of a dominant system of
social relations, framing what can be thought or said (Ozga, 2000).
At the same time, educators, students, and families
remake policy at the local level as they shape educational experiences
and negotiate meanings in schools within the constraints imposed by
centralized policies (see Ball, 1994; Grace, 1994; Ozga, 2000). Among
schools there is also variety in educational philosophies and
practices, and the philosophies of central office programs and staff
may run counter to a district’s dominant agenda. Residual and emerging
perspectives compete with CPS’s dominant culture of accountability and
control. In short, both agency and constraint exist at all levels of
the system, and policy-as-practice is the result of conflicts and
contention in particular contexts as teachers and administrators
“rewrite” policies through their own actions within the restrictions
imposed on them. Moreover, there is contention within the state over
policy formation—within the city’s political regime, the State Board of
Education, and the CPS administration. Although I attempt to describe
some of this complexity, a full discussion is largely beyond the scope
of this article. (See Lipman, forthcoming; 2001, April, for a
discussion of these issues.) My focus here is on the systemic
dimensions of the dominant discourse within an admittedly multifaceted
picture and multiple discourses.
I assess CPS policies from the standpoint of equity
and social justice. Here I claim an expanded definition of equity
(Tate, 1997) that emphasizes equality of outcomes. To achieve equity,
not only must students have equal opportunities and rights, but special
efforts must be made to overcome past injustice and the historically
sedimented advantages of race, gender, and class. Policies and programs
perpetuate social inequality and injustice when they prepare students
of specific racial/ethnic, class, or gender groups for unequal life
choices, when they merely extend advantages to a larger percentage of
marginalized students, or when marginalized students have to compete
with each other for scarce advantages, e.g., magnet schools and other
highly competitive advanced academic programs.
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