By George N. Schmidt

A few months before the dawn of Chicago’s “renaissance”, in January 2002, the Chicago Board of Education passed a resolution to pay more than $4 million to another round of what were then called “external partners.” 

External partners back in the late 20th and early 21st centuries were academic and consultant experts who were attached, sometimes at great expense, to local schools that were declared to be “failing” because they had low scores on standardized tests. The external partner program, which pre-dated the federal “No Child Left Behind” law, had many of the same elements as were later incorporated in the federal law. Based on standardized test scores, inner city schools were designated as “failures” because they had low score. Because they had “failed,” the teachers and principals in the schools were deemed to be in need of outside help. Chicago pioneered the entire system of blame and assistance during the late 1990s and was hailed as a national model of school reform as a result.

Although the schools were held accountable, the external partners never were, as the example below shows. Once it was established that standardized test scores were a valid “bottom line” for measuring the success or failure of schools, the solution to the failure had to come from the outside. Once that was established, external partners were one method of assistance, which the local school had little or no control over. While “No Child Left Behind” today mandates massive privatization of public resources based on the same model of the “bottom line,” in the late 1990s the lurch toward privatization was facilitated by Chicago professors and other supposed experts in the external partners program.

Less than a year after Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Arne Duncan to be the second “Chief Executive Officer” of Chicago’s public schools, Duncan proposed one of the last iterations of the external partners program which had cost more than $10 million under his predecessor, Paul Vallas.

The logic was simple. Test scores determined which schools were “failures.” Then the school board mandates that the schools hire external partners, approved by the Chicago Board of Education, to tell the schools how to end their failure. The external partners were supposed to show the teachers and principals at those schools how to improve the schools (translated, raise test scores) so that they would get off “Academic Probation” and, theoretically, live happily every after. The theory was that the scores at the schools were low not because of poverty, gangs, crime, unemployment and all of the problems facing the children and their families – but because teachers didn’t have access to the best lesson plans. In practice, the lucrative external partnerships virtually guaranteed that the external partners — and in most cases the universities they represented — would never be publicly critical of the high-stakes testing used by CPS against inner city schools. For more than a decade that was precisely what happened.

From the first time external partners arrived in the schools at the behest of Paul G. Vallas in 1996, many teachers and principals noted that their partners were more like dictators and their advice usually inane or irrelevant. For all of their self-importance, the external partners usually they didn’t know very much about how to make things better for inner city schools where the combinations of poverty, crime, and racial segregation had created conditions that most Americans in those pre-Katrina days had forgotten existed.. The worst of the external partners barked and threatened the teachers and principals. The better ones tried to help out, even acknowledging that the scheme was farcical, but urging people to go along with it. In a few cases admitted that they had never realized how serious the problems of inner city teaching were.

By 2000, Paul Vallas was facing more problems than he could solve with bluster and bribes. By 2001, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley was rumored to have had it with Vallas. After Vallas assured Daley that things were under control in the schools just prior to Deborah Lynch’s enormous upset victory over Tom Reece in the key May 2001 Chicago Teachers Union election, Daley decided that Vallas had to go. In the wings was a former City Hall favorite who had barely registered within the school system, a former second rate professional basketball player named Arne Duncan who had never taught in a public school a day in his life.

After Vallas was ousted by Daley as CEO of CPS, he made a run for the Democratic Party nomination for governor of Illinois, garnering a great deal of suburban Chicago support based the reputation the Chicago media had carefully cultivated for him. As the 21st Century dawned, Vallas lost his bid for Governor and was installed by the conservative Pennsylvania Business Roundtable (and then Pennsylvania’s union busting and privatization happy Governor, Tom Ridge) into the top job in Philadelphia’s public schools. External partners continued as Duncan made his transition.

‘Renaissance’ closes schools; partners still paid

But within a year after Vallas’s departure, Arne Duncan had moved the Chicago Public Schools to what he is always calling a “new level” — closing what he called “failing” schools. He instituted the “renaissance”, which means closing schools and privatizing them (usually by giving a charter school the building that had once housed a public school). The first three schools to be closed under the early ‘renaissance’ were Dodge, Terrell and Williams elementary schools, all-black schools in the heart of the west side and south side ghettos. (Two — Terrell and Williams — were in public housing projects; the third— Dodge — was in an area that was rapidly gentrifying on the near west side).

It wasn’t the first time that an expensive program under Mayor Daley’s school reform had failed, only to be replaced by a more expensive program that, everyone was assured, would surely succeed. Not once did Arne Duncan, his predecessor Paul Vallas, their leader Richard Daley, or Chicago’s major media mention the fact that if the expensive eight-year-old, $25 million external partners had been the solution to the so-called “failure” of inner city schools, the “renaissance” of 2002 (small “r” before 2004, capital “R” since) would never have been necessary.

On January 23, 2002, Duncan proposed (and the Board approved) hiring a group of external partners at a cost of $4.1 million. Almost all of them had been around for several years, and all of their works had failed — at least if their job was to help schools improve test scores. What had succeeded is that none of the colleges and universities that became external partners was willing to publicly report that basing school evaluations on standardized test scores was contradicted by virtually all of the professional research in education for the previous half century. If the external partners had been unable to improve the schools, the external partnerships had bought the silence of the professors, or even their active complicity in the victim blaming that had become Chicago-style “school reform.”

DePaul’s School Achievement Structure

One of the external partners renewed by the January 2002 board action was DePaul University’s “School Achievement Structure” (SAS). The SAS had been developed by former CPS administrator Barbara Sizemore, who by the 1990s was back in Chicago as a professor of education at DePaul (she had left Chicago for a tumultuous sting in Washington, D.C. before returning to Chicago). By January 2002, Sizemore’s SAS program was being run by her daughter, Kymara Chase. On January 23, 2002, the SAS program received another $909,000 to continue to serve as external partners at a total of 17 Chicago elementary and high schools, almost all of which were segregated, all-black, and serving the poorest kids in town.

The schools that had the benefit of the SAS partnership approved January 2002 were the following:

• High Schools: Austin, Collins, Englewood, Marshall, Spalding, Tilden and Westinghouse.
• Elementary Schools: Copernicus, Curtis, Dodge, Faraday, Howland, Jefferson (T), Mason, Sherman, Sherwood, and Thorp (JN).

In April 2002, less than a half year after Duncan moved that the Board of Education pay nearly a million dollars so that DePaul’s SAS program could continue helping improve those schools, Duncan moved that one of them (Dodge) be closed for what he called “poor performance.” Without missing a beat, DePaul’s Barbara Sizemore attended the April 2002 board meeting to support the closings and what Duncan then called the “renaissance” (lower case “r”).

Schools on the external partner list for the DePaul SAS program have been closed in record numbers since the “renaissance” began four years ago. Between 2002 and 2006, the following schools that received SAS help have been closed and turned over to charters or other replacements:

• High Schools: Austin, Collins, Englewood, and Spalding.
• Elementary Schools: Dodge, Howland, Mason, and Sherman.

The Board of Education hasn’t asked for refund from DePaul, SAS, or any of the other external partners for their failure to save the schools that are now closed or ready to be closed. Instead, DePaul is still being rewarded by CPS with various consultant jobs. The teachers, students, principals, and other workers in the inner city schools are still being blamed for society’s failures, wile the professors continue to concoct ways to ignore the facts and profit from the misfortune of those who live and work in the inner city.