The much-anticipated Chicago education forum, which began as an airing of old ideas to help the city’s public schools, ended Thursday with much more lively debate and a focus on sweeping change.
The overriding themes of the all-day meeting at the Harold Washington Library Center were the need to rid schools of state and federal laws that impede progress and the need to increase control for principals through renegotiation of union contracts.
While interim Supt. Richard Stephenson highlighted the school system’s financial plight and the need for more training of local school council members, several of the 40 panelists called in by Mayor Richard Daley said schools will not gain the flexibility they need until the unions bend.
“The incremental changes we’ve been making (in union contracts) will no longer suffice,” said Andrew Stern, vice president of Booz, Allen and Hamilton Inc., the management consulting firm that last year combed the Board of Education budget and surmised that it could wind up in financial ruin if major changes aren’t made.
“We need to throw out existing contracts and start all over from scratch,” Stern said. “If we don’t do that this year, we will lose our chance for the next three years.”
Similarly, Lynn St. James, principal of Lindblom High School, suggested significant cutbacks in the school system’s busing program, saying the effort to desegregate schools in a system that is more than 80 percent minority seems futile.
“I know that it would not be a popular decision, but it certainly is one that should be considered,” St. James said.
Daley, who said he would have been pummeled for suggesting a cutback on the schools’ $150 million desegregation effort, later entertained the idea.
“What if we were to cut that amount to, say, $50 million?” said Daley, who gave more input Thursday than he did during the conference kickoff Wednesday. “We’d have $100 million that could go to schools.”
When school board member Stephen Ballis told the mayor that such a move might require changes in state and federal laws that stipulate where certain school money can be spent, Daley said the laws should be changed.
“Some of the mandates, they just get in the way and create more unnecessary costs for schools,” Daley said.
And Daley stopped short of saying the Chicago Teachers Union will have to make major concessions during the upcoming contract negotiations, his interest in cutting back on incompetent instructors was evident in his questions.
Charles Kerchner, a professor at Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, Calif., outlined a program in which teachers press their poor-performing colleagues to “leave the system gracefully.”
“How do they get them to do that?” the mayor asked. Kerchner said he would give the mayor written details.
Transcripts of the education summit will be submitted to the mayor’s office for his review.
