At Christian Liberty Academy, in Arlington Heights, it’s hard to find anyone shoving or speaking out of turn-let alone despoiling the halls with graffiti or packing a gun in class.
Boys sport tidy haircuts. Girls wear neat dresses or skirts. Students stand when their teachers enter the room, and each day begins with a prayer.
Mischief is controlled by the “Board of Education,” teacherspeak for a thick wooden paddle.
The man who runs this school, part of an international network of such fundamentalist academies, is Rev. Paul D. Lindstrom. And he has a dare for Chicago:
Let Lindstrom establish a similar school in Chicago, and he’ll guarantee that students there will outperform their counterparts in the neighboring Chicago public schools.
Don’t worry about money. His own church will cover the $400,000 startup costs.
All he needs is a vacant school building.
Attention, Mayor Richard Daley and the Chicago Board of Education: He’d like you to respond by Thursday.
If Lindstrom’s program lives up to its promise, the deal would require the board to pay the academy half of what the district spends per pupil per year-currently about $5,000-and give him two more schools to operate.
Is he joking? No.
So far the city and school board’s response has been punctuated by a blizzard of questions about separation of church and state, corporal punishment, lack of teacher certification and other red flags.
Other observers note that public schools face state and federal mandates-especially those that require admission and instruction for all students, no matter the educational level, behavioral problem or physical disability-that his private schools avoid.
Chicago Teachers Union spokeswoman Jackie Gallagher called the proposal “inane.”
Lindstrom, ever comfortable with controversy, is undeterred, even emboldened by the brushoff.
Derided by some as a right-wing extremist and praised by others as an educational savior, Lindstrom says his ultimate goal is to dismantle government-operated schools in America. So why not begin with a system once tagged the worst in America?
“This contest is a means of exposing the fraud of what is being presented to the people as education in the city of Chicago,” he declared in his booming voice. “My ultimate goal would be an all-private educational system, educating the hundreds of thousands of students with the government completely out of it.”
Any other time, Lindstrom’s proposal might have sounded like a loft from left field-or in this case, right field. But given the quagmire of the city school system and the desperation to set it right, it may not strike everyone as outlandish.
The plan even has elements of the growing movement to create some sort of system, whether by vouchers or other means, to give all parents an affordable choice outside public schools.
“I would and a lot of other ministers would welcome Pastor Paul setting up school in the inner city,” said Rev. Henry Mitchell, pastor of North Star Baptist Church on the West Side.
Mitchell worked with Lindstrom on a similar school in the 1960s. Despite the school’s success in raising the students’ academic scores, he said, Chicago officials closed it down after a year for a zoning violation.
He said he and a group of African-American ministers have pledged to do whatever it takes to get Lindstrom’s school established.
Lindstrom said he would enroll the first 200 public elementary pupils who applied, though children could be expelled if they don’t conform to the rules. The bill would be footed by his Church of Christian Liberty.
The Arlington Heights school enrolls 425 students in kindergarten through grade 12. Tuition is $1,500 per year. The academy also educates about 2,200 students at schools in Tokyo; Moscow; and Paramaribo, capital of the South American country of Suriname; and another 24,000 in a home-schooling program.
He dismisses objections that the proposed public-private amalgam would apparently violate laws prohibiting publicly funded schools from forcing students to pray, or public school policies against corporal punishment.
Or that his plan to staff the school with currently unemployed or retired people-some of whom have no college education or teaching credentials-would violate state regulations requiring certification at publicly funded schools.
He notes that few of the teachers at the Christian Liberty Academy have state certification or took college education courses. He said they concentrated instead on their areas of expertise and don’t need the state’s stamp of approval to be excellent instructors.
David Rudd, spokesman for the Chicago school board, said the proposal “carries with it certain ramifications having to deal with separation of church and state, and mandates for desegregation and special education.
“The ramifications would call for having laws changed,” he said.
Noelle Gaffney, Daley’s deputy press secretary, said, “No one has had the opportunity to look at it and see what this group is and what the proposal means. . . . But it looks like there would be some roadblocks legally.”
Teachers union spokeswoman Gallagher, an Arlington Heights resident who has watched Lindstrom’s empire grow over the years, added, “With a school board at odds with itself, union contracts expiring and a lack of money, it’s a perfect time for someone like him to step in with a perfectly inane kind of concept of building a religious school, pyramid-style.”
Lindstrom first stirred up controversy in 1968, when he gained national attention as a member of the Remember the Pueblo Committee.
While the crew of the USS Pueblo was held by North Korea, he organized rallies and demanded that the U.S. intervene. He embarrassed the government when he used his own sources to scoop the State Department with updates of the situation.
He later tried to form commando units to liberate American prisoners of war supposedly held in Laos. In 1985, he scheduled Adolfo Calero Portocarrero, a leader of Nicaragua’s contra rebels, to speak at his church.
Now he says his full attention is on public education.
From the rising teen pregnancy rate to the AIDS crisis to escalating youth violence, most of society’s ills can be blamed on the public schools, Lindstrom believes. The country’s moral decline began when the schools replaced God with humanism, he said.
Lindstrom in 1968 established the academy in the Church of Christian Liberty basement, then in Prospect Heights. In 1985, the academy moved into the 210,000-square-foot former Arlington High School building.
Stressing the Bible and old-fashioned spelling, grammar, phonics and math, Christian Liberty elementary pupils generally score about two to three grades above their level, Lindstrom said.
And the high school students, he said, generally rank in the 80th to 90th percentile on standardized tests and go on to such prestigious institutions as Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, Princeton, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Because the academy is private, it is difficult to verify Lindstrom’s claims. It is not accredited by the state or the North Central Association, nor is it required to disclose student test scores, unlike public schools.
Officials at area public schools do not dispute the academy’s apparent success, though they say it’s to be expected.
“Like many private schools, what they have is a select student body,” said Maureen Hager, Arlington Heights District 25 assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.
Just as important to students and parents as academic performance is the school’s emphasis on discipline.
“In the public school I went to before I came here, everybody was rowdy; they did what they wanted,” said Becky Murga, a 14-year-old freshman who commutes by Metra train from the Northwest Side.
“Here, everybody respects everybody,” she said.
Her mother, Lilly Murga, a Chicago public school teacher, said: “I’m not happy that (the public schools’) national ratings are terrible and they’re having to put metal detectors in high schools; it’s scary. I want my daughter to be able to distinguish between good and bad.”
“There’s no black and white in the public schools. Everything’s gray,” Murga said.
Lindstrom says if Chicago officials reject his proposal, he’s prepared to launch a massive lobbying effort all the way to the governor’s office, if necessary.
“We’ll have to start being activists in our crusade of saving the children of Chicago,” he said.
