Don’t go after a mosquito with a howitzer.
That’s an axiom legislators in Springfield should keep in mind as they consider legislation that would give the Chicago Public Schools’ central office veto power over certain Local School Council decisions on retention of school principals.
If the measure proposed by schools chief Paul Vallas became law, whenever an LSC declined to renew the contract of a principal who had gotten a rating of “meets” or “exceeds” expectations from the central office, an advisory panel would review the decision and recommend to the school board whether the principal should stay or go. The final decision would then be up to Vallas and the board.
In the ongoing tug-of-war between Vallas and proponents of local control of schools, this is no small matter. It would fundamentally alter the role of Local School Councils by transferring from them to the central administration the ultimate authority for keeping or releasing principals, thus cutting the heart out of a decade-old reform movement aimed at restoring some local control to neighborhood schools.
Surely so significant a change must be prompted by a proportionately significant need, but that is simply not the case here. Of the more than 550 Local School Councils, nine didn’t renew their principals’ contracts under circumstances like those in the proposed legislation, and Vallas said he would challenge only four or five of those decisions. Far from justifying a major change, those numbers make the status quo look good. That, however, is not to say that the system of Local School Councils created by the 1988 school-reform legislation does not bear revision.
The whole structure of Chicago Public Schools governance has undergone massive changes since then, and the role of the councils ought to be evolving as a result. But there is scant evidence that Chicago is prepared to throw over local control of schools to return to a centralized micromanaging bureaucracy–a system that also was far from perfect.
The best bet in the long run may be a cooperative approach in which local councils function largely as they do now but under the rigorous oversight of a central administration that is held accountable for the schools’ academic successes and failures.
But the way to achieve that is through public debate and straightforward language, not through back-door legislation that compromises the councils’ powers because a handful of them may have made poor personnel decisions.
