Elaine Schuster, 56, has been superintendent of the archdiocese’s schools for 10 years. With about 130,000 students, 6,000 teachers and staff, it is the largest non-public school system in the nation. As she prepared to leave the post Friday, she paused for a few minutes to reflect on her accomplishments and discuss her observations about the challenges of public and private education.
Q: Why are you leaving a job that you say you loved?
A: I’ve been superintendent of a major school system. It’s been my honor and privilege. When I made the decision last summer that it was time for me to move on, I told Cardinal George that I would leave by the end of the calendar year. I have loved being superintendent, and think I have accomplished many good things. But I also believe no one should stay in a position too long. I’m leaving understanding that it’s time for someone else to come in and take the helm.
Q: Attracting good teachers is a problem across the country. How are the Catholic schools doing in the competition for good teachers?
A: We have been very challenged. The reality is that our schools and most non-public schools deal with this. Our salaries are between 50 and 75 percent of what a teacher could make in the public schools. In this time of teacher shortages, it adds to our challenges. We require our teachers to be state certified and 93 percent of our 6,000 teachers are certified. If they come in without certification, we require them to get certified in three years. People choose us because they believe in our mission and identity. Unfortunately, many leave after three to five years because salaries do not grow at the same level as public school teachers. We continue to work hard at increasing teacher salaries. It remains a priority for us.
Q: What do you think are your major accomplishments?
A: Guaranteeing Catholic schools are schools of high quality and growth and expansion of our schools. One thing we have done is to expand the use of technology in our schools to make sure we have technology connections. About 90 percent of our schools now have the Internet, though not necessarily in every classroom. On growth and expansion, when Cardinal Bernardin hired me in 1990, I told him I felt we needed to build and expand, and it was at a time when there were significant closures of our schools. We built three new schools since then and expanded close to 60 others. I have worked very hard to make sure our schools are faith-based institutions, where children have the freedom to learn, whether they come from our faith or not.
Q: Over the years Chicago has had its unique brand of school reform to address its problems. Everyone wants better-quality schools. Has the Catholic system undergone any kind of educational reform movement of its own?
A: Reform of education is really a national agenda. In order for our schools to remain quality schools that parents want, we, too, have had to acknowledge what’s going on in educational reform. We don’t teach today the way we did when I first started teaching. Now it’s done more with technology and varieties of teaching methodologies. We continue to do more with our teachers to help them prepare. Education is no longer a sister sitting in front of a classroom feeding information to children who sit quietly all day at their desks. We have more activity-centered learning going on, and we work hard to make sure our schools stay on the cutting edge. In most of our schools, there’s a lot of innovation.
Q: There are 60 or so schools in your system that depend on direct grants from the archdiocese to survive. They simply can’t function on their own. Doesn’t it make sense to accept an offer from the Chicago Public Schools in which they give you one of their charters so that the archdiocese can establish its own charter school thus enabling the Catholic schools to have a place for children, if and when any of these schools close?
A: We are seriously studying these schools’ viability. But that doesn’t necessarily mean closing any of them. Perhaps we will cluster or consolidate them, or change the programming there. Those are the ones we are taking the closest look at right now. There were conversations a while back when the first wave of charters were coming into the city. [Chicago Public Schools CEO] Paul Vallas did offer us a charter. We took a close look at that possibility because there is a potential for us to be able to sustain the quality of schooling we provide in the city and in areas of the city where parents struggle to pay tuition. It was decided on a staff level and all the way up to Cardinal George that a charter school is a public school, and that it isn’t a religiously affiliated school. Our school identity and approach to education includes a religious dimension and cuts across all the things we do during the school day. Do I think at some point in the future charters might be reconsidered? Possibly but not at this time. The reality is that in our elementary schools we accept the students who come to us. We take a broad range of abilities. It is true, there has to be some ability to pay even though we do provide significant scholarship money. The ones we would not accept are children with extreme learning needs that we are not programmed for. There is a myth that we are choosy about the students we take.
Q: One of the criticisms public school officials make of the Catholic schools is that the standardized exam you use–the Terra Nova–is easier than the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. This makes it appear that your children are better achievers. Would you consider giving your children the state’s new exam, the Illinois Standards Achievement Test?
A: First we agree that all schools must be accountable. The standards movement in this state and across the country is a good thing. We need to make sure our children are prepared. We have for years had our own standardized test, chosen for us with input from committees of principals and teachers throughout the system. We use the California Achievement Test, the Terra Nova Format. To say one is easier is not true. They are normed differently. We use the test to look at achievement of kids, programs, and we use them in the central office to determine which areas of our curriculum we should strengthen. With regard to the ISAT, the reality is that in Illinois it is being used only by the public schools. Another issue is the cost factor. For instance who is going to pay for all of our students to take the state’s exam and to have them scored? In this state, the test has never been mandated or offered to the non-public schools. There are other states, such as Ohio, that require all schools to take their state exam. If that were true in Illinois, we would be willing to do that.
Q: Increasingly vouchers are being talked about as one possible solution to help parents with children in some of our worst schools. Some educators and school reform groups in Chicago believe the Catholic system doesn’t want vouchers because it doesn’t want to handle the influx of underachieving children. In Milwaukee, for instance, the majority of children who use vouchers there ended up in the Catholic schools.
A: We are going to have to have some type of a voucher system, one that would provide a direct assistance to families. Such as giving them some of their own money back; that would be a great help to us and our colleagues in the non-public schools. If we are going to have in this country options for parents, then we are going to have to move toward some type of voucher system. Otherwise what’s going to happen is non-public schools, including Catholic schools, might only be accessible to the wealthy. These schools are part of the educational process for the common good of society. There are 200,000 children in the state of Illinois in catholic schools. Some type of voucher system in the long run could prove less costly to the state. We have to sustain a variety of options.
Q: In the public schools today, one of the biggest problems facing teachers is a lack of student discipline. Teachers often complain that dealing with discipline problems eats up valuable class time. What sorts of student discipline problems, if any, does the Catholic system deal with?
A: To say we don’t have any discipline problems would be less than true. Yet we are able to sustain a good level of discipline that provides for a positive learning environment, allows us to help students learn, without having to kick lots of students out. Yet our expulsion level in our schools is less than 1 percent a year. There’s a myth out there that if a child looks the wrong way at a teacher we kick them out. That’s simply not true. The reality is that in most of our schools we are dealing with children who are products of the same society as children in public schools. It would be less than honest if I didn’t tell you that many of our teachers talk about discipline challenges. The issue of discipline and helping students understand it is a challenge. This takes more time, and more work than it did in the past. We try real hard to work with parents and guardians to get everyone working together to help the child.
Q: Across the nation, more and more school systems are moving toward a heavy reliance on standardized exams. Some use them to provide a snapshot of how their students are doing, compared to the nation. Others use them to compare one school with another. And still others, like the Chicago Public Schools, use them to determine whether a child should be promoted. What is your view of how this reliance on standardized tests has grown over the years?
A: Using the national exams only is very dangerous. Speaking as an educator, I think there’s a great danger in the national standardized tests being used incorrectly. They are one measure and one measure only of how students are doing. The results give you information to help individual children. You can’t look at the results of a standardized test the way you look at the bottom line of a budget. It’s a dangerous way of appraising schools as well. To say one school is a lousy school based upon the results alone isn’t fair.
———-
This is an edited transcript.
