Dan A. Lewis

Dan Lewis is Professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. He has studied Chicago school reform over the past decade and has written several papers on the subject.

Prior to Chicago’s 1988 school system reform, pessimism was rampant. Its public school students were consistently scoring among the lowest in the country on standardized achievement tests. Educators, parents, and business people all agreed that improvement was a necessity. A decade into school reform, that consensus still exists.

Yet, research over that decade does not show consistent results that would allow us to conclude with confidence that school reform has brought about student improvement. Scores on national tests show improvements in some areas but not in others. Dropout rates have been erratic, with some positive results recently.

Most research on Chicago’s two major school reforms (the latest was in 1995) has centered on school improvement rather than student learning and instructional refinements. Investigators have assumed that changes in governance, which transferred formal authority to elected local school councils (LSCs) in 1988, would advance student achievement. Their research, therefore, emphasized governance changes, parent participation, and principal performance. LSCs were seen as the key to success.

There were problems with this emphasis. Often there was no baseline against which to compare the post-reform schools, and little effort was made to look at how the individual student fared over the reform period. Furthermore, high student mobility rates were often ignored.

As a result, variations in student achievement within schools were seldom analyzed; and students’ average scores on national tests (or the percentage above the national norm) in the school became the criteria for success.

There have been a few careful studies of individual achievement among a randomly selected sample of Chicago students. But there have been no studies, as far as I am aware, that look at the classroom experiences of students and relate those experiences to student achievement.

The research literature has also failed to show a systematic improvement in the quality of instruction over the ten years of reform, though instructional improvement clearly has not been the focus of most researchers. This lack of interest in what teachers were doing in the classroom also reflects an assumption of the 1988 legislation that the teachers were the problem and not the solution.

All this means that there is a strong need for careful research on samples of students, which track their achievement over time and control for factors that affect that achievement. Individual-level (background, student capacity, and socioeco-nomic status) as well as school and classroom-level variables must be measured.

Outcomes should also be addressed: Do Chicago public school graduates do better today than they did a decade ago in competing for jobs? Are they doing better in admissions to post-secondary educational institutions? What learning strategies are paying off in better skill acquisition?

The lesson of Chicago school reform is that we had better start asking those questions now before another decade slips by and we have lost the advantage the past reforms have produced.

A final thought: White enrollment in Chicago public schools dropped from 65% of students in the mid-1960s to about 10% today, and the system lost about 100,000 from the mid-‘60s to the early ‘80s. In the past decade, the proportion of low-income students nearly doubled from 45% to just over 83%. Not surprisingly, high school graduation rates fell from 61% to 51% and dropout rates rose from 10.7% to 15.5% over that period.

As we look at this history, the true measure of school reform may not be how much test scores have improved, but rather how little they have eroded, given the staggering impact of changes in the composition of the student body.