Charles Payne

Once described as the “worst in the nation,” Chicago public schools have been scrambling since 1988 to erase that image. The school system has decentralized, recentralized, and now lodges somewhere inbetween. At the same time, it continues to test numerous models of school reform, among them Essential Schools, the Algebra Project, the Urban Systemic Initiative, Best Practices Movement, the Comer Program, and Total Quality Management.

Researchers have been studying these changes on a system-wide level, but much less is known about exactly what goes into creating a successful school in a poor neighborhood.

The Joyce Foundation is funding a new IPR project headed by sociologist Charles Payne to identify patterns of change within these schools that have contributed to significant improvement in student performance.

Payne has studied the Comer school reform program in Chicago since 1990. He is targeting 12 to 20 elementary schools in Chicago that have been successful in implementing change. He is deliberately concentrating on schools with at least a 90% poverty rate and a 90% minority student population, including some that serve public housing projects.

Through interviews and personal observation, he hopes to learn, for example, whether lower grades start changing faster than upper grades, whether veteran teachers react to change better than younger ones, or whether certain types of children are likely to start showing gains before others.

He is also interested in the learning process: What mistakes have been made? What assumptions or constraints led to those mistakes? And what might school personnel do differently now?

Another significant aspect of change is leadership and the new roles that reform has created. Payne will examine how these internal and external leaders have been integrated into the overall school structure. He will also look at the kinds of support that have helped improve the quality of teaching.

Given the variety of models being tested in Chicago, the study will also compare their effectiveness. But Payne cautions that “the question is not which model is the best, but which is likely to work under what circumstances?”

Payne joined Duke University’s history and African-American studies departments this spring but will remain an adjunct professor at Northwestern where he has been a faculty member since 1986.

A final report on the findings will be submitted by the fall of 1999.