After
fewer than two weeks on the job, Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean Claude Brizard
has embarked on a listening tour, trying to find out what Chicago parents,
teachers, principals and students want, but he’s also doing a lot of talking,
expounding on his own philosophy for improving schools.
Brizard
has already met with the City Council’s Black Caucus, CPS principals and other
groups, sharing his views on what can be done to improve performance in
Chicago.
He sat
down with the Defender editorial board, and talked about – among other topics –
school turnarounds, a process that has met with much consternation here in
Chicago.
“I’m a
little concerned about this last round, this past year, because Terry (former
interim CEO for CPS Mazany) pushed a lot of transformation model … which can be
the more loosey-goosey approach,” said Brizard. “It is softer. You keep all of
the adults, you don’t change anything, you just pour some money, change the
curriculum, change some things.
“That
stuff works if you have the right leadership in place. So imagine that you’re
not the greatest leader, you don't have the greatest of teachers, but I'm going
to give you up to $6 million over three years, and will tell you to change
yourself. So it is kind of hard to do that.”
Brizard
said that his preferred way to turnaround a school is to change the dynamic of
the student body.
“In most
failing schools, you tend to have a concentration of either low-performing, or
special ed or English language learning kids in one place,” he said. “As
educators, we know a homogenous population of struggling kids is ecipe for
disaster.
“You
bring in a heterogeneous group of kids - high-performing, low-performing,
middle of the road,” he continued. “You put kids together in the same room. The
kids who are low-performing they benefit from the high-performing.”
Brizard
said his recent meeting with the City Council Black Caucus was very important,
noting that the aldermen wanted to have more information on the front end about
schools, rather than after the fact.
“They
said we know you are doing a facilities survey. We know we are going to have to
consolidate, because there are too many schools and we've lost a lot of
population. Bring us in on the front end of this conversation and not on the
back end,” said Brizard.
“There
are unique dynamics in Chicago that we have to pay attention to,” he said,
noting that gangs in Chicago were smaller and didn’t have the well-defined
lines of demarcation that are in place in New York City, where he was schools
superintendent. He said the prevalence of neighborhood schools also figures
into school closings.
“We need
to look at this as not just a school restructuring, but a neighborhood
restructuring,” he said.
Brizard
said that while he is a supporter of charter schools, he worries that “at times
you may put a school in place that is drawing from the entire city, and at the
same time, if you are doing that you are hurting a neighborhood school. You
could be, sucking the lifeblood out of a school by building another school
nearby, even though it is serving a lot of kids.
“It’s
going to be tricky,” he told the Defender. “It goes back to not just the
politics, but it goes back to the culture of the community that will make this
work a little bit more difficult.”
Earlier
in the week Brizard and Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced cuts in the school
district’s central office and other areas that totaled $75 million, in an
effort to pare down the estimated $700 million budget deficit. Unfortunately,
at almost the same time, the state Legislature announced that it would cut the
appropriation to Chicago Public Schools by $77 million.
“We’re
kind of running in place with that,” said Brizard. But he said that the new
school board, which has not yet met, would come up with spending plans to
eliminate the budget hole. Both he and Emanuel stressed that the state should
pay up the estimated $330 million it already owes, which would nearly halve the
deficit. Emanuel also stressed that all of the stakeholders should expect to
make some sacrifices - including teachers - to bring the district into
solvency.
Brizard
said that it would be up to the school board to decide whether to ask the
teacher’s union to open up the contract to forego negotiated 4 percent raises,
which is one tactic former CEO Ron Huberman proposed.
Copyright
2011 Chicago Defender
