Chicago hope: 'Maybe this will work.'

In South Chicago, where a large percentage of the affected schools are located, residents worry about constantly shifting students from one school to another. They also complain about the lack of voice they've had in forming this plan and wonder why these changes are coming only now that public housing is being dismantled and many neighborhoods are facing gentrification. At the heart of the rumblings is a deep distrust of a city government that hasn't always been open and up front in the past.

"[The district] has no credibility with the community about the decisions they're making," says Julie Woestehoff, director of Parents United for Responsible Education, a parent activist group. "Their idea of community involvement is coming with a PowerPoint presentation, doing a dog-and-pony show, listening to people say they don't like the program and moving it to the next place."

Ms. Woestehoff worries in particular about the future of local school councils (LSCs) - elected bodies with high parent representation that govern current schools but which won't necessarily be a part of the new charter or contract schools - as well as the effect of multiple transfers on kids.

"Parents don't want their kids to be experimented on," she says. "They're tired of it. We've had an awful lot of it in Chicago over the past decades."

Indeed, this is a city that has been at the forefront of school reform since the mid-1980s, with a mixed bag of successes and misses. This newest plan might be considered the third wave of school reform, after changes to school governance (and the beginning of LSCs) in 1988 and the move toward accountability - which included reconstituting failing schools - in the 1990s.

When Chicago closed and reconstituted several schools back then, staffing was the key issue, says G. Alfred Hess, director of the Center for Urban School Policy at Northwestern University. "The last 15 percent of new hires they were simply exchanging each other's staff," he says, even though turnover was required. "If you keep the same teachers, and change the structure but don't change the way they relate to kids, you're not likely to see changes in student achievement."

Proponents of the Renaissance plan argue that this wave of closings will be very different from simply reconstituting schools. It will be instead an overhaul of philosophy, size, and, in particular, governance. Each new school will be based on a proposal drawn up by community members on a transitional advisory council, or TAC. While the district will review the schools' performance, the specifics - whether the school will be charter, contract, or district-run; whether it will have a local school council or appointed board; whether its employees will be union members - will vary widely.

In the past, every new school, every idea for reform, came from the central district office, says Greg Richmond, who is overseeing Renaissance 2010. This plan is, in a sense, an acknowledgment by the district that it doesn't have all the answers and a hope that by opening the doors to outside groups, to principals and teachers and education reformers with creative ideas of their own, some successful ideas will find fertile ground.

"We want to be able to find people with not just ideas, but with their own experiences and autonomy," Mr. Richmond says. "We want to be able to have a portfolio of people who will run good schools and have a track record, so that we can go to one of a dozen or two dozen proven organizations and replace a school that doesn't work with one that does."

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