Chicago's Renaissance 2010: The Small Schools Movement Meets the Ownership Society

Abstract

The fundamental goal of Renaissance 2010 is to turn around Chicago's most troubled elementary and high schools by creating 100 new schools in neighborhoods across the city over the next six years, providing new educational options to underserved communities and relieving school overcrowding in communities experiencing rapid growth. --Mayor Richard M. Daley, 24 June 2004 WE started the Small Schools Workshop in 1991, with the goal of supporting Chicago's reform-minded teachers as they tried to create new, smaller learning communities in an environment that was historically toxic. While the small schools movement at that time represented a wide range of political and educational philosophies, our vision of small schools was closely connected with issues of social justice, equity, and community. For us, small schools were not some new efficiency or simply a technical change. Neither were they an innovative, sophisticated way to sort and track kids. Rather, the small schools movement offered a strategy for engaging teachers, students, parents, and whole communities, the people with the problem, in a movement for democratic education. Since then, the movement has grown nationally and has many victories under its belt. In Chicago, dozens of small schools have been created from the ground up, and several large high schools have been restructured. According to many studies, the results have been positive. (1) But many of the movement's early participants now feel great anxiety and concern over its current direction. Some have recently expressed to us their discomfort with Chicago's new initiative, Renaissance 2010, which seems to have more in common with the erosion of public space, with the than it does with democratic education. While the Renaissance 2010 plan is specific to Chicago, similar strategies are emerging in school districts nationwide. A critical look at these strategies is imperative. It's no secret that the language of social movements can be co-opted or reduced to empty cliches. In the world of Chicago school reform, the simple word choice has become a two-edged sword. It can mean both a widening of options for the city's underserved students and a replication of our traditional, two-tiered education system. Another word commonly used around the small-schools movement, autonomy, was supposed to signal greater for educators from bureaucratic constraints and stupid rules, more local decision making, and increased teacher discretion. Instead, autonomy has been twisted to mean the absence of accountability or the freedom of charter operators to implement business efficiencies and run schools without due process or necessary regulations. This kind of educational doublespeak is embedded in Chicago's latest public school strategy, Renaissance 2010. Ostensibly, it's a plan to create 100 new small public schools in six years in minority and low-income neighborhoods. One would think that such a plan would be a perfect match for the program of the Small Schools Workshop. But neither we nor many others from Chicago's small schools movement were consulted or brought to the planning table when was being hatched--and for good reason. From its inception, Ren 10's focus, its underlying agenda, and many of its strategies for change ran counter to those deeply rooted in the small schools movement, none more so than the turning over of at least two-thirds of the new schools to private owners. Even before it got off the ground, Ren 10 was being hailed as a reform model for other large urban districts. It looms as part of a new national wave of fierce market fundamentalism, now being touted as the ownership society, with ownership supposedly the common national goal shared by Enron executives, factory workers, and public housing residents alike. It's apparent everywhere these days, penetrating our schools, homes, families, places of worship--even our private lives. …