Black Politics and School Reform in Harold Washington’s Chicago

The coalition that elected Harold Washington as the first black mayor of Chicago in 1983 relied on an unprecedentedly unified base of African American electoral support buttressed by significant Latino and white liberal supporters. Black public sector employees of the Board of Education formed an important middle-class base of the Washington coalition. I argue that in the 1980s, African Americans’ increased representation as Board of Education employees, and the changing roles of black teachers within the schools and teachers union, transformed black communities and black political power in Chicago. This paper explores how African Americans with disparate political ideologies claimed a stake in Mayor Washington and his political organization.  Once Washington became mayor, however, cleavages that had characterized earlier eras re-emerged as Washington attempted to reform Chicago Public Schools—between nationalists and integrationists, middle-class reformers and working-class parents, white business leaders and the Black community, and the School Board and community organizers.  This paper analyzes the racial politics of Mayor Washington’s Education Summit and the supporters and critics of the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act.  I argue that black parents and education reformers who participated in the mayor’s Education Summit had a different understanding of what local control and decentralization would mean for black students and communities than the predominantly white education advocates who pushed the Chicago School Reform Act through the Illinois state legislature.  This episode demonstrated a form of racial misreading that emerged again in later debates about the merits of magnet schools, charter schools, and privatization.  Social scientists have dominated the conversation about black politics, the rise of black elected officials, the “urban crisis,” and education reform in the 1980s.  While this paper engages with social science debates, it utilizes a historically-grounded methodological and conceptual approach in demonstrating how past struggles produced contemporary politics and policies.