From Deseg to Accountability: Building the School Reform Consensus in Chicago

In 1980, a 26-year-old staffer for the Illinois State Senate, Paul Vallas, was assigned to compile a report on the financial crisis that had just rocked the Chicago public schools. The crash course in education policy and school finance proved formative. Fifteen years later, Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Vallas to lead the Chicago Public Schools. A superstar CEO during an era of purported urban renaissance, Vallas transformed the system’s reputation from a bellwether of catastrophe to a model celebrated by Democrats and Republicans on a national scale. A cascade of initiatives—magnet schools, bilingual programs, local school councils, and small schools—preceded the Daley-Vallas moment. In the Harold Washington era, progressives promoted these reforms as civic renewal. Together, they reveal the continuity between urban progressivism and what was later known as urban neoliberalism, even as the two camps increasingly performed as antagonists. This paper argues that desegregation set the terms of an urban policy paradigm: a forum in which educational problems were defined and networks of actors in universities, nonprofits, and foundations were convened. In the late 1960s, the deseg paradigm was inseparable from debates about how cities might forestall the woes of fiscal and racial crisis. Between the 1970s and mid-1990s, policy entrepreneurs—often operating through state-mandated venues of community participation related to desegregation—became architects of a successor paradigm centered on expertise in school management and parental choice. The new paradigm, commonly termed “choice and accountability,” championed a reduced central bureaucracy, measurable academic outcomes, site-based management, and open attendance rules to maximize parental choice. These were the policies that made Vallas famous, and they later defined the “what works” agenda invoked by his successor, Arne Duncan, upon becoming US Secretary of Education in 2009. This paper traces how the new common sense of urban education was forged.