Another View of Chicago School Policy

In an analysis that includes qualitative research studies at four Chicago elementary schools and district-wide data, a DePaul University educator challenges current discussions of equity that frame Chicago school reforms and offers proposals to reconstruct urban education policy. This research is reported in the summer 2002 issue of the American Educational Research Journal, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Educational Research Association.

Pauline Lipman, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Foundations in Education at DePaul, contends that "current policies exacerbate existing race and class inequalities and create new ones. The policies promote unequal educational opportunities and experiences and produce stratified identities with significant implications in the city's new, highly stratified work force."

To reconstruct Chicago's urban education policy, Professor Lipman proposes four strategies that will help students achieve equity:

* provide all students with an intellectually rich and rigorous education;

* deploy significant material and intellectual resources, particularly to under-resourced schools;

* reverse historical inequalities and current failures of urban schools by collective action of educators, students, parents, school leaders, and policymakers; and

* engage in a lengthy campaign to challenge deficit notions about children of color and their families and the appropriateness of impoverished curricula for these students.

According to Professor Lipman's research gathered through interviews, school meetings, events and observations in various school settings, Chicago public school policies undermine culturally relevant teaching and pedagogies that promote critical approaches to knowledge. In addition, her data suggest that teachers felt pressure to align their teaching with tests, and "improved scores may have more to do with test preparation than with learning."

School reform policies, including high-stakes testing, centralized accountability, and differentiated schools, have come as Chicago's economy has been restructured, and corporate, financial, and political officials strive to make Chicago a "global city," she notes. Her data suggest that the new policies "widen educational inequalities by institutionalizing a narrowed curriculum in low-scoring schools while creating new, academically challenging educational opportunities for a small percentage of students."

Summing it up, Professor Lipman states, "These reforms also support inequalities of global city development, gentrification, and the displacement of working-class and low-income communities, especially communities of color."