Jeff Bryant’s new, in-depth report on the growth of wraparound, full-service Community Schools in Chicago is important. Bryant explains that a Community School is based on six pillars: a challenging and culturally relevant curriculum, wraparound services for addressing students’ health and well-being, high-quality teaching, student-centered school climate, community and parent engagement, and shared leadership in school governance.

Bryant quotes Chicago community organizer, public schools advocate, and director of the Journey 4 Justice Alliance, Jitu Brown: “Community Schools are an education model rooted in self-determination and equity for Black and Brown people… In the Black community,  we have historically been denied the right to engage in creating what we want for our community… Every city where charters go, there’s been a diminishment of Black people in urban spaces… Privatization has crippled Black urban communities across the country.” Bryant quotes Jitu Brown calling the explosion of charter schools “a form of education colonialism.”

Underlying Jeff Bryant’s celebration of Community Schools in Chicago is his attempt to address another urgent policy question: When a really dangerous policy scheme—neoliberal school reform based on an ideology favoring public-private partnerships and privatization—gets adopted with welcome and celebration, and then 20 years later we all realize it was a bad idea and an utter failure, how can we clean it out of public policy?  Bryant’s chosen topic for this report is the expansion of full-service Community Schools, but his article also explores a policy dilemma that has been lost in today’s widespread press coverage of the explosion of private school tuition vouchers, in reflections on the long range implications of COVID for our schools, and in masses of coverage of the culture wars.  How is it that the far-right has dominated the press with attacks on equity and inclusion and attempts to make “diversity” a dirty word?

In her fine book, Left Behind, The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, Claremont-McKenna College history professor, Lily Geismer describes the topic we so frequently forget to discuss: the long impact of neoliberal school reform conceived by the New Democrats during Bill Clinton’s administration. The idea was that bipartisan expansion of charter schools would improve the public schools through competition—all based on the evidence of standardized test scores that would supposedly show us how to reward the successful schools and get rid of the failures.

Geismer explains: “In fact, the New Democrats often argued that they were simply using new means to achieve the same liberal aims. Unlike free-market fundamentalists like Milton Friedman, the New Democrats believed that both government and corporations had a fundamental obligation to do good. They aimed to … use the resources and techniques of the market to make government more efficient and better able to serve the people. Clinton and his allies routinely referred to microenterprise, community development banking, Empowerment Zones, mixed-income housing, and charter schools as revolutionary ideas that had the power to create large-scale change. These programs, nevertheless, uniformly provided small or micro solutions to large structural or macro problems… Ultimately, the relentless selling of such market-based programs prevented Democrats from developing policies that addressed the structural forces that produced segregation and inequality and fulfilled the government’s obligations to provide for its people, especially its most vulnerable.” (Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, pp. 9-10)

In education, the theory became known as “portfolio school reform,” which was the driving force in dozens of urban school districts. Chicago became the quintessential experiment in portfolio school reform, and Bryant reviews that history: “That approach… began in the 1990s, according to an analysis by University of Illinois Chicago professor Pauline Lipman, when Illinois state lawmakers gave former Mayor Richard M. Daley sole authority over the district with the power to appoint the district administrator—who was rebranded district CEO—and members of the governing board in 1995.”

Bryant quotes Lipman: “Daley and his successor, Rahm Emanuel, generally filled the board with corporate executives, bankers, and investors and appointed corporate-style managers as CEOs… These mayor-appointed regimes designed a top-down accountability system that applied business methods to public schools and deployed high stakes standardized tests as a metric to close schools and create a market of privately-run charter schools.” Bryant continues: “Privately-run charter schools are brought into the district to provide market competition to the public schools, and funding ‘follows the child’ to whatever form of school a family happens to choose. Chicago’s use of the portfolio model ‘went national,’ according to Lipman, in 2002 when, under the George W. Bush administration, Congress enacted the No Child Left Behind legislation and, then again, in 2009 when the Barack Obama administration passed Race to the Top, a program conceived and led by Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who was district CEO of CPS from 2001–2008.”

Bryant realizes the expansion of full-service Community Schools, however important, isn’t enough to turn around a public schools district that has been trapped in a portfolio-charter school expansion plan for decades.  He enumerates the other steps Chicago’s activists have been pursuing that, bit by bit, are restoring public control of the schools and enabling Chicago’s public schools to better serve the needs of families and children in the city’s poorest neighborhoods:

• In 2015, Citizens mounted a protracted hunger strike to prevent the closure of Walter H. Dyett High School.
• In 2013, Chicago organizer Jitu Brown and the Journey for Justice Alliance joined with other national grassroots groups and labor unions to found the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools.
• In 2014, the Chicago Teachers Union made the call for Community Schools the centerpiece of its “bargaining for the common good” rallying cry, and in 2019, that demand became part of  CTU’s  contract.
• Dyett High School reopened in 2016 as a sustainable Community School along with 19 other Chicago Public Schools.
• In April, 2023, Chicago teacher and CTU organizer Brandon Johnson was elected mayor of Chicago.
• In July, 2023, Mayor Johnson replaced the majority of appointed members on the Chicago Board of Education with members who favor an equitable system of neighborhood schools.
• In March, 2024, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed legislation to transition to a new, fully elected Board of Education.
• Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Board of Education have now announced they will prioritize moving away from Student Based Budgeting, Rahm Emanuel’s system that put schools in the poorest neighborhoods on a race to the bottom and in many cases eventual closure. The priority will be to fully fund and staff all neighborhood schools—with many schools becoming Community Schools.

Bryant explains that myriad challenges remain—especially a $391 million budget deficit projected for the 2024-2025 school year: “According to a 2024 analysis by by the Chicago based Center for Tax and Budget accountability, 70 percent of the state’s school districts are getting less education funding from the state than was was mandated by the 2017 law.”

I am grateful to Jeff Bryant for this story of Chicago’s expansion of full service Community Schools. And in these times when coverage of public schools has been largely focused on the danger of vouchers, the effects of COVID, and the far-right distraction posed by the culture wars, I am also grateful that Bryant remembered to trace the history of Chicago’s long and grinding effort to reject neoliberal, portfolio school reform.

In another excellent recent report, blogger Tom Ultican explores the New Orleans Parish School District’s plan to open the first publicly operated school, the K-8, Leah Chase School, since charter school ideologues and philanthropists drove the charter school takeover of that school district after Hurricane Katrina twenty years ago. Ultican reviews the history of the neoliberal takeover of New Orleans’ public schools from the point of view of community leaders who show the impact on the city’s families and children. I hope the rest of us will continue retelling this story of Chicago, New Orleans, and other districts trapped in the struggle to get rid of poisonous federal policies, along with the policies No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the School Improvement Grants exported into state laws, and local schemes like portfolio school reform.

Corporate, test-based accountability and neoliberal schemes continue to infect education policy in myriad ways. It would be lovely if we could just scrub away their long stain on our public schools, but without persistent reporting, people will forget about the ongoing need to continue cleaning up the damage. When even small steps are accomplished, I challenge us all to take the time to report and celebrate them.