Linda Ford is shorter than some 6th graders, but she has this way of walking, of staying ahead of just about everybody. She walks like she talks, fast and with a purpose.
Just before 9 a.m. most weekdays, Ford strides through the halls of Brownell Elementary School, 6741 S. Michigan Ave., where she is the principal.
On this particular morning she is making her way to the second-floor room of a 3rd-grade teacher who is late because of car trouble.
It’s a Friday, so Ford and all the teachers are wearing navy blue sweats with “BROWNELL” emblazoned across their shirts. This Friday ritual is one of the ideas Ford implemented last year to build school spirit.
The teacherless kids are a jumble of noisy disorganization in the hallway outside the room.
“No running, no running,” she intones with authority, “walk, Walk, WALK. Out of your coats QUIET-ly. Into your room QUIET-ly.”
The children beam up at her, obviously respectful of her authority. Ford beams right back at them as she helps a girl struggling to get out of a coat sleeve. The school has 425 children, all African-American, from prekindergarten 4-year-olds through 6th grade.
Ford is one of about 200 principals hired by Chicago’s 550 public schools since the General Assembly passed the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act.
That sudden and massive turnover started because the power to hire and fire principals was taken away from the Board of Education by the act. The new law created local school councils, made up of six parents, two community representatives and two teachers, elected every two years since 1989. The councils have the authority to hire and fire principals.
The school-reform act in effect gave the local school council system five years to turn around the sorry record of city schools.
At Brownell and many other schools, new principals came in filled with idealism and enthusiasm. But they’ve found how difficult it is to turn around an inner-city school and realized that some influential factors, especially the traumatic home lives of many of these children, are largely out of their control.
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This year, Chicago’s public schools are again a major ingredient in the mix of issues that legislators hope to boil down into a session-ending deal. The chance for riverboat gambling for the city appears tied to stymied legislation that would change school-employee work rules, including giving more power to principals in the name of reform.
And any hope for state help in filling the massive hole in the school system budget depends greatly on whether there is still any faith at all that reform can work.
But with four years nearly over, school reform citywide has shown mostly dismal results in standardized test results.
Brownell is typical: Standardized reading and math scores have continued to plummet in each of the first three years of reform, though there have been a few bright spots.
Even as the school system struggles with its projected $415 million deficit and faces the prospect of a school strike in September, reform has changed life dramatically in most of Chicago’s public schools. Reform proponents, disappointed by slow results thus far, still believe the changes eventually will produce improved performance.
Standardized test scores are only one gauge of a school’s progress.
Controlled chaos
The philosophy behind the reform act is to give a school’s parents, neighbors and teachers the power to tailor each school to each neighborhood’s needs. That power largely rests in the local school council’s ability to select and hire a principal every four years or retain the one it has.
It is then the principal’s responsibility to guide the school.
The reform effort at Brownell has been rocky and often frustrating. But it also has injected the 124-year-old school with more hope of eventual success than test scores might suggest.
Ford was given a four-year contract by the Brownell council in March 1991 after the former principal abruptly retired.
Ford grew up in Woodlawn and is a product of South Side public schools. She came to Brownell as a 20-year veteran in the school system, first as a teacher and then an assistant principal. She has a son who is a public school pupil, and her husband, Lafayette, is chairman of the Board of Education Nominating Commission.
One of the first things she did at Brownell was impose a dress code.
Dress shoes. Blue skirts and slacks. White blouses and shirts. If a child is in flagrant violation of the code, he is sent to the school office and a clerk calls the child’s home with a reminder and a request that proper attire immediately be sent to school.
The dress code precludes children wearing clothing with gang symbols, and Ford says the uniform helps build a spirit of belonging that is important for children from broken and single-parent families.
The thin, high-pitched voice of a child leading the Pledge of Allegiance squeaks from a public-address speaker. The children stand, place their right hands over their hearts, and face the flag at the front of the room. Then they all sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”
A teacher’s aide pops her head through the classroom door, telling Ford that she will watch the children until the regular teacher arrives.
Ford bustles down the hallway, questioning straggling children still at their lockers.
Striding into the school office, Ford confronts the first decisions of the day: a teacher with a frowning boy who has become a chronic disciplinary problem, a couple of parents with children transferring into Brownell, the office clerk with a handful of phone messages.
Before any of them can capture her attention, Ford focuses on the little girl who led the school through the pledge and the anthem from the public-address console behind the office clerk’s counter.
“My goodness, sweetheart,” Ford says warmly, draping an arm over the girl’s shoulders, “what a beautiful job you did. You have such a lovely, sweet voice, did you know that?”
The girl grins, a special moment to be savored for a long time.
Ford and Brownell start with this controlled chaos every schoolday.
“Every time I see this, I think I’m living through the opening of `Hill Street Blues,’ ” said business consultant James Stone one day last spring after watching Ford confront the various rituals and exigencies of the first few minutes of her day.
Stone is evidence of Ford’s talent as a bureaucratic entrepreneur to attract hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and contributions to enrich Brownell’s curriculum.
Stone, president of Stone Management Corp., a shipping and storage logistics consultancy, has committed more than $100,000 of his company’s money to two Brownell classrooms over the last two school years. The money hired teacher aides and stocked each room with computers and educational materials.
Stone’s experiment is designed to see if inner-city classrooms, given the same resources as well-to-do suburban classrooms, can perform academically as well as their suburban counterparts.
Need for outside help
As a “reform” principal, Ford has more responsibility than pre-reform principals, but she also has more direct power and influence to run the school as she sees fit than principals did in the past.
In pre-reform days, schools were assigned principals by district superintendents as if the posts were duchies in a feudal estate.
Once granted tenure, the principal’s job was virtually assured until retirement, so long as he or she did not rock the bureaucratic boat. The old system made principals more accountable to the bureaucracy than to the schools and neighborhoods they served.
Now, Ford answers to a school council elected from an inner-city neighborhood plagued with drugs, crime, unemployment and single-parent families.
The Brownell council members are atypical of the community they represent. Some have lived in the neighborhood all their lives, and all have lived there for at least five years. Only one is a single parent, and all are either employed or married to a working spouse.
As a group, they hold conservative attitudes about how they want their school run.
Ford came to Brownell brimming with ideas. When she took over in the spring of 1991, however, she quickly discovered how difficult putting her ideas to work would be.
The atmosphere in the school was one of cordial stiffness between local school council members, teachers and other building staff. The majority of the teachers resented the local council, if not Ford. They felt the former principal, a 20-year veteran and a tough disciplinarian, had been unfairly nudged out.
Since taking over, Ford has worked closely with the council to find ways they can lure more Brownell parents into taking an active interest in the school. So far they have been without much notable success.
She also is leading the effort to allay frustration over the apparent lack of progress in test scores.
“Look at the scores,” said Charles Taitt, 34, a parent representative, at a Brownell council meeting last fall, his voice quavering with anger over a report on test scores from the previous spring. “I’ve read it and read it and read it again, and it’s really bad. Almost 81 percent of our children are below the minimum . . . scores.”
Ford has sought help and ideas to improve the school from all over the community. She has planned programs and drafted grant proposals that have brought the school more than $200,000 in two years.
A large portion of the money came from Stone’s commitment, but Ford has inspired others to bring in tens of thousands of dollars in outside help.
In 1991, for instance, Ford worked with ETA, a South Side non-profit African-American theater and dance company, to start a yearlong playwriting project for 5th and 6th graders. Ford wrote three proposals and snared grants worth $22,000.
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Ford also helped teachers find grants to start two gardens.
Council member Evonia Tucker, who also is an assistant precinct captain, got the city to donate a vacant lot a block north of the school for one of the gardens. She also got the city to clear the lot of trash and helped persuade the Cook County Forestry Department to donate three truckloads of black dirt.
Tucker, a neighborhood stalwart, hit up area churches and businesses for contributions of toilet paper, paper towels, writing paper and other supplies after deep budget cuts by the central administration.
In all, more than two dozen organizations and individuals with no formal connection to Brownell have been contributing cash, time, material or expertise to the school.
Developing character
The program that Ford is most hopeful about is one that reaches into every Brownell classroom. It is a supplemental curriculum in “values” education endorsed and heavily subsidized by the non-profit Chicago Foundation for Education in 115 schools.
“Self-esteem is the most precious thing we can give to a child, whether as parents, teachers or society in general,” Ford says.
“Now, the family often is so dysfunctional that the child is getting all the wrong messages. Church just doesn’t figure into so many people’s lives anymore. If we don’t teach it at school, who will?”
Teachers are expected to integrate lessons on values, such as courage, generosity, kindness and honesty, into routine classroom work.
Many teachers like the program because it gets children talking about the real, traumatic events that occur in and around school.
One example of that happened at the school at 2:30 p.m. June 3, 1992, as prekindergarten and kindergarten children were being ushered out.
Two men on the sidewalk pulled out guns and began firing about 20 feet from a kindergarten teacher who was saying goodbye to her pupils. The gunshots lasted a few seconds and were apparently fired harmlessly into the air.
Outside, teachers ordered the children to drop to the ground. Teachers inside yanked children from the windows.
By the time police got there, the school was a scene of stunned children, some shrieking and sobbing. The gunmen disappeared. Two men were questioned, but no charges were filed.
The next few days, teachers put their character-education techniques to work, encouraging kids to talk about guns, gangs and street violence. Every child in one 6th-grade class ended up writing to public officials, ranging from the mayor to the president, asking for stronger laws against guns and crime.
Character education became part of other programs too.
Officer Philip Jones of the Police Department’s Bureau of Community Services spent an afternoon each week lecturing 5th graders on drugs. He lets the children ask him through anonymous notes what to do to avoid specific dangers in their lives.
“I get questions like, `When my momma gets drunk, she beats me and hurts me bad. What can I do to make her stop?’ I can tell them pretty stories all day long about calling the police. The thing is, there isn’t a lot we can do.
“I tell them, `When she’s drinking, you know what’s going to happen, you know you can’t do right by her when she’s that way. You’re better off getting off by yourself in your bedroom or wherever. Just find a place in the house out of her way.’
“It’s tough. How can that child think about school and what needs to be done in school with that kind of preoccupation?”
Ford says she hopes character education will begin to help children in troubled circumstances make better choices.
At a kindergarten graduation ceremony last June, she stood on the school stage and hugged each of the more than 50 graduates.
When she first took over at Brownell, she says, the office staff was surprised and bewildered by the amount of time she spent puzzling over children caught fighting.
“I don’t want any situations where a child is afraid of coming to school because of a threat from some other child,” she says. “You have to make the school a safe haven or no learning will take place.”
Ford’s efforts gradually are changing Brownell. The atmosphere between her, the staff and the school council is less stiff and more cooperative.
She says test scores should begin to rise as the teachers master the local school council’s mandated curriculum changes. She offers as proof Dacia Dixon, a 32-year-old 1st-grade teacher she brought to Brownell for the 1991-1992 school year.
Dixon replaced a teacher who, a year earlier, had passed most of her 1st graders with reading and math scores at the kindergarten level.
Dixon’s class turned out to be one of the few truly bright spots by the end of the 1991-92 year. Most of her 1st graders scored at 2nd-grade levels on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills.
“That is the sort of thing this school should be capable of accomplishing on a regular basis,” Ford says.
The question, however, is whether schools like Brownell will improve the academic performance of all their students by the end of the five years the 1988 School Reform Act gave to the experiment.
If they don’t, the next question is, what will Springfield do about it.
“The big `if’ is if the politicians really want reform to work,” Ford says, “or if this was all set up to fail so that the state could take over city schools and impose something they want, like a voucher system. It’s going to be hard to make reform work if they keep cutting our budgets, slashing our programs.
“I still think reform can work, but if we are given the time and the tools.”