Jeff Bryant, veteran education journalist, writes here about the success of community schools in Chicago, in contrast to the failed ideas of “education reform.” The latter echoed the failed strategies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top: testing, competition, privatization, firing staff, closing schools, ranking and rating students, teachers, principals and schools based on test scores. So-called “education reform” created massive disruption and led to massive failure.
Bryant describes the evolution of community schools in Chicago, led by grassroots leaders like Jitu Brown, where parents are valued partners.
Bryant writes:
“Until now, we haven’t even tried to make big-city school districts work, especially for children of color,” Jhoanna Maldonado said when Our Schools asked her to describe what Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and his supporters have in mind for the public school system of the nation’s third-largest city.
Johnson scored a surprising win in the 2023 mayoral election against Paul Vallas, a former CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), and education was a key issue in the race, according to multiplenewsoutlets. Maldonado is an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which is reported to have “bankrolled” Johnson’s mayoral campaign along with other labor groups, and Johnson is a former middle school teacher and teachers union organizer. What Johnson and his supporters are doing “is transforming our education system,” Maldonado said. There’s evidence the transformation is sorely needed.
For the past two decades, Chicago’s schools experienced a cavalcade of negative stories, including recurring fiscal crisis, financial scandals and mismanagement, a long downward slide in student enrollment, persistent underfunding from the state, the “largest mass closing [of schools] in the nation’s history,” and a seemingly endless conflict between the CPS district administration and CTU.
Yet, there are signs the district may be poised for a rebound.
“The people of Chicago have had enormous patience as they’ve witnessed years of failed school improvement efforts,” Maldonado said. “And it has taken years for the community to realize that no one else—not charter school operators or so-called reformers—can do the transformation. We have to do it ourselves.”
“Doing it ourselves” seems to mean rejecting years of policy and governance ideas that have dominated the district, and is what Johnson and his transition committee call, “an era of school reform focused on accountability, high stakes testing, austere budgets, and zero tolerance policies,” in the report, “A Blueprint for Creating a More Just and Vibrant City for All.”
After experiencing more than 10 years of enrollment declines between 2012 and 2022, losing more than 81,000 students during this period, and dropping from its status as third-largest school district in the nation to fourth in 2022, CPS reported an enrollment increase for the 2023-2024 school year. Graduation rates hit an all-time high in 2022. The number of students being suspended or arrested on school grounds has also declined significantly. And student scores on reading tests, after a sharp decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, have improved faster than most school districts across the country. Math scores have also rebounded, but are more comparable to other improving districts, according to a 2024 Chalkbeat article.
Johnson and his supporters have been slowly changing the district’s basic policy and governance structures. They are attempting to redefine the daily functions of schools and their relationships with families and their surrounding communities by expanding the number of what they refer to as “sustainable community schools.” The CPS schools that have adopted the community schools idea stand at 20 campuses as of 2024, according to CTU. Johnson and his transition committee’s Blueprint report has called for growing the number of schools using the sustainable community schools approach to 50, with the long-term goal of expanding the number of schools to 200.
The call to have more CPS schools adopt the community schools approach aligns with a national trend where several school districts, including big-city districts such as Los Angeles and New York City, are embracing the idea.
Community schools look different in different places because the needs and interests of communities vary, but the basic idea is that schools should address the fundamental causes of academic problems, including student health and well-being. The approach also requires schools to involve students and their families more deeply in school policies and programs and to tap the assets and resources available in the surrounding community to enrich the school.
In Chicago—where most students are non-white, more than 70 percent are economically disadvantaged, and large percentages need support for English language learning and learning disabilities—addressing root causes for academic problems often means bringing specialized staff and programs into the school to provide more academic and non-academic student and family services, often called wraparound supports. The rationale for this is clear.
“If a student is taken care of and feels safe and heard and has caring adults, that student is much more ready to learn,” Jennifer VanderPloeg the project manager of CPS’s Sustainable Community Schools told Our Schools. “If [a student is] carrying around a load of trauma, having a lot of unmet needs, or other things [they’re] worrying about, then [they] don’t have the brain space freed up for algebra. That’s just science,” she said.
“Also important is for students to see themselves in the curriculum and have Black and brown staff members in the school,” said Autumn Berg, director of CPS’s Community Schools Initiative. “All of that matters in determining how a student perceives their surroundings.”
“Community schools are about creating a culture and climate that is healthy, safe, and loving,” said VanderPloeg. “Sure, it would be ideal if parents would be able to attend to all the unmet needs of our students, but that’s just not the system we live in. And community schools help families access these [unmet] needs too.”
Also, according to VanderPloeg, community schools give extra support to teachers by providing them with assistance in all of the things teachers don’t have time to attend to, like helping families find access to basic services and finding grants to support after-school and extracurricular programs.
But while some Chicago educators see the community schools idea as merely a mechanism to add new programs and services to a school’s agenda, others describe it with far more expansive and sweeping language.
“Community schools are an education model rooted in self-determination and equity for Black and brown people,” Jitu Brown told Our Schools. Brown is the national director of Journey for Justice Alliance, a coalition of Black and brown-led grassroots community, youth, and parent organizations in more than 30 cities.
“In the Black community, we have historically been denied the right to engage in creating what we want for our community,” Brown said.
In Chicago, according to Brown, most of the schools serving Black and brown families are struggling because they’ve been led by people who don’t understand the needs of those families. “Class plays a big role in this too,” he said. “The people in charge of our schools have generally been taught to believe they are smarter than the people in the schools they’re leading.”
But in community schools, Brown sees the opportunity to put different voices in charge of Chicago schools.
“The community schools strategy is not just about asking students, parents, and the community for their input,” he said. “It’s about asking for their guidance and leadership.”
It Started with Saving a Neighborhood
Chicago’s journey of embracing the community schools movement has been long in the making, and Brown gets a lot of credit for bringing the idea to the attention of public school advocates in the city.
He achieved much of this notoriety in 2015 by leading a hunger strike to reopen Walter H. Dyett High School in Chicago’s predominantly African American Bronzeville community. Among the demands of the strikers—Brandon Johnson was a participant in the protest when he was a CTU organizer—was for the school to be reopened as a “hub” of what they called “a sustainable community school village,” according to Democracy Now.
The strike received prominent attention in national news outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.
But Brown’s engagement with the community schools approach started before the fight for Dyett, going back almost two decades when he was a resource coordinator at the South Shore High School of Entrepreneurship, a school created in 2001 when historic South Shore International College Preparatory High School was reorganized into three smaller campuses as part of an education reform effort known as small schools.
Brown was responsible for organizing educators and community members to pool resources and involve organizations in the community to strengthen the struggling school. He could see that the school was being “set up,” in his words, for either closure or takeover by charter school operators.
“School privatization in the form of charter schools was coming to our neighborhood,” he said, “and we needed a stronger offer to engage families in rallying to the school and the surrounding community.”
Brown pushed for the adoption of an approach for transforming schools that reflected a model supported by the National Education Association of full-service community schools.
That approach was based on five pillars that included a challenging and culturally relevant curriculum, wraparound services for addressing students’ health and well-being, high-quality teaching, student-centered school climate, and community and parent engagement. A sixth pillar, calling for shared leadership in school governance, was eventually added.
After engaging in “thousands” of conversations in the surrounding historic Kenwood neighborhood, where former President Barack Obama once lived, Brown said that he came to be persuaded that organizing a school around the grassroots desires of students, parents, teachers, and community members was a powerful alternative to school privatization and other top-down reform efforts that undermine teachers and disenfranchise families.
Brown and his collaborators recognized that the community schools idea was what would turn their vision of a school into a connected system of families, educators, and community working together.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
Teaching and learning are PROFOUNDLY HUMANE endeavors. They are all about interactions between people who know and care about stuff and younger people who know and care about people who know and care about stuff. Anyone who does not understand this–who does not grok that from time immemorial, this was a profoundly PERSONAL matter–I’m looking at you, Gates, and all the infestation in our schools of your spawn that has been, for decades now, pushing on our kids and teachers breathtakingly devolved computer-based curricula and pedagogy based on your puerile, almost entirely content-free skills bullet list, the Common Core State Standards, which were common only in the sense of being base, were not at all core (or central) to the subjects they covered, were not produced by the states but pushed upon them without vetting, and certainly do not constitute “higher standards” by any stretch of the imagination.
AMEN, Bob. TRUE! TRUE!
The Common Core SUCKS!
A school is a community. Grok that, Ed Deformers. Ever notice that these Ed Deform types are always from some other profession–never know anything about a) teaching and learning or b) the communities they foist their idiotic programs on? Clueless. A guy like Gates is totally clueless. He literally has no idea how much damage he is done. Totally removed from reality.
Ed Deformers always come from outside education or, in some rare instances, are “educators” who have utterly sold out, Vichy collaborators with the Ed Deform leaders due to the enormous sums to be made via collaboration. I myself for decades did development of educational materials, and the Gates/Coleman “reforms” presented an opportunity for me to cash in to the tune of millions of dollars. I declined with a hearty “Get thee behind me, Satan.” It would have been a betrayal of everything I believe and care about.
Listening to Ed Deformers, who are in the business of peddling computer software (Gates) or multilayer marketing programs (our ex Education Secretary, Cruella’s younger sister Betsy) or whatever on the subject of education is like CONSULTING PLUMBERS ON THE SUBJECT OF CARDIOLOGY. It might even be a little better because plumbing and cardiology both involve ductile structures. LOL.
It would have been a betrayal of everything I believe and care about.
I wish that this had been common. It was not. There was a great river of green flowing from Medina/Redmond/Seattle. And one by one, major edupundits threw all their principles out the window and became Gates/Coleman/testing/Common [sic] Core [sic] shills. There was, for example, the guy who had built his career on preaching about the importance of formative assessment and the evils of summative assessment. Took Gates money and totally went over to the dark side while pretending that he had not. There was the woman who had made her name as a champion of equity in education who went to work making Common [sic] Core [sic] tests with their tricky questions with multiple right answers. But there were thousands and thousands of such people–hundreds of thousands if one counts all the bureaucratic and administrative Vichy collaborators. Even the two largest teachers’ unions totally went over, took the money, and started preaching the Gates party line. Sickening.
This current interest in Community Schools shows that people are, slowly, waking up. But systemic change takes a long time in U.S. K-12 education. It literally took half a century to excise the Behaviorist model from U.S. education. Only the gods know when we will finally get over the breathtakingly expensive and wasteful and useless and curriculum-and-pedagogy-destroying emphasis on summative standardized testing.
Oh, I forgot. Gates and Coleman are our gods. Just ask them. They were appointed by themselves deciders for the rest of us.
Break up the community schools. Appoint a CEO or a mayoral manager. Test TF out of the kids.
THEN, nothing will happen. For decades. NO IMPROVEMENT.
Ed Deformers are slow learners. Extraordinarily slow learners. I’m looking at you, Gates.
“There was, for example, the guy who . . . . There was the woman who had made her name as a champion of equity in education who went to work making Common [sic] Core [sic] tests with their tricky questions with multiple right answers.
I have no idea to whom you refer. Please name names. Thanks!
So, yes, Community Schools are an important way forward. SO, EMPHATICALLY, are sufficiently funded wraparound services.
OK, I had a poor single mother. Simply putting food on the table was a challenge for her. Forget about fancy trips to Disneyland or whatever. I was also smaller than my cohort in school because I had been moved from fifth to seventh grade, so I was bullied A LOT, literally beaten up by other kids. Fortunately, there was, in my neighborhood, a Boys and Girls Club with evening programs that cost all of five dollars a year. And there, there were incredibly humane and loving counsellors and basketball courts and games of many kinds and books (including old comic books) and movies (I saw King Kong there; how exciting!) and lots of other kids to play with in a safe space. I would have to write an entire book to explain how important this experience was to me. POOR KIDS NEED A SAFE AND STIMULATING AND FUN PLACE TO GO TO IN THE EVENING, A PLACE WITH LOVING ADULTS WHO WILL MAKE SURE THAT THEY ARE SAFE.
Denzel Washington is the national spokesperson for the Boys and Girls Clubs. He credits them with helping him become the man he is today.
Same. And to a mother who, despite her poverty (she was a single mother who worked as a waiter and lived on her tips) and lack of education, read voraciously and READ TO her sons.
My kids had the stability of a two parent home where both were teachers, but they practically lived at the Boys and Girls Club. It was like paradise – my son’s first job at 14 was helping out in the gym. His sisters coached field hockey and took on leadership roles.
We didn’t want them to take for granted their way of being in the world and to understand that other kids had experiences different from their own. Those friendships expanded their horizons and endured.
wonderful, Christine!!!
““Until now, we haven’t even tried to make big-city school districts work, especially for children of color,”
When I first moved to the NYC area, I applied for teaching job in and around the city. I was offered a position in The Bronx and a suburban district at the same time. The differences between the two were like East and West Berlin. The city school was like a dungeon, class size was over 35, and the salary was less. By contrast, the suburban school featured student art work, was well maintained and resourced with a class size of about 25, and the pay was better. It wasn’t a difficult decision for me or any teacher looking for a job.
Governors and mayors have routinely underfunded city school districts in many states. They often refuse to pay what is owed the urban districts, and poor communities generally generate fewer tax dollars. When districts become minority majority, we see a decline in resources and personnel due to budget constraints. Community schools are an opportunity for communities to invest in themselves which, if done right, will directly benefit young people.
Preach it, RT!
The Challenge of the Resource Exchange Network by Seymour. B. Sarason and Elizabeth Lorentz. 1979
The neighborhood Community School has always been The Hub Of A Network. Maybe a network implicit but always there and available in the tough love problem-solving capacity of its public school teachers.
Sarason imagines an exchange much more overt and strategic. The Community School contacts the local university dental school. The university gets great PR and maybe even some alumni funding. To go into The Community School and examine young teeth, teach kids how to brush and floss, supply families with necessary and costly supplies. Perhaps a mobile dental unit flow from this exchange. One that parks in the neighborhood on a scheduled basis. Point is The Community School knows who it is, who it is serving and the school initiates, coordinates and expands the network.
amen
Paterson, New Jersey has offered dental care and other services in the schools for at least twenty years. It has its own staff that delivers the services.
Ed Deformers think that they understand what’s best in education because they have been to school. It’s like thinking that one knows how to practice medicine because one has been to a doctor.
I was at a health care facility on Thursday when SCOTUS released its decision on mifepristone. The nurse I was chatting with said, “We’re the ones with the professional training. Politicians need to stay in their own lane. They don’t know what we know.” Exactly the same applies to teachers.
Oh lord, yes!
Thanks Diane.
Mr. Bryant, great piece!
Thanks, Mr. Bryant, for this brilliant, beautiful, compassionate, sane piece. Really important.
When I argue a point with supporters of the DPECS (Destroy Public Education Crime Syndicate), I like to use primary sources to prove them wrong.
And one of the best primary sources is the NAEP test score charts going back to the 1970s.
Fast Facts: Long-term trends in reading and mathematics achievement (38) (ed.gov)
Key dates: 1983, 2010 and 2015
“Since 2010, a number of states across the nation have adopted the same standards for English and math. These standards are called the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).”
“The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is a US law passed in December 2015 that governs the United States K–12 public education policy. The law replaced its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), and modified but did not eliminate provisions relating to the periodic standardized tests given to students.”
Starting in 2010, reading scores flatlined with a slight reduction and never recovered. Math scores declined more.
From 1973 to 2010, Math scores showed mostly steady gains.
Reading scores showed gains from 1971 to 1983, the year Reagan’s misleading, manipulative A Nation at Risk lying report was released, declaring war on public school that were succeeding and improving.
I read two articles today—one in The Atlantic, another in The NY Times—referring to declining test scores. Not true.
Only idiots believe that those test scores have validity.
Thanks, Lloyd. That’s exactly right. The standards-and-testing deforms have resulted in NO CHANGE in outcomes as measured by test scores–that is, by the deformers’ own preferred measure. But they continue insisting upon this boondoggle–billions of wasted dollars, untold hours of opportunity cost for instruction. An utter waste. And these fools are supposed to be about accountability.
There is no accountability for the accountability mavens. THEY HAVE FAILED. EMPHATICALLY. So, time to end their stupid “reforms” that have reformed nothing but have cost so much.
One of the standard motifs in ancient Greek literature was that of the “miasma”–a blight or curse upon a land, resulting in dying cattle, stillbirths, pestilence, etc. This became the wasteland motif of medieval literature and orature (see, for example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), picked up and used by Eliot in his famous poem.
Well, the standards-and-testing occupation of our schools has been a miasma–a curse, a blight, the creator of wastelands of horrible curricula and pedagogy.
Time to lift it. Remember, in those Greek plays and medieval romances and fairytales, the joy that reigns when the curse is lifted and the wasteland once again blooms? (Think, for example, of the wasteland that grows up around Sleeping Beauty.) Well, that’s what it will be like when the standards-based federal testing mandate is finally lifted. It will be a renaissance for American education. A great flowering. We just need freaking fools like Gates and all the Vichy collaborators with his occupation of our schools to stand TF down, starting with our Secretary of Education.
Chicago is very fortunate to have Jitu Brown! Community schools, as well as the first ever elected school board in the city –which is being phased in to start with beginning in the November election– sounds like a winning combination, especially for Chicago’s historially marginalized (and neglected) black and brown people.
Jitu Brown is a superb advocate for communities, families, and students. He’s running for the new Chicago school board.
Having Jitu Brown on the first elected Board of Education sweetens the deal, as that would make the combo even more promising, no doubt!!!