Another look at Renaissance 2010

Well, 2010 is only a little more than a year away. Will Daley/Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 initiative to transform public education in Chicago through more standardized testing, closing neighborhood schools, militarization, and the privatization of school management, be hailed as a great success? Will Ren10 seal Mayor Daley’s legacy as the “Education Mayor” and slide CEO Arne Duncan into a cabinet post in President Obama’s administration? Not likely.

Chicago’s high schools are still the basket case they were when Daley took over the school system in June of 1995. Things have gotten so bad that Daley/Duncan appear to have given up on real reforms and on supports for teachers in classrooms, and are now resorting to gimmicks like pay-for-grades. Huge dropout rates, falling test scores, a school and youth violence epidemic, which can in some small part be directly traced to Ren10 school-closing policies, and lackluster results from frantic charter-school replications, all are leading to the same conclusion.

Of course it’s not only Daley/Duncan’s failed policies that are at fault . Disastrous federal polices like NCLB and Reading First, the lack of adequate school funding, deteriorating economic and social conditions in the community, and teachers union wracked with internal division, have all contributed.

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One positive that may come out of the politically-motivated attack on Chicago’s decade-old Annenberg Challenge, is a more balanced look at school reform in general.

Why is every short-term, high-impact, urban school reform initiative, like Annenberg or Renaissance 2010, ultimately written off as a failure when test scores don’t spike? How has mayoral control of big-city schools worked? What about superstar superintendents like Arne Duncan, Paul Vallas, John Deasey, and Michelle Rhee, using Eli Broad’s business model of sub-contracting schooling out to private companies?

Claremont prof Charles Taylor Kerchner, writing in Edweek, “What Can We Learn from L.A.?”, takes a stab answering these questions and makes some interesting observations about the short and long-term dynamics of school change, in the process.

The myth of politics-free education gave way to the reality of interest groups. Even though sponsors of reform projects talk of driving out destructive politics, which usually translates into diminishing the power of the teachers’ union, they find that they have re-created a world full of competing interests. Philadelphia’s attempt to escape urban politics by replacing the elected school board provided only a temporary respite, and that city’s diverse-provider model of education introduced for-profit and nonprofit school operators as new political interest groups. New York City, Chicago, and to a degree Los Angeles have recoupled public education and mayoral politics.

But in the end, Kerchner plays it safe, keeps it vague and never really tells us what it is we can learn from L.A.