Alexander Russo was working as a Senate aide on Capitol Hill back in the mid-90s when he heard about the education revolution in his hometown. “Everyone in Washington was talking about it,” says Russo, a freelance writer who grew up on the north side. “All the great cutting-edge themes–accountability, the end of social promotion–began right here.” But by the time Russo moved back to town in 2000 the revolution was washed up. The following year its main architects, schools CEO Paul Vallas and school board president Gery Chico, were forced out by Mayor Daley, who wanted to take the system in a new direction.
Vallas and Chico demanded that schools raise their test scores, and those that didn’t were put on probation. The two fired union trade workers and laid off teachers. They were particularly tough on teachers, forcing them–with the complicity of their weak union–to accept a paltry pay raise even though the system was relatively flush. Vallas and Chico held back thousands of students, most of them low-income blacks and Hispanics, as part of their plan to abolish social promotions. If students “failed” the annual standardized achievement test–which hadn’t been designed to be pass or fail–they wouldn’t be promoted. Both men seemed to take an almost perverse delight in holding press conferences to announce how many thousands of students they were either sending to summer school or holding back.
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Their fight against the old guard was as much generational as cultural. “Vallas’ new team installed a pair of large, do-it-yourself coffee urns holding Starbucks coffee in one corner of the cafeteria, with a stack of Starbucks cups and lids,” Brandhorst writes. “The new Vallas recruits carried their Starbucks cups and lids like badges of honor. The cups became symbolic, the shorthand some in the old guard used to dismissively describe the Vallas people and the totem the new team used to mark membership in their tribe. The new recruits carried their Starbucks coffee, walked fast, met only behind closed doors, and scared the hell out of everyone else. The feeling among those on Vallas’ team was, we can do no wrong, because we can’t possibly screw things up any worse than they already are. We could just look around the building and get a sense of how badly decayed and rotted the system was.”
In Russo’s view, Vallas’s tenacity and personality simply became too much for everyone. “Vallas is a very compelling character,” he says. “He inspired fear. And because he inspired fear, he got things done. Social promotion ended–you know, the trains running on time. But you can’t just use the stick. Unfortunately that was his main tool. After a while you just can’t pummel people.”
