School decentralization, “as it’s been tried so far, has been a half-measure because nobody wanted to make fundamental enough changes in the lives and incentives of adults,” reports Paul Hill of the University of Washington, one of two principal investigators in a six-city study that included Chicago (Education Week, September 10). According to the University of Chicago’s Anthony Bryk, the other principal investigator, “Most of the districts started with a chop-the-top philosophy,” leaving few administrators to help guide and support individual schools. Worse, until 1995 the chopped top had little power to make sure improvement was happening.
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As early as 1993, says Bryk, “we had identified a significant subset of schools in Chicago that looked to us to be dead in the water. But they basically could hide under decentralization because there was no viable mechanism to identify those schools and to intervene in them.”
“Although I am well past the peak ages of criminal activity and no longer fit as many ‘profiles’ as I did in my youth, police harassment remains an occasional feature of my life,” writes Salim Muwakkil in In These Times (October 5). “There is the routine humiliation of being stopped and frisked while visiting white friends in certain neighborhoods. My black male friends and I find gallows humor in receiving traffic tickets for ‘driving-while-black.’ Even now, I’m a party in a class-action lawsuit against Illinois State Police for harassment of African-American motorists.”
