Vallas's school reform is old, tired, and failed

But it excels at two things: overspending and racial stratification

Do we really have to do this, Chicago? Do we really have to go over all this again?

In light of the flood of recent endorsements of Paul Vallas, I think we have to. I’m going to outline, again, in detail, the problems with Paul Vallas as a mayoral candidate.

It’s going to take a few posts, as we’re going to cover a few topics. I hope you keep coming back here to follow along. If you hit subscribe below, you won’t miss a thing.

Seeing that our beloved former principal of Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, Dr. Joyce Kenner, came out with a Vallas endorsement this week, I can no longer sit idly by watching this race unfold, as educators who know better make preposterous pronouncements like that. How often do we have to talk about this? I guess as often as it takes.

Because I can’t with this. Kenner knows the costs of Vallas-style school reform. She lived its impact on the district. She was like a mama owl protecting her school, teachers, and students from the worst of what the district dealt out in the Vallas years and post-Vallas decades. And still somehow the man who set the template for the tale of two cities, for budget crises, for school closures—this Paul Vallas is her man for mayor. I guess she must still want the CPS CEO job and she’s banking on a Vallas win.

But wait, you say, savvy reader that you are, Vallas wasn’t the one who cut the budgets! Vallas wasn’t the one who closed the schools! Rahm was!

Correct, savvy reader. You are correct. But Rahm was practicing principles developed by Vallas. And Rahm was acting on financial realities put in place by Vallas—which had reached a crisis point by 2012. The path from Vallas to Rahm to school closings is clearly discernible.

Here’s what you need to know if you don’t already. Vallas is the OG of a tired, old, failed style of school reform marked by privatization of public services, charter proliferation, and school choice. These elements are now omnipresent in American public education; he helped make this so. In no school district anywhere have these initiatives enabled positive transformation, not in thirty years. But choice-based school reform does two things well—it racks up big, huge spending deficits, and it racially stratifies urban school systems. Vallas has achieved both, here and everywhere he has led districts.

Vallas-style school reform has a kind of tech-bro aesthetic: spend big, break things, disrupt systems, do it all at once. But this has always come with a cost. We need to know the cost.

Vallas’s push for privatization and its ugly impact in urban districts

In Chicago, the effort to privatize is by now the rather hackneyed status quo. Charter advocates say there just aren’t enough charters yet. But critics say we can’t possibly afford to keep throwing money at this worn-out approach. After all, in Chicago we have seen the rise and fall of the UNO network, and embroilment in scandals for Urban Prep, Acero, Epic, Gulen, and many other chains. If you click this link, you can find 26 articles on charter scandals in IL dating back just to 2017.

Privatization lacks accountability. These schools are not subject to the standards and accountability faced by traditional public schools, which eventually is what lands many of them in trouble—they say they are handling special needs and aren’t. They claim they offer bilingual services and they don’t. They get millions in funding from the district and it goes up in smoke. These schools also yield a poor ROI—that is to say, their results are not good. On top of this, these schools are prone to closing without notice.*

Privatization always results in disinvestment of traditional public schools. Privatizers love to say that public schools are terrible without ever acknowledging that they’ve been deeply disinvested for decades, then divert much of what funding remains to charter schools, entrenching the cycle of disinvested schools failing to provide what students need and deserve. When you factor in poor ROIs, scandals, and instability, banking on charters seems like a pretty poor bargain. In Chicago, the district added charter schools for years prior to the school closings, very much impacting or even creating the 2012/13 “school utilization crisis” pushed by Rahm and Barbara Byrd-Bennett. Suddenly we had too many schools for too few students. The end result was 50 closed neighborhood public schools, displacing 30,000 kids.

Privatization goes hand in hand with racial stratification of school districts. Vallas went all in on privatization in New Orleans, creating the first all-charter public school district in the country. The results have been dramatic, and terrible, in Diane Ravitch’s narration:

Scores went up (before the pandemic). Losing about a quarter of the poorest who never returned to the district helped bump up the numbers. 

But New Orleans is nonetheless the lowest scoring district in the nation’s lowest scoring state. 

Most NOLA charters are rated D or F by the state. 

The schools are highly stratified by race and income. The whitest schools are at the top. The schools that are almost completely black have the lowest scores, have the greatest number of high-needs kids, and are subject to closure and restart. 

There are reams of materials written about how choice leads to more segregated, stratified, and inequitable schools. You can start with a few short posts, like Raymond Pierce in Forbes, “The Racist History of ‘School Choice’” or Jan Resseger, “Why School Choice Ends up Creating Injustice and Inequality.” Or if you have more time, look into a recent monograph like The Choice We Face: How Segregation, Race, and Power Have Shaped America’s Most Controversial Education Reform Movement. Folks devoted to choice as a fix-all for urban school systems are waylaid, or waylay others, by slogans (such as “choice is the new civil rights”), concealing what really transpires via privatization.

Friends, given what we’ve seen in our district—scandals, disinvestment, and poor ROI—and what we know about other districts where Vallas has brought his old-school style of choice-based reform to bear, we need to ask ourselves if this is really what we want, here, now, for our city and its beleaguered, tapped-dry, charter-school-scandal racked, already racially-stratified school district.

Vallas’s big spending and its long-lasting consequences

Vallas’s first spend-big-move-fast job was here in Chicago. As the first CPS CEO, he decided to use money that would ordinarily have gone annually to pensions and added it to the CPS operational budget. Spoiler alert: that didn’t end well. Whet Moser’s short, clear 2013 piece on how this led directly to the 2013 CPS financial crisis should be required reading.

He built 71 (?) new schools during his CPS tenure, somehow. Both the LA Times and the NYT reported this number in 2001, which seems to strain credulity; I can’t find any other corroboration or a list of schools. Be assured, many of them are now closed. He did open the first 16 charters in the city, several of them chains that expanded over the years, including the notorious UNO.

Vallas also left Philadelphia’s school district in financial tatters. His many reforms, attempted all at once, went way over budget in Philadelphia and when he left, the shortfall was $73M, which had come as a surprise to him. A 2013 assessment of his longterm Philadelphia impact was not flattering. Of Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, says Diane Ravitch,

Philadelphia is in the worst shape today, its finances in shambles, desperately underfunded, nearly 4,000 teachers and other staff laid off, schools under threat of closure or privatization, students with little or no access to the arts and the other essentials of a basic education.

How his school district CEO tenures have given Vallas the reputation of the “fix-it guy” and the “turnaround specialist” is something I can’t fathom. Because to my eyes, Vallas is a little bit of a relic of another time—a time when the promise of charters seemed shiny and new, when they seemed like a nimble financial solution to the problems of urban school districts.

We know better now. Costly and disappointing, scandal-ridden and offering poor results, racially stratifying and tapping traditional public schools dry, charters have never lived up to their promise. Privatization has never been worth the cost. Do we want to double down on old failed methods? Can we afford it? Can our children?

Come back tomorrow for an assessment of candidate Vallas’s current plan for CPS.

*NB: Note I am not saying All Charter Schools. In Chicago we do have a few that have a) not yet closed down, b) not yet erupted in scandal, and b) do turn out reasonably well educated students. These schools are, in the span of Chicago’s romance with charters, by far the minority of charter schools.

Photo of Uno Tamayo Campus taken by George Schmidt for Substance News, 2009. All UNO schools have since been “rebranded” as Acero schools in the wake of the UNO financial scandals.