Having considered the operation of SLD institutions in the context of severe
resource deprivation, we now ratchet the adversity of background conditions
upward by adding interest conflict. Though poor, the parties to SLD
deliberation in Central Beat and Harambee Academy largely agreed on the goals
of governance and acknowledged one another as partners in a common effort to
secure those goals. In this chapter, we revisit the two impoverished
neighborhoods discussed above in our examination of Central School and
Southtown Beat. As one might expect from their proximity to the cases of the
previous chapter, poverty also characterizes these cases. However, the parties
to deliberation in the cases below share histories of mutual suspicion and
animosity. In both Central School and Southtown Beat, neighborhood residents
were divided against themselves into conflicting factions and
professionals--police and school staff respectively--were at various times
divided against resident groups. In this chapter, then, we use two cases to
explore the operation of SLD institutions that under the doubly difficult
initial conditions of "resource poverty" and "high interest dispersion,"
depicted in the lower right hand sector of Figure 12.3 (chapter 12).
The five critical perspectives developed in chapter 11 focus our intuitions
about why poverty and conflict in Central School and Southtown Beat constitute
particularly hard cases for SLD, and indeed for any configuration of democratic
institutions. We developed the poverty-based criticisms of the Strong
Egalitarian and Social Unity theorist in the previous chapter, and those same
criticisms apply to the two cases below. The added dimension of interest
diversity, however, adds several voices to this skeptical chorus. In contrast
to the broad agreement on interests and intentions that we found in the cases
of the previous chapter, deep conflicts between parties here leads the Strong
Rational Choice to be skeptical about the possibility for fair deliberation in
Central Beat and Southtown School. Parties in both of these cases have
histories of mutual conflict and suspicion that pre-date community policing and
local school governance reforms in Chicago, and the Rational Choice critic
expects that those conflicts will continue under the new institutional regime
of SLD. Indeed the heart of the disagreement between this critic and the
proponent of SLD lies in the disbelief of the former that a mere institutional
change could induce parties to operate deliberatively by constraining the
pursuit of their self interest. Instead, this critic expects that warring
factions will continue their battles using SLD's spaces as just another
gladiatorial arena. The second critic, the Strong Egalitarian, will offer at
least two skeptical arguments against SLD's prospects in Central School and
Southtown Beat. Since they live in the same two neighborhoods examined in the
previous chapter, residents who participate in the SLD processes of Central
School and Southtown Beat are similarly poor, and so for that reason may lack
the human and material resources--education, money, skills, etc.--necessary for
effective deliberation. The two cases of the previous chapter illustrated
moderately successful deliberation despite poverty, however, and residents in
the two cases below displayed similar abilities to deliberate despite their
poverty. Conflict between professionals and residents, however, poses an
additional, especially acute threat to the integrity of deliberation under
conditions of poverty. The unavoidable advantages of time and expertise (they
are paid and trained for their public work) that agency professionals enjoy in
their adversarial encounters with ordinary citizens are multiplied when those
citizens are poor (Handler 1988). Therefore, both the Strong Egalitarian and
Technocratic Expert critics might argue, SLD will likely yield domination of
residents by professionals under the initial conditions of poverty and
conflict. Finally, a critic who emphasizes the Politics of Difference will find
the prospects for deliberative democracy particularly bleak when interest
diversity stems from deep cultural differences, as it does in Southtown Beat, a
mixed African-American and Hispanic Community.
We shall see shortly that experiences of those serving and participating in
the local governance institutions of Southtown Beat and Central School validate
some of these criticisms. Due to both material poverty and entrenched conflict,
effective problem solving and fair deliberation occurred in fits and starts in
both of these cases. Nevertheless, similar to Traxton Beat in chapter 12, both
cases also exhibited periods of substantial fair and effective deliberative
problem solving in addition to less laudable phases. In the former,
deliberative institutions of school governance and community policing did seem
to advance the realization of core democratic values laid out in chapter 2. The
existence of these high-points for SLD even under the adverse conditions of
rather severe poverty and entrenched conflict, however, offers some support for
SLD proponents against these critical perspectives. By describing the causes
that separate the periods of failure in these cases from moments of more
successful deliberation, we argue below that the failure is principally due
neither to the initial conditions, as difficult as they are, nor to the
institutional design of SLD, but rather to failures of implementation. In
particular, both cases illustrate how deliberative success and failure rests
largely on the ability of the "Supportive Center" (chapter 8) to foster the
problem-solving processes of poor, conflicted neighborhoods by performing
adjudicative, facilitative, and supportive functions.
Southtown Beat, located on Chicago' far south side, is a low income area of
some forty square blocks that is home to Hispanics--many of them
Spanish-speaking only--and African-Americans. According to 1990 census figures,
approximately one fifth of the households in the area were ethnic Hispanics,
and the remaining 80% were black. Though there were no impenetrable physical
fences that separate these two groups as in Traxton Beat, residents considered
various blocks on the beat either "Black" or "Hispanics." The later group lived
for the most part in the northeast portion, with its rough boundary defined the
railroad tracks that run northwest and southeast through the beat (see Figure
15.1 below). Though there were many exceptions to this pattern, most of the
blocks that lie to the south of these tracks were inhabited by
African-Americans.
Residents of the beat do share, however, great vulnerability to criminal
victimization. Southtown Beat's personal crime rate in 1996 was 111 crimes per
1000 persons, slightly lower than that for Central Beat (see chapter 14), but
almost 50% greater than the citywide rate and high enough to place it in the
most violent quintile of Chicago police beats. There were a total of ten
homicides in Southtown Beat between 1995 and 1996. One female victim died in
domestic violence, and the other nine were young males between the ages of 15
and 40 who were shot down either in the street or in automobiles. The most
dramatic threats to personal safety, then, come from gunfire in the occasional
flaring of youth violence. In 1994, for example, sniper fire from suspected
Latin Kings disrupted a basketball game between blacks in Southtown Park, the
neighborhood green space (see Figure 15.1 below). Violence also occurred on
50th Street because it coincides with a territorial boundary between
the Black Gangster Disciples (north of 50th) and Latin Kings (south
of 50th) street gangs. Over the past few years, several retaliatory
shootings have occurred back and fourth along this boundary. In 1994, a black
man was shot by Hispanic youth just north of 50th on Adams, and in
retaliation two Hispanics were shot by black assailants on Adams and
51st street. In 1995, a black man was shot and killed in an alley
on Jefferson Ave. just north of 50th street. In addition to these
sites of gun violence, there are a number of crack houses on the beat, two of
them located on 55th Place between Adams and S. Quincy. Street
walking prostitutes solicit customers on the run-down commercial strip on
Jefferson Avenue, and then take them to alleys, the abandoned buildings, or
Southtown Park to complete their transactions. Finally, there have been
several spates of serial abduction-and-sexual assaults of grammar school aged
girls.
As our classification of Southtown Beat in the space of initial conditions as both "poor" and subject to internecine conflict due to great "interest dispersion" suggests, the residents of Southtown Beat face severe barriers to launching the kinds of self help efforts which might help them deal with these problems. Poverty is the most obvious of these barriers. As Table 12.1 (chapter 12) shows, the average household income in Southtown Beat was $14,074 according to 1990 census statistics, easily placing it in the poorest quintile of Chicago beats. In that same year, 38.6 percent of the families in the beat received some sort of public aid, and one third of the beat's households that had children were headed by a female. The 1990 unemployment rate for residents living in the beat was 24%, about two and half times the city-wide rate. The physical condition of the neighborhood's housing stock and commercial real estate mirrored these statistical measures of neighborhood poverty. Approximately one-third of the commercial lots that line the once-thriving Jefferson Avenue and 50th Street commercial boulevards lay vacant (see Figure 15.1 below). Some of these lots were simply empty, the buildings that once stood there having been demolished. Unoccupied, boarded-up, and decaying buildings, however, still stood on much of this commercial strip during the observation period. Most of the residential interior was better maintained, but there were still substantial quantities of abandoned and boarded-up single and multi-unit housing on this block. Even by the lowered metrics of urban-America, Southtown Beat was a poor area.
As we shall see below (15.2.3), police-civilian relations were as congenial as this officer depicted due in large part to unilateral and arrogant police decisions.
The prospects for effective Street Level Democracy in Southtown Beat seem
rather dim given these multiple axes of isolation, conflict, and the absence of
supposed conditions (e.g. trust, wealth, agreement) for fair deliberation. To
the surprise of both residents and this observer, the community policing
problem-solving process there was both fair and quite effective during the
initial period of my exploration, from August 1996 until December 1996. We call
it successful because it included, for the first time ever in Southtown, both
African-American and Hispanics in concerted group action. Over this period,
furthermore, police cooperated with residents and provided indispensable
problem-solving resources. Most importantly, this diverse group solved two
important, long-standing neighborhood public safety problems.
As with Traxton Beat, the strategic intervention of a skillful facilitator
contributed enormously to this success. Unlike in Traxton Beat, however, the
facilitator and other helpful actors were dispatched from the Chicago Police
Department headquarters to perform functions gathered under the heading of the
"supportive center" in chapter 8. These individuals, called community policing
trainers and organizers, operated in Southtown between August and November 1996
under the Joint Community-Police Training (JCPT) Program described in chapter
5. Recall that under this program, the City subcontracted the Chicago Alliance
for Neighborhood Safety (CANS) to organize residents and police to turn out and
participate effectively in community policing. Under the program, CANS
dispatched roving teams of three or four individuals--one or two community
organizers, one civilian trainer, and one police trainer--to various beats in
the city. Due to resource constraints at the city-wide level, each team
remained in a beat for only three or four months, hoping that they would build
self-sustaining interest in community policing and impart effective
problem-solving methods in that short time.
The J.C.P.T team performed three important functions that were especially
critical in light of Southtown's adverse initial conditions. Its leader was
civilian trainer Roger Sanchez.[4] A highly
skilled, bi-lingual facilitator, Sanchez was able to bring African-American and
Hispanic residents together in conjoint civic action. Residents from both
groups found him inviting and fair. In the presence of this intermediary,
Hispanic residents, African-Americans, and police who lack a prior history of
cooperation, avoided the deliberative breakdown (8.1) which would likely have
occurred without him. When asked why community policing seemed to spark a
bi-racial effort when nothing else had done so, one long time neighborhood
resident responded that, "CANS bi-lingual staffing helped a lot. We tried to
get some community safety efforts going a couple of years ago, but it didn't
work out because it lacked leadership ability and this skill."
Second, trainers from J.C.P.T. and CANS provided residents with deliberative
problem solving skills and made them aware of opportunities for directing
police power under Chicago's community policing reforms. Several Southtown
residents cited problem-solving skills training as a distinctive and critical
feature of community policing in their area. One Hispanic resident, who had
been active several city-wide and neighborhood efforts including the Chicago
Empowerment Zone and a well known Community Development Corporation, commented
that:
CAPS is the first time that I have seen a program empower people. CANS
instructors were especially important in this. No one ever came out and taught
us a whole process before. This is quite different from the Empowerment Zone,
which was a war between different agencies.
An African-American Southtown Beat participant commented that:
None of this [successful problem solving] would have happened without CANS and
the changes in the Chicago Police Department. The doors [to neighborhood
improvement] would not have opened, as they are starting to do now. They helped
bridge the African-American communities, and this an unprecedented alliance.
CANS training showed us what resources and talent exist in the community, and
we never saw that before.
Third, the presence of J.C.P.T. trainers induced beat level police officers in
Southtown to cooperate in problem solving efforts. The first two factors of
bi-lingual facilitation and skills training forged a unified voice with
particular problem solving plans. Police officers were largely content to
fulfill the roles assigned to them by these largely resident-devised plans
because they saw the J.C.P.T. program as a legitimate authority associated with
the police headquarters. After all, one member of the training team was a sworn
officer.
Recall from chapter 5 that the J.C.P.T. program calls for a kind of situated
training. Instructors teach community policing skills and procedures by
guiding resident and police trainees through the five steps (see chapter 7) of
deliberative problem solving as applied to actual neighborhood concerns.
J.C.P.T. training in Southtown began at a beat meeting, held in St. Peter's
Church, in early September 1996. Though participation in community policing had
been quite low prior to that, J.C.P.T. organizers mobilized residents for this
event through posters and door-to-door canvassing. As a result, 112 residents
attended the meeting, split about equally between African-Americans and
Hispanics. They used the session, conducted with simultaneous bi-lingual
translation by Mr. Sanchez, to develop a list of the priority problems on the
beat and to select one for group attention over the next several meetings.
Though residents raised several very serious problems such as shootings
Southtown Park and along the northern and western commercial strips, they
eventually settled on what some might consider a relatively minor issue:
unsanitary, loud, and occasionally violent residents who owned a house in the
beat. Participants reported that they selected this house as a first target
problem not because they thought it the most severe problem on the beat, though
it was not trivial, but rather because they lacked confidence in their own
abilities. They wanted to begin their bi-racial community policing efforts, to
cut-their-teeth, with an issue that they considered manageable.
The targeted problem consisted of two brothers, call them the Stilps[5] and their house at 55th Street and
Jefferson (marked as "1" in Figure 15.1 above). Neighbors had long complained
about conditions in and around the house. They reported that foul, almost
noxious, odors issued from the house and complained that human feces and other
raw sewage often lay in the front and back yards. Reports from city inspectors
later validated these claims. Neighbors also reported that the Stilps owned a
large number of immobile automobiles that obstructed traffic and rendered the
block unsightly. Another frequent complaint was that loud music came from the
Stilps' house at all hours. Further still, the Stilps owned two rottweiler dogs
who occasionally roamed without leashes and frightened the neighbors. Perhaps
coincidentally and certainly circumstantially, three of the nine non-domestic
homicides in Southtown between 1995 and 1996 occurred within one block of the
Stilps' house (see Figure 15.1). Several neighbors tried for years to make the
Stilps more neighborly, but nothing worked. Mr. Marley[6] was the most active, annoyed, and outspoken of these. He
reported trying many avenues--including dealing directly with the Stilps,
calling the police, and contacting various city agencies--all to no avail.
When the Stilp's house became the community policing group's first target,
however, actions became more strategic, persistent, and forceful. Following the
next four steps of the problem solving process (problem analysis, strategy
development, implementation, and re-evaluation), the group developed several
simultaneous approaches to address the Stilp house and assigned these steps to
various participants. This multiple-approach strategy instanced the mechanism
of complex coordination whereby resident groups orchestrate the actions of
multiple bureaucracies to solve quite local problems.[7] They invited the Stilps to discuss the problem, but
received no response. They asked police officers to issue citations against the
immobilized vehicles (It is illegal in Chicago to park such cars on public
streets). They invited representatives from the Sanitation Department to attend
one of the group's meetings so that residents could learn about pertinent city
regulations and possible courses of legal action. Initially, the Department of
Streets and Sanitation did not respond. After several petitions, however, the
Department finally sent an inspector who issued multiple citations to the
Stilps after examining their property. Animal control officials were contacts
about the rottweiler dogs, but they failed to respond. Finally, the group
requested that housing inspectors visit the building, and these city agents
eventually brought the Stilps to housing court for code violations.
The area around the Stilps' house improved gradually as a result of these
actions, and the Stilps themselves were eventually evicted. Visible progress
began when the broken-down cars were towed away and noise violations ceased as
a result of police citations. Citations from housing and sanitation inspectors
brought the Stilps to Housing Court. There, perhaps because some two dozen
residents had organized themselves to testify about the property's blighting
effect, the Judge ordered the Stilps to desist from unsanitary practices and to
implement building repairs rather rapidly. The Stilps failed to respond to
these court orders, and the judge eventually evicted them from their own house.
Neighbors report that the area has greatly improved since their departure, and
neighborhood residents generally view cleaning up the Stilps' property as a
quite substantial neighborhood victory.
At first blush, this problem solving example may seem to illustrate the
potential of populist, deliberative schemes like SLD to impose community norms
in violation of individual rights. Upon reflection, however, readers will note
that the sequence of events the culminated in the eviction of the Stilps
complied with deliberative norms, existing law, and the pedestrian notions of
reasonableness. The Stilps were invited repeatedly, first in community policing
meetings then in housing court, to offer arguments as to why others ought to
accept their behavior or proposals to make such behavior more acceptable. Again
and again, they failed to do so and thus forfeited opportunities to deliberate.
Had they chosen to participate, it is doubtful whether they--or anyone--could
have formulated reasonable arguments to justify their actions. One might
respond that they should not have to justify their actions to their neighbors
because those actions fall within the sphere of their personal or property
rights and so, like one's religious choices, do not require public acceptance.
Since the actions of the Stilps had such severe negative externalities,
however, a conception of rights that protected their actions would be
indefensibly expansive. Finally, it should be noted that they were only allowed
to inhabit the house as long as they did due to lax enforcement of existing
building and sanitary regulations, and therefore the eviction itself was
perfectly legal. In this case, the deliberative efforts of the Southtown
community policing group directed the existing legal discretion of city
agents to target a situation that they deemed problematic.[8]
Whether or not it was wrong, it might have been overkill to direct the
community policing attention and resources of the entire beat to one smelly
house. Solving this problem, however, was part of a self-reflective strategy to
develop just these community policing capacities. In a very real sense,
residents had no collective capacity to address public problems such as this
one prior to targeting the Stilps' house. African-American and Hispanics had
never acted together on any neighborhood problems. Efforts within each of these
communities had consisted almost exclusively of individual calls to the police.
Police themselves for the most part kept aloof from particular resident
concerns. Organization and joint action around the Stilps' house developed
residents and police collective capacities in several important respects.
African-Americans and Hispanics began not only communicating with one another
on common concerns, which by itself would have been novel, but also developing
and implementing strategies together. This is a first step in building the
studied trust (see chapter 10) that SLD supposedly provides. Following
the guidance of J.C.P.T. trainers, residents gained familiarity with the
straightforward, but not obvious, five-step deliberative problem solving
procedure. Additionally, they learned from these trainers first that it is
possible, through persistent demands, even for poor people to solicit action
from city agencies and they learned some of the methods (calling, letters
signed by dozens of residents, invitations to public meetings) to summon such
action. Finally, perhaps more trivially, they learned that collective action on
neighborhood problems works. The Stilps house had posed a widely recognized but
seemingly insoluble neighborhood problem for years. In the span of three short
months, residents used the opportunities and techniques of community policing
to eliminate it.
By late September 1996, clear signs of progress had appeared on the Stilps
property. Residents of the community policing group, which at this time
numbered some 80 regular participants, turned their energies to a larger
neighborhood problem: violence around Southtown Park. As the map in Figure 15.1
above shows, Southtown Park was the neighborhood's primary public green space.
The Park's grounds were rather small, amounting to about two city blocks. Its
facilities included two asphalt basketball courts, a multi-use natural grass
athletic field, and a modest field house. In past years, staff from the Chicago
Parks Department used the field house to teach various crafts and sports
classes to children, working age adults, and elderly neighborhood residents.
Public spaces in many inner city neighborhoods are sites of violence as well as
liesure, and Southtown Park did not escape that pattern. In 1994, several
children playing in the Park were wounded by sniper bullets allegedly fired by
Hispanic gang members. In response, the Park District decided to defend the
Park by closing it down. The closure did not prevent residents from using the
open space for basketball and other sports, but staff were pulled from the
field house. But neither did the closure eliminate violence in and around the
Park. Police and neighbors alleged that there was substantial narcotics
trafficking in the Park. Furthermore, of the three homicides in this beat in
1995, two of them occurred within one block of Southtown Park (see map above).
In March of 1995, 30 year old Troy Bell was shot and killed in his automobile
at 52nd Place and Qunicy. In May of the same year, 32 year old
James Jones was shot in his truck at 54th and Monroe.
In response to this continued violence, the community policing group selected
Southtown Park as its second priority problem. Some Hispanic participants
initially objected to prioritizing Southtown Park on the grounds that this
space, which lies to the south of the railroad tracks that informally segregate
Hispanics from African-Americans, was primarily a "Black" problem, and that
solving it would principally benefit African-American residents. Black
participants responded first that the Park lay on the border between the two
groups, and should therefore be a public space for both groups despite its past
use patterns. Beyond this, they argued, the Park was objectively one of the
neighborhood's most urgent crime and safety "hot spots." Finally, black
participants promised, and later delivered on this commitment, that they would
devote energies to making the Park accessible to Hispanics if their efforts to
make it safer succeeded. These arguments persuaded Hispanic participants, and
the group as a whole agreed that the Park should be listed as a priority
problem.
Residents and police selected two strategies to address the Park problem.
First, they would increase police visibility and patrol around the area.
Officers agreed to visit the Park more often and more carefully on their
various shifts. Furthermore, the police District[9] had a "Park Car" devoted exclusively to patrol its many
parks, and police arranged to have this car patrol Southtown's Park more
frequently. Both police and residents report reduced narcotics activity and
fewer arrests after implementing this patrol-based strategy. As the group's
second strategy, they decided to make the Park safe by turning it into a
lively, oft-used, public space. Criminal and violent individuals, they
reasoned, prefer to conduct their activities in the shadows, and so taking the
Park out of the shadows would make it safer. This strategy was led by residents
rather than police. Residents organized a committee to meet with the non-profit
group "Friends of the Parks" to learn about how others in Chicago had dealt
with dangerous parks. The committee petitioned several officials from the Parks
District and organized large resident turnouts to several Park District
hearings to impress upon officials there the importance of opening the Park.
Only one month after this initiative began, Parks District officials decided
that they would open the Park. Southtown residents mark the turning point in
this campaign to open the Park at a Park District hearing in which a nine year
old Hispanic boy from Southtown testified to city officials about the
difference that open green space would make in his life.
The Park officially opened at the end of October 1996. Shortly thereafter, the
community policing group spun off a portion of itself as the Southtown Park
Council, charged with handling governance and public safety issues concerning
the Park.[10] Staying true to the initial
commitment to make the Park accessible to Hispanic as well as African-American
residents, the Council used new Park funds to hire two full time staff members,
one Spanish speaking and the other African-American. In a continuing effort to
make the Park a safe space, Council members petitioned the Alderman for
physical improvements such as out-door field lighting and new paving. More
routinely, the Council has also served as a funnel to channel resident requests
to Park officials for specific craft classes and after-school programs. After
the Park opened and officials began to staff it on a full time basis, residents
reported that both narcotics activity and violence dropped off.
Just as Southtown Beat participants were enjoying these victories, the J.C.P.T.
team was about to conclude its assigned period in Southtown Beat and move on to
other neighborhoods. Designers of the program would have preferred that
training teams remain in each beat for more than just three months and that
they continue to provide substantial technical assistance services even after
their departure. However, funding constraints limited each team to just a few
trainers, short stays in each beat, and prevented them from offering ongoing
assistance after their primary assignments. These program limitations were
particularly unfortunate in the case of Southtown Beat. Because several of the
collective and deliberative competencies that training set out to provide were
not yet in place, the J.C.P.T. team's departure severely crippled Southtown
Beat's problem solving process. There were two quite prominent symptoms of this
breakdown. First, participation generally, but Hispanic participation in
particular, dropped off precipitously. Between August and November, the period
of J.C.P.T. presence, community policing meetings numbered between 60 and 120
persons each, and in each case participation was approximately evenly divided
between African-Americans and Hispanics. After November, resident meeting
participation ranged between 20 and 30 persons, and in each meeting less that
half a dozen of them were Hispanic. Second, cooperative relations and attitudes
between police and citizens dropped off precipitously, and in particular the
police began to make unilateral decisions and did not treat residents as equals
in the deliberative process.
The J.C.P.T. team contributed to substantial Hispanic turnout in three main
ways. First, Roger Sanchez, the team leader, was an effective bi-lingual
facilitator who made Hispanic participants feel welcome and included at every
step of the community policing process. He knew that he would operate in
Southtown for only a few months, and so hoped to have trained in that time
local leadership capable of tying together this bi-lingual coalition.
Specifically, he had selected two very active and enthusiastic residents, one
African-American man and the other a Hispanic woman--call her Ms. Martinez, to
continue on as beat facilitators after his departure. Shortly after Sanchez
left, Martinez decided to pursue community organizing opportunities in other
parts of Chicago and her Southtown contributions ended. No remaining
participant possessed both the bi-lingual facilitation skills and procedural
knowledge necessary to connect residents in the Hispanic community to community
policing in the way that they had found both inviting and promising before.
Such an individual might have eventually turned up were it not for a second
loss associated with the departure of J.C.P.T.: its community organizer. Aside
from training, J.C.P.T.'s second function was straightforward mobilization of
community residents to attend community policing events. In Southtown Beat,
much of this phone calling and door-to-door organizing activity had been
directed toward the Hispanic population. Judging by the high Hispanic turnout
between August and November, this mobilization effort was quite successful.
With the team's departure, the Beat lost the "push" of a very active effort to
mobilize Hispanics as well as the "pull" of effective Hispanic community
policing leadership.
A third factor, related to the prior two, is that none of the most energetic
actors tried to maintain high levels of Hispanic participation after J.C.P.T.
staff left. As any community organizer will testify, a thousand small decisions
make the difference between high and low participation. J.C.P.T. staff took
deliberate and concrete steps to increase Hispanic participation. Meetings were
held at St. Peter's church, a central Hispanic neighborhood institution, they
were facilitated in both English and Spanish simultaneously, and special effort
(follow up calls, home visits, etc.) was directed toward sustaining Hispanic
participation. Mr. Sanchez paid attention to these details, and hoped that Ms.
Martinez would continue to do so after his departure. Since she too left the
process, the remaining energetic actors were the police and a handful of
African-American residents. The police viewed their responsibility as
administering community policing at a minimal level rather than mobilizing
residents--attending meetings, scheduling them, and selecting locations. In
this ostensibly neutral role, they made decisions which had the unintended
consequence of reducing Hispanic participation. In particular, some officers
felt that the St. Peter's location was inappropriately religious for public
meetings, and so they moved it to the Southtown Park field house. As mentioned
above, many Hispanics felt uncomfortable and unsafe in this part of the
neighborhood because it was located in the "black" section. The active
African-Americans, for their part, felt that they had their hands full
maintaining mobilization in their own community and trying to develop workable
relationships with the police. When asked what he planned to do about the drop
off in Hispanic participation, one black activist responded that "We have to
consolidate the involvement of our own community, and then we [will] reach out
to the Hispanics again."
The second major aspect of deliberative breakdown was the erosion of
cooperation between police and those residents who continued to participate in
the community policing process. In the prior period, residents identified quite
specific problems and strategies with the help of facilitation and suggestions
injected by J.C.P.T. trainers who kept them on track with respect to the five
step problem solving process. Each of these strategies featured specific roles
for police action which officers themselves willingly fulfilled. When the
trainers left, resident activists had not yet acquired the deliberative
capacities[11] to formulate precise, feasible
proposals for dealing with sundry neighborhood public safety concerns and to
assert such proposals with confidence. Police officers similarly lacked the
skill and imagination to develop the complex, novel strategies evident in the
first period. They too had not undergone training in deliberative problem
solving methods prescribed in Chicago Police Doctrine and laid out in chapter
7. When asked how he came to learn the techniques of community policing, the
sergeant in charge of the Southtown Beat officers responded that "I didn't get
any formal training. I just sort of read the general order to get the story on
what to do."
With participants not yet inculcated into this problem-solving discipline, the
previously deliberative process devolved into the kind of laissez-faire
discussion that we observed for a time in Traxton Beat and also in Central
Beat. Unlike those two cases, in which residents exercised control or at least
dealt on a par with police, Southtown officers frequently asserted themselves
over residents and, more out of bureaucratic habit and arrogance rather than
self-conscious design, made decisions for the group that truncated effective
problem solving. Residents, lacking confidence in their own abilities and
authority, often accepted these decisions when they should have questioned
them. In the first such decision, already mentioned, police decided to move
regular meetings from St. Peter's Church to the Park field house. Residents
accepted this decision first because they saw it as within the purview of
police authority and second because they did not foresee that it would severely
depress Hispanic participation.
In a second destructive decision, a police offer announced at the February
1997 beat meeting that "We don't want to discuss drug houses like we have in
the past, because you never know who is at the meeting." They reasoned that
gang members might attend these public beat meetings to gather intelligence on
which residents were making trouble, and then target those residents for
retaliatory action. Instead, alleged drug houses would be reported on a form,
filled out by citizens and collected by police, and police would deal with the
problem properties with their own methods and on their own recognizance. While
it is true that many residents feared criminal retaliation and a few had even
suffered intimidation for their participation in community policing activities,
there was no evidence that gang members or others involved in narcotics
trafficking had attended Southtown beat meetings. More importantly, a flat
prohibition on discussion of drug houses erects a major barrier on
problem-solving deliberation. During the period of observation, there were at
least two active crack houses in Southtown, and residents had from time to time
brought these up as potential priority problems. By submitting the location of
these areas to police rather than themselves devising solutions, residents
would be unable to monitor police progress or indeed whether the police had
exerted any effort at all. Beyond this, as we saw with the drug house
strategies in Traxton and Central Beats, police are unlikely to develop the
full range of effective strategies on their own. Finally, many measures would
have protected citizens from retaliation while still allowing group discussion
and strategizing; for instance, they could have decided that all drug house
problems would be handled by volunteer committees. Unfortunately, residents
accepted the gag-rule without comment as a reasonable measure that fell within
the decision scope of police facilitators.
Aside from setting these procedural constraints on deliberation, the tone and
cooperative character of problem-solving itself turned downward after November
1996. Police answered some resident calls for action with narrow police
solutions--most often by increasing patrol--at the same time that they offered
excuses to justify inaction on other problems rather than developing innovative
strategies. Residents, on the other hand, recognized the limitations in police
responses but also failed to offer constructive proposals. An exchange that
occurred at the March 1997 beat meeting illustrates the missed opportunities to
develop joint solutions:
Black Female: On [Jefferson and 54th Street], I understand
that there was a shootout and one person was shot. Why wasn't our community
informed about this?
Police Officer: We can't inform everyone about every crime. It's
doesn't show up on this sheet[12] because the
guy didn't dies. He was shot in the buttocks.
Black Female: There have been approximately five shootouts and two
homicides [near that address]. It seems like the police should be more
involved. Its getting warm now. Those same people are still living there.
Police Officer: There were shots fired yesterday. We are aware that
there is a problem there and we are dealing with it with [increased]
presence.
Had they been more experienced or better trained in the Chicago style of
community policing, either the police or residents might have offered
strategies that have become quite common in various beats--described in
previous chapters--that beat groups have developed to combat such problem
properties: search warrants, titles searches to identify owners, the nuisance
abatement ordinance, city inspections, and housing court. Unfortunately, no one
proposed such strategies.
The tension between police and residents, and the unwillingness of the police
to propose constructive solutions, is again illustrated in the following three
beat meeting exchanges between police and residents:
Black Female: A while ago, there was a black man in a house [near mine],
and a group of Latin Kings surrounded the house [and trapped him in there].
This was a month ago. I called 911, and a sergeant drove by in a truck, but he
just kept going.
Police Officer: In that situation there is no complainant and there is
nothing that we can do.
Black Female: If you could listen to what I am saying, he should not
make a complaint. I am looking at this out the window, and describing every
detail to 911. The man could not call in because there was no phone in the
house.
And:
Black Female: They want my daughter to join a gang. They pulled a gun
on her, and I don't know what to do about this. She doesn't want to call it in
because she thinks that they will kill her.
Police Officer: There is nothing we can do unless there is a call. You
have to take care of this yourself.
Finally:
Black Female: [At 51st and Hamilton, there is] a little store
on the corner seems to be a meeting place for gang bangers. They hang out
there, throw rocks at [passing] cars.
Police Officer: The Tact[ical] team [undercover officers] made six
arrests on this corner about five days ago. If people will sign the
complaints, we will take them out.
Black Female: We will file complaints. When my daughter was walking
home, they tried to jump her out in front of that store.
Tactical Officer: We are aware of the problem at the store. There have
been numerous complaints about rocks at cars, ...
Neighborhood Relations: You can thank the ACLU [American Civil Liberties
Union] for repealing a gang law [that would have empowered us to act on
this]
But of course there were many possible strategies for both police and residents
for dealing with the problem liquor store and the alleged gang members,
beginning with negotiations with the owner, as in the pancake house problem of
Traxton Beat (chapter 13). Unfortunately, neither police not residents offered
these strategies.
The height of police arrogance and unilateral action in this period occurred
when the District Commander cancelled the July and August 1997 beat meetings in
Southtown over the vocal objection of several active participants. According to
one frustrated activist:
Three weeks ago, I met with the Commander for an hour and half. He said that
the meetings would be cancelled, partly because many officers were on furlough.
He himself could not come because he was pretty busy. He would not move on
this... So I am looking at a dictator type Commander, a snide and unresponsive
alderman, and I am wonder, `is my effort really going down in flames?' I am
stuck in a gear that I can't get out of here.
Last week, there was a drive by shooting, on Sunday, at a house a block form
mine. The house returned fire, and a woman's house who was in between had her
windows shot out. On Monday, the car came back for retaliation.
Lest these relations seem more dismal than they actually were, it should be
noted that the police did respond and act effectively to resident complaints
when such actions fell within the core of the tactics and routines to which
they were accustomed and therefore did not require creativity or concerted
action with residents. For example, on one public corner where residents
allegedly that men dealt narcotics and harassed passers by, police deployed
additional patrols and plainclothes officers arrested several of the
perpetrators. At a later meeting, one resident observed to police that: "I know
that you guys are doing a great job on the corner of ____ Street and _______
Ave. Those guys ... are not there right now [and have not been lately]."
Another problem concerned prostitution on the far south side of the beat. At
the February 1997 meeting, residents and police exchanged the following
information:
Black Male: We live at _______, by shrimp and tire place. Seems like
the prostitutes and dope dealers hang out there. They come out behind our
garages. You have to go out there and say "hey, what are you doing?"
Police Officers: Is there a particular time frame?
Black Male: Usually at night. The girls leave when you come out.
Police deployed both patrol cars and specialized units over the following weeks, and reported in the March 1997 beat meeting that:
Police Officer: We have had special units up and down Michigan Ave. We
have made 100+ arrests...
Black Male: Are the Johns arrested?
Tactical Officer: No, because most of the women are arrested for
soliciting rides.
And residents acknowledged in later meetings that the prostitution in the targeted portion of the beat had virtually disappeared.
Like Traxton Beat, the two phases of success and relative failure of
deliberation in Southtown Beat make it somewhat difficult to evaluate the
degree to which Street Level Democracy advanced the core democratic values of
effectiveness, fairness, deliberation, autonomy, and solidarity there. This
brief evaluative section makes two claims with respect to the realization of
these values. First, the initial period of observation, between August and
November 1996, saw the rather extensive realization of each of these values.
Despite the initial conditions of poverty and conflict, SLD in Southtown Beat
during this period, performed as well as it did in Traxton Beat (chapter 13)
and better than in either Southtown School or Central Beat and certainly better
than the command-and-control policing arrangements in Southtown Beat itself
prior to community policing reforms. Second, the latter period of deliberative
problem solving in Southtown, marked by the departure of the J.C.P.T. training
team, was less successful in advancing democratic values than SLD as
implemented in each of the previous three cases examined thus far. Measured
according to its own value criteria, therefore, the reform was something of a
failure in Southtown Beat during the latter period. Nevertheless, even during
this period of relative failure, the values of effectiveness, autonomy, and
deliberation were better realized than under Southtown's prior
command-and-control regime. Solidarity and fairness, furthermore, suffered
little if at all.
Consider the first core democratic value of effectiveness. In four
short months, residents and police acting in the context of SLD community
policing managed to solve two enduring problems that had plagued the
neighborhood for years: they cleaned up the Stilps house and they dramatically
reduced crime and violence (as far as we can tell) by re-opening Southtown
Park. Many of SLD's mechanisms of effectiveness, described in chapter
9--directed discretion, institutional innovation, complex coordination, and
studied trust--came into play in the implementation of these problem solving
strategies. We thus rank the first period of SLD problem solving highly
effective. Though the second period was far less so--residents and police
failed to develop innovative strategies--the mechanism of directed
discretion--the capacity of the residents to direct the attention and
energy of police--remained intact and community policing meetings provided
ongoing opportunities for residents to monitor police activity. This resulted
in police attention to particular problems--e.g. narcotics sales on particular
corners and areas of dense prostitution. Police, especially if they relied on
their traditional strategies of emergency response and preventative patrol (see
chapter 5)--might well have remained oblivious to, or otherwise ignored, these
problems. We therefore count the relatively ineffectual problem-solving
activity of Southtown Beat during the second observation period as nevertheless
more effective than pre-reform policing.
SLD procedures in the initial observation period advanced the second core
democratic value of fairness by directing the public safety energies of
police and residents according to a deliberative procedure that includes the
prioritization of problems. Whereas in the prior regime, police energies were
directed according to the random logic of preventative patrol and emergency
response, residents--both Hispanic and Black--and police agreed on particular
priorities after full discussion and selected the Stilps house and Southtown
Park. The fairness of community policing in the second observation period is
more difficult to gauge. On one hand, the lack of Hispanic participation in the
process suggests that African-Americans would be able to unfairly monopolize
policing resources and deploy them exclusively on their own concerns. On the
other hand, African-Americans participants in the process affected the
deployment of police resources quite marginally; they increase patrol here and
there, but that is all. It is clear that African-American residents were
slightly better off in the second period of observation compared to the prior
command-and-control regime because they were able to steer, in a limited way to
be sure, the use of police powers. It is not clear, however, that Hispanic
residents fared less well under the low period of SLD than prior to the reforms
because they received similar levels of patrolling and emergency response
service.
We say that core democratic values of deliberation and autonomy were
substantially advanced in the first observation period because Hispanic and
African-American residents and police officers participated robustly in problem
solving discussions and acted in good faith to implement the results of those
deliberations. In the second period, Hispanic participation fell off
substantially and the quality of deliberation between African-Americans and
police decreased. Nevertheless, even in the second period, communication and
highly constrained discussions between residents and police continued under SLD
whereas the prior regime of command-and-control policing provides for no such
formalized interaction. We therefore say, more tentatively, that both autonomy
and deliberation were marginally better realized in the second observation
period of Southtown Beat than under the prior policing regime.
Does this drop-off in Hispanic participation validate the perspective of the
Theorist of Difference (see chapter 11) who doubts that constructive
deliberation can occur in culturally diverse contexts. Two considerations weigh
against this skepticism. First, there was successful deliberation that included
both cultural groups in the first period, and so difference itself does not
preclude deliberation. The Theorist of Difference might respond that this
success was only fleeting, and that cross-cultural coalitions of that sort
cannot be maintained over time. The proponent of SLD, might respond to this
objection by arguing, as I did above, that the retreat of centralized
facilitation and training resources--the incomplete implementation of SLD's
"Supportive Center"--explains the Hispanics drop-off, not some inevitable
decline of cooperation. This proponent would argue counterfactually that, had
the J.C.P.T. team or some similar group remained in the neighborhood, diverse
participation would have continued. Unfortunately, since the supportive center
did retreat in the case of Southtown beat, the available data do not allow us
to adjudicate between these two contending views.
Consider finally the value of solidarity. The first period brought Hispanic
and African American residents together in unprecedented cooperation that
generated the kind of mutual respect and appreciation that constitutes
solidarity, and so that value well realized, just as the normative theory of
SLD predicts. In the second period, however, the isolation of Hispanic from
African-American residents returned when the former group stopped participating
in the community policing process. Aside from the enduring construction of a
multi-cultural public space in Southtown Park, solidarity between the two
groups returned to its low, pre-community policing levels. In the second
period, we might say that the solidarity between African-Americans and police
suffered under SLD institutions. When thrown together in supposedly cooperative
setting, police often offered excuses and acted non-constructively, and
residents resented them for these attitudes. Under the command-and-control
mode, such dispositions might have remained latent and therefore residents
might have entertained more generous perceptions of their police officers. It
would be a mistake to call these good feelings true solidarity, however, for a
worthwhile solidarity must be grounded on accurate assessments;[13] an unexplored and untested trust does not count as
solidarity at all.
We move across city now, from the far southern edge of Chicago to the heart of
its historic South Side. Central School is located in the middle of the
neighborhood of Central discussed in chapter 14 and depicted in Figure 14.1.
Like the Harambee (chapter 14) and Traxton (chapter 16) Schools, Central School
serves children from Kindergarten through eighth grade. The school's total
enrollment in the 1995-6 school year was 727 students.[14] Reflecting the neighborhood in which it sits, the
school's student body is quite poor, slightly more so than those at Harambee:
92.4 percent of the students come from low-income backgrounds and 100% of them
are black. The mobility rate of students in 1996, however, was a high 44.6
percent, slightly lower than that of Harambee. In that same year, class sizes
were substantially larger than Chicago averages:[15] Central Kindergarten classes averaged 28.2 students,
first grade classes averaged 29.6 students, the average third grade class had
29.3 students, and there were 27.3 students in Central's average sixth grade
class.
Since the children who attend Central and their parents are homogeneously
African-American, the area lacks Southtown Beat's ethnic cleavages.
Unfortunately, this racial uniformity has not translated into the unified
interest in effective school governance that we saw at Harambee. Instead,
factions of Central's parents and community members have contended quite
vigorously with one another and against school administrators in recent years
over a number of fundamental school issues such as principal selection and the
use of discretionary school funds. As we shall see, these conflicts prevented
not only the concerted deliberative action for school improvement at which SLD
aims, but even honest communication between parents, staff, and the school
principal. These paralyzing conflicts are somewhat surprising in light of a
widely read 1993 report of the Chicago Consortium on School Research (Bryk,
Easton, et. al. 1993) that praised Southtown School for the unity and
effectiveness of its school governance community. That report cited Central as
"one of the most actively restructuring schools in Chicago," and attributed the
success of the school largely to its Local School Council:
The Local School Councils in [Central and the other five actively restructuring
schools] are vital institutions. They are definitely an important part of the
ongoing discussion about the improvement of the school community, and they help
out where they can... In the past, both groups [teachers and parents] often had
been alienated from the local school. They had little reason to believe that
they could make a difference or that anyone would really care if they tried.
Now, ... principals [of the six schools] are engaged in a conscious, sustained
effort to convince parents and teachers that "together we can make a
difference." (27-8)
In my own interviews, Central's community and staff school governance
participants seconded this report's glowing assessments of Central School, but
they added that relations between various school actors had since turned sour.
Between 1984 and 1994, Central School enjoyed the extremely popular
principalship of Marcy Gilson.[16] According
to participants who were active in that period, she used her skills as a
facilitative leader and the freedom brought by the 1988 school decentralization
reforms to lead problem solving experiments that improved critical aspects of
school operation and academic performance in just the ways prescribed by SLD.
Central initiated volunteer programs, incentivized with monetary stipends, to
increase the involvement of parents in the supervision and discipline of
students. The school participated in a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) program that brought them college educated teaching aids. In
1993, it joined a partnership with education experts at Northwestern University
in what was then called the Total Schools Program. This effort applied business
principles such as basic statistical quality control to various aspects of
school performance such as test scores, attendance, and classroom discipline.
Though the causes of school improvement are difficult to determine, many in the
school thought that these and other efforts produced better educational
outcomes. Then LSC Chair Nathan Bowles[17]
recalls that "1992 was the highest year [of student test scores], and we
thought that we had turned the corner [of school improvement]." One year later,
the Consortium report mentioned above ranked Central as one of the city's most
promising schools.
Marcy Gilson's retirement for health and other personal reasons in 1994,
however, cut short this experiment and marked the beginning of a downward slide
in relations between various factions of the school community. With Gilson's
departure, the Local School Council faced the difficult decision of selecting
another principal. Like some University tenure decisions, the discussion over
this choice was heated, some say duplicitous, and many of those involved
continued to bear grudges for years afterward. The LSC began its search process
by forming a committee, composed of 12 teachers and 18 parents and community
members, that reviewed applications over a six week period. Beginning as
deliberative problem solving should (chapter 7), the group first agreed on
three selection criteria: the next principal should (i) be an expert in reading
instruction, (ii) have charisma that can unify the diverse school community and
provide a social model to students, and (iii) demonstrate proficiency in
administration. Three top candidates--call them A, B, and C--were ranked on a
series of questions based on these criteria.
Candidate A was a reading expert and disciplinarian. However, she angered some
staff by stating in her interview that if hired, teachers would have to pursue
additional training. Candidate B had been a principal at another Chicago
school, and had received her training in social work. Though the criteria were
on their face neutral between interests of parents and teachers, teachers as a
group ranked B above A and parents generated the opposite ranking. Some parent
and community committee members suspected that teachers objected to Candidate A
because they feared her harsh management style, but this point was never voiced
in public deliberation. As further evidence that unstated interests rather than
justified arguments guided the process--and thus that it was not an earnest
deliberative process--one participant notes that behind it all there was "Lot
of personal stuff. One teacher's son had gotten busted for having a gun by
[Candidate C], but this didn't come out in the discussion. None of their
reasons came out in the discussion - [they just said] `We just don't like her
[Candidate A].'" Candidate B prevailed in the final vote, with all of the
teachers and two parents supporting her. Since Candidate B, call her Principal
Krauss, became principal of Central in 1994, many of the best teachers at the
school have left. One long time LSC member who continued to oppose Ms. Krauss's
candidacy, noted with pyrrhic satisfaction in 1996 that, "I personally know...
a lot of teachers on the [search] committee now think that they made a
mistake."
When I began observations of Central School in November 1996, the parties to
school governance--active parents, community members, teachers, and Principal
Krauss--were still divided along the factions that formed during the 1994
principal selection decision. To some extent, these rifts had reproduced
themselves as older participants transmitted particular biases to newer ones,
but many of those who joined in the 1994 decision were still active and bore
hard feelings over the conflict. As a consequence, the energies of the LSC
between 1994 and 1996 seem to have been consumed with bureaucratic infighting
and attempts by all sides to build complex alliances between the principal and
various teachers: the principal with one section of the parent representatives,
while one stable section of the community representatives tried to build
alliances with parts of the school staff and with parents against Principal
Krauss.
Though the primary axis of contention was whether Krauss ought to continue
principal of Central, no faction had attempted to explicitly remove Krauss
between 1994 and the beginning of my observation period. Instead, factions
fought over many other school decisions and as a result, staff and LSC morale
were driven to very low levels. For the first three months of observation,
between November 1996 and January 1997, decision-making was far from
deliberative. All sides were suspicious of untoward maneuvering on the part of
the others--changing committee meeting times to restrict attendance, using
minute rules to move agenda items from full LSC meetings into closed executive
sessions or to remove them from the agenda entirely, and withholding
information. Much of the LSC discussion revolved around these procedural issues
rather than upon the substantive difficulties of governance or school
improvement and so conflict paralyzed the body. Consequently, the school as a
whole, while they may not have been harmed by any particular LSC actions,
certainly did not benefit from concerted action on the part of its legal
governors in this period.
Unlike the unified LSC and school community at Harambee Academy, the
self-conflicted paralysis at Central School had prevented the school from
embarking upon any major systemic innovations since the departure of Principal
Gilson in 1994. Many dimensions of the school's operation--including academic
performance, discipline, and the condition of the grounds--seems to have
suffered from this collective inaction.
The most visible signs of this decay came from the building itself. Unlike the
well-lit, clean halls and rooms of Harambee, Central's rooms and halls were
ill-kempt and often dark. Though the building itself was over-crowded, the
failure to repair water damage rendered three classrooms unusable and thus
further exacerbated class size limitations. Insufficient resources do not
explain this inattention to the physical infrastructure of the school, because
Harambee and Central received comparable levels of per-pupil funding in their
school budgets. Beyond this, as we saw in Harambee, a coherent Local School
Council can leverage financing from various sources to improve its physical
plant. Beyond this, the school also suffered from rather high chronic truancy
rates; in 1996, six percent of its students missed more than 10% of the school
days without excuse (Chicago Public School 1996).[18] Teachers and other school staff complain about being
unable to discipline those children who attended class. At the end of 1996,
many classes were loud and unruly, and children often roamed the halls without
supervision.
As a result of being placed on probation, discussed in the next section, a
team of external educational auditors from the Chicago Public Schools at the
Department of School Intervention visited the school in October 1996 to assess
its strengths and weaknesses. The report[19]
listed many more weaknesses than strengths, including:
[Sigma] Poor LSC budgeting decisions.
[Sigma] Polarization and school politics interferes with implementation of
instructional program.
[Sigma] Teachers need intensive monitoring.
[Sigma] School staff not effectively utilized.
[Sigma] Lack of effective teaching strategies.
[Sigma] Instructional techniques not keyed to learning styles of students.
[Sigma] Teachers not trained to use existing technology.
[Sigma] Staff sometimes loiter in halls when they should be in class.
[Sigma] Poor classroom management.
[Sigma] Poor housekeeping.
[Sigma] Student work often not graded.
[Sigma] Funded but vacant teacher positions.
[Sigma] Poor physical plant.
Perhaps the most damning and consequential indicators of non-performance,
however, were the low standardized test scores of Central's students. In 1996,
only 14.6 percent of students there met or exceeded national reading norms
according to the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), and only 13.4 percent of
Central students met or exceeded math norms on that test in that year.
According to this standardized test, Central falls within the lowest decile of
worst-performing Chicago schools in math and reading. While the significance of
test scores, even ones as low as Central's, is a hotly contested matter among
educational scholars, these scores brought grave consequences for the school's
governance. The Office of Accountability at the Chicago Public Schools (CPS)
central office used aggregate school test scores to assess whether or not to
intervene in a school's internal governance and administration. Beginning in
1996, it placed all city schools in which fewer than fifteen percent of the
students failed to meet national norms as measured by the ITBS on a special
probation status (Catalyst Staff 1998). Central fell easily into the group of
71 elementary schools that CPS placed on probation.
In the fall of 1996, school governance participants at Central, and indeed knowledgeable observers of educational reform throughout the city, were unsure how this new program of academic probation would be applied. Many feared it as a thrust by central office administrators to take back much of the autonomy that had been given to the LSCs under the 1988 law (see chapter 4). This shift of power from individual failing schools back to CPS central authorities was the obvious interpretation of probation. How else would a team dispatched from the "Office of Accountability" at CPS headquarters put a failing school back on track other than by putting it in a kind of centralized receivership? To the surprise of Central LSC members, the next few months under probation did not involve giving up power to external authorities. Instead, the probation team forced LSC members and others in the school community to break through their entrenched lines of conflict into more serious deliberations about strategies that might improve the school. Over the months from October 1996 until the end of my observation period in June 1997, the probation team performed two urgent functions attributed to the "supportive center" in chapter 8 above. First, facilitators from the team recognized the deliberative breakdown (8.1) in Central's LSC. Much like Roger Sanchez's J.C.P.T. team in Southtown Beat, they were perceived as a legitimate and neutral third party that helped school participants work through their entrenched conflicts. At least as importantly, they approximated the function of networking inquiry (8.3) by appraising Central LSC members and school staff of administrative and classroom techniques developed in other, more successful Chicago schools so that Central might incorporate these practices into its own strategies.
When the probation team, consisting of several education and school
governance experts from CPS headquarters and an outside consultant hired as
"Probation Manager," began its intervention in September, they quickly observed
that constructive deliberations within the LSC had completely broken down. Of
the many contentious issues in the LSC at the time, the continuation of parent
stipends was the most controversial and heated. As mentioned above, Marcy
Gilson had under her principalship established a practice of paying small
stipends to parents who volunteered to work as hall monitors, disciplinarians,
and escorts at the school. By 1995, the amount of money devoted to paying these
parent stipends had grown to consume $70,000, a substantial portion of the
school's discretionary budget. Members of the LSC were bitterly divided over
whether or not they should continued to fund the stipend program. Opponents saw
the program as a hand-out to low income community members who contributed
little to the school environment. They suspected that those on the LSC who
supported the program had close friends or relatives who benefited financially
from it, and so raised the issue of corruption. Supporters of the program, on
the other hand, argued that it forged critical links between school and
community and that the school could certainly use the help given the
demonstrated inability of its staff to control students. Furthermore, stipend
supporters suspected that its opponents' real, unarticulated, objections to the
program had more to do with protecting teacher job areas from volunteer
encroachment and insulating the school from community monitoring than with
their professed interest in school improvement.
In its October assessment of Central, the probation team sided with the
opponents of parent stipends by stating that the "LSC approved funds for
exorbitant ($70,000) parent stipend[s]." Stipend supporters feared that this
authoritative statement dictated the end of the program. In a February meeting
at Central, an LSC member who supported the program asked the supervisor of the
probation team whether this report was a command to end the program. In an
articulate and unequivocal declaration that probation's purpose was not to
direct school practices in command-and-control fashion, but rather to force the
LSC to self-consciously deliberate about best school improvement strategies,
the team supervisor responded that:
I understand that some [in the Central community] were offended by the
statement that the amount allocated to parent stipends was exorbitant. We have
to call it like we see it. We normally see less than $10,000 in parent stipends
[at the schools we visit]... [Discretionary school funds] are supposed to be
used for the kids best interest. That same $70,000 could buy a summer school,
grade and homework retrieval system, or an enrichment program. I am not saying
that the $70,000 is being wasted, but I am asking whether you can spend it on
something more effective. What you did in the past, and what worked in the
past, may not be the best strategy now. You are supposed to see this [probation
assessment] report as a suggestion and use it for self-reflection. If you don't
agree with it after self-reflection, then discard it.
Each of us needs to examine what we have always done and see whether we can do
something that is more effective. If you don't do things differently, you can't
expect better outcomes. We have plenty of schools that move from 5 to 30%
improvement [in terms of percent of students meeting national testing norms]
and you should look at what they are doing. If you look and reject, then fine.
But at least you will be doing so from and intelligent and informed
perspective.
With the help of the probation manager's facilitation and knowledge of best
practices at other Chicago schools, several LSC members and school staff formed
a committee to develop a "Probation Corrective Action Plan," analogous to but
more immediate than the School Improvement Plans discussed in chapters 4 and 8,
to consider the issue of parent stipends and school strategies more generally.
Stipend proponents eventually accepted arguments that the funds could be used
more effectively, and went on to work with previously opposed factions to
develop a number of new strategies in their Corrective Action Plan.[20] Some of these strategies responded to the
weaknesses identified in the probation team's assessment report, while other
addressed issues that those inside the school knew to be problems but went
unnoticed by the outside evaluators. Everyone at Central, including the staff
themselves, realized that teachers there varied enormously in their quality.
The first goal, then, was to improve the classroom performance of teachers.
Strategies including monitoring the performance of teachers by comparing the
test scores of their students across time and across teachers within Central,
summertime professional development training for teachers, and formation of
teacher teams to discuss lesson plans and teaching strategies. In the area of
curriculum reform, teachers would concentrate on improving reading by adopting
thematic teaching units, new instructional materials, and by experimenting with
the popular computer based "Writing to Read" program. To reduce chronic
truancy, the LSC decided to create and fund a new position of "Attendance
Coordinator" visit the homes of truant students and to coordinate with social
service agencies. To increase school and classroom discipline, they decided to
implement a hall monitoring program, develop more clear in school suspension
procedures, and direct teachers to formulate and post clear rules for
acceptable classroom behavior. Despite the severe factionization that had
poisoned collective governance over the two years prior to probation, the
Corrective Action Plan received wide endorsement--all sides viewed its
strategies as promising avenues to building a more effective school--and it was
eventually adopted into Central's School Improvement Plan without objection.
The cooperative experience of forming a Corrective Action Plan warmed
relations among previously warring factions. Each began to recognize that the
other was not simply interested in parochial gain or obstructionism, but had a
common interest in improving the school. The ice broke in the following
humorous, but indicative, March 1997 LSC meeting exchange between the leader of
the faction opposed to Principal Krauss, a black man, and a black woman who was
one of her principal supporters.
Male: We need some training on teamwork, and we can get training for
free from [a Chicago non-profit organization]. We aren't going to get much
done unless we are a team.
Female: What did you say?
Male: I said that we aren't going to get much done unless we are a
team.
Female: Repeat that two more times and put it in the minutes.
By June 1997, LSC members seemed to have transcended their histories of conflict. They began to behave cordially to one another and, more importantly, to deliberate substantively on school improvement issues rather than using meetings as occasions for gaining political position. In the last Central LSC meeting of that academic year, the agenda contained two potentially incendiary items: allocation of discretionary funds and appropriate indicators of school progress. All of the LSC members participated in a reasonable discussion of school needs, and reached a consensus on allocations that would, among other items, fund capital improvements to increase classroom space by repairing damaged rooms and to install fans in classrooms without them, fill shortages of instructional materials, extend the school's computer network, and to purchase additional equipment for the science lab. Whereas a discussion of indicators of school progress such as test scores would have likely drawn accusations and defensive responses only six months earlier, LSC members used the June meeting as an occasion for thoughtful reflection on the school's weak grades--the third grade turned out to need the most attention--and need to better identify the particular grades that posed truancy and mobility problems. Finally, prior meetings of the principal selection committee had agreed to renew Principal Krauss's contract for another three years. This committee decision was unanimous approved--even by those who had bitterly fought her--by the entire LSC.
Without the probation team's successful effort to induce Central LSC members to
question their own practical positions on school strategies and to refocus
their attention to the broader, common, goal of school improvement, however,
the congenial relations that make deliberation possible would probably not have
developed when they did. Like Southtown Beat, then, the intervention of a
"Supportive Center" transformed initial conditions of conflict into effective
problem-solving deliberation. How do these two periods of Street Level
Democracy--the deadlocked months prior to the intervention of the probation
team and the more deliberative period that follow--rank on the scales of our
five core democratic values?
On the first dimension of effectiveness, it seems that command-and-control
arrangements would have performed better than Central's LSC governance when it
was deadlocked, but not as well as the LSC after the probation team helped to
reinstate the deliberative process. In the former period, changes to school
operations were largely paralyzed by conflict. Under the command-and-control
mode, the principal would have been able to act unilaterally on at least some
issues of curriculum change. In the latter period, however, the LSC began to
use the authority devolved to it under the SLD reforms of local school
governance to develop and implement creative and thoughtful strategies for
school improvement. Though observations of Central School were too brief to
reveal whether these changes would yield measurable improvements in test
scores, truancy, graduation, or life prospects, they seem prospectively quite
promising because they address obvious and urgent problems at the school.
Both the paralyzed and deliberative moments of Central's local school
governance realized the values of autonomy and fairness to a greater degree
than decisions under the command-and-control arrangements would have been. Even
during the long months when LSC members were bitterly divided against one
another, all sides expressed legitimate concerns about which they simply could
not reach collective agreement. Command-and-control administrative arrangements
would have allowed the principal to make some of these decisions unilaterally
over many objections. While this may have resulted in more effective
educational outcomes, they would have advanced autonomy and fairness even less
well than non-decisions resulting from a paralyzed collectivity. Less
controversially, it seems that outcomes under the more deliberative later
moment were clearly more fair and autonomous than those that would have been
generated under command and control arrangements because they resulted from a
consensus distilled from broad input of school staff, parents, and community
representatives as well as the principal.
School governance processes in the period after the intervention of the
probation team advanced the value of deliberation by setting into motion a
processes of effective group problem solving and action. The prior period of
internecine conflict, however, did not realize the value of deliberation at all
because parties failed to offer or receive earnest reasons and proposals, and
because they failed to act with common direction at all. With respect to the
fifth core democratic value of solidarity, it was not realized at all in the
early period of conflict--parties held great animosity toward one another. At
the end of the observation period, however, parties had begun to build
solidarity through the slow and painful process of cooperation and studied trust.
The
two cases discussed above clearly illustrate the difference between Street
Level Democracy and more common proposals for administrative or political
decentralization. They show that decentralization simpliciter in the
context of poverty and conflict can result in substantial exclusion and
paralysis that ills serves our core democratic values. Good fortune can
overcome such exclusion and paralysis. For example, Central School luckily
enjoyed, for a time, the leadership of a principal as talented and popular as
Marcy Gilson. Counterfactually, Southtown Beat might have been able to develop
a bi-racial community policing coalition even without the J.C.P.T. team if a
bi-lingual, committed, activist familiar with community policing procedures had
lived in the neighborhood. Absent these salubrious accidents, however,
decentralization alone can yield quite dismal outcomes under unfavorable
neighborhood conditions.
The design of Street Level Democracy, however, moves beyond simple
decentralization by prescribing the construction of a supportive administrative
center (chapter 8) that can provide assistance when assistance is needed.
Residents of poor neighborhoods will likely benefit from the training and
specific policy knowledge that such centralized resources can provide. Since
contexts of high conflict are almost by definition more subject to deliberative
breakdown, citizens there can benefit from the facilitation and guidance that a
supportive center might provide. This institutional design recognizes the
intuitions that drive the Strong Egalitarian concern that residents of poor
areas will lack the material wherewithal to deliberate effectively, the
Technocratic concern that inescapable differences in applied knowledge make
deliberation between poor residents and their street level bureaucrats
untenable, the Strong Rational Choice expectation that reasonable norms will
not constrain self-interest, the worry of the Theorist of Difference that
deliberation across cultures will yield domination or confusion. Rather than
accepting the ultimately skeptical conclusions of these views, however, Street
Level Democracy offers the institutional mechanism of a supportive center to
ameliorate inequities and conciliate differences. This mechanism was partially
instantiated by CPS's probation teams and the CPD's Joint Community-Police
Training teams. In the cases of both Central School and Southtown Beat, the
interventions of these groups transformed situations of conflict and exclusion
into fair and effective deliberative problem-solving.
[1] Street names have been changed to conceal
the location of this case.
[2] Name of church changed to preserve
anonymity.
[3] Name changed.
[4] Name changed.
[5] Name changed.
[6] Name changed.
[7] See chapter 9 above on complex
coordination.
[8] See chapter 9 on Directed Discretion.
[9] Recall from chapter 4 that Chicago Police
administrative areas are composed of beats, which are then aggregated into
Districts. The City as a whole contains 24 police Districts, each with between
nine and fifteen beats.
[10] Though far less elaborate, the Parks
District offers neighborhood governance opportunities that roughly parallel
those of community policing and school governance; if a neighborhood has the
wherewithal to organize a local Parks Council, officials in charge of
administering the Park will follow their direction in programming, operations,
and some staffing decisions.
[11] Discussed as "limited practical reason"
in Chapter 6 above.
[12] The officer is referring to a list of
most frequent crimes on the Beat that is passed out at each beat meeting.
[13] See the discussion of studied trust in
Chapter 9.
[14] Statistics in this paragraph were drawn
from Chicago Public Schools (1996).
[15] See 14.2 above for citywide average class
sizes in these grades.
[16] Name changed.
[17] Name changed.
[18] The Chicago wide chronic truancy rate in
that year was 4.7%, and the rate at Haramabee Academy (Chapter 14) was 3%.
[19] Office Of Accountability, Department of
School Intervention, Chicago Public Schools. "School Report" Dated October 30,
1996. Document on file with author.
[20] On file with author.