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Obama Looks to Lessons From Chicago in His National Education Plan

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By SAM DILLON

CHICAGO — Senator Barack Obama learned how hard
it can be to solve America’s public education
problems when he headed a philanthropic drive
here a decade ago that spent $150 million on
Chicago’s troubled schools and barely made a
dent.

Drawing on that experience, Mr. Obama, the
Democratic nominee for president, is
campaigning on an ambitious plan that promises
$18 billion a year in new federal spending on
early childhood classes, teacher recruitment,
performance pay and dozens of other
initiatives.

In Dayton, Ohio, on Tuesday, Mr. Obama used his
education proposals to draw a contrast with
Senator John McCain, his Republican opponent,
and to insist to voters that he, more than his
rival, would change the way Washington works.

Were he to become president, Mr. Obama would
retain the emphasis on the high standards and
accountability of President Bush’s education
law, No Child Left Behind. But he would rewrite
the federal law to offer more help to high-need
schools, especially by training thousands of
new teachers to serve in them, his campaign
said. He would also expand early childhood
education, which he believes gets more bang for
the buck than remedial classes for older
students.

Mr. Obama added a new flourish to his stump
speech, promising for the first time on Tuesday
to double federal spending on public charter
schools while holding those with poor records
accountable.

But more than most campaign blueprints, Mr.
Obama’s education plan reflects his own work
with Chicago’s public schools, campaign staff
members and people who have worked with him
said in interviews. His plan signals that he is
looking to apply those lessons nationwide.

“Barack has been very engaged, very inquisitive
about the dynamics of how do you improve public
schools,” said Scott Smith, a former publisher
of The Chicago Tribune who has collaborated
with Mr. Obama on education projects here for a
decade.

One of the biggest lessons Mr. Obama drew from
his experiences in Chicago, associates said, is
that student achievement is highly dependent on
teacher quality.

In the two decades since Mr. Obama arrived in
Chicago, its public schools have undergone a
sweeping turnaround, from an education
wasteland to a district that, while still
facing major challenges, is among the most
improved in the nation. The city has closed
many failing schools and reopened them with new
staffs, making it an important laboratory for
one of the country’s most vexing problems.

The city closed the failing Dodge Elementary
School, for example, in 2002 and reopened it as
an academy where candidates for advanced
degrees in education work in classrooms under
master teachers while studying at a local
university. Mr. Obama visited the school in
2005, liked what he saw and now proposes to
create 200 such teacher residency programs
nationwide. The goal, he says, would be to turn
out 30,000 teachers a year to work in the
toughest schools.

Mr. Obama’s views have drawn heavily from a
cast of experts who helped mold the Chicago
experience. Strategies for overhauling failing
schools have come from Arne Duncan, who as
chief executive of the Chicago public schools
led the turnaround efforts. The senator derived
his views on early childhood education in part
from the work of a Nobel Prize-winning
economist based in Chicago.

The scope of Mr. Obama’s plan has impressed
many educators, but not everyone.

Michael J. Petrilli, a former Education
Department official under Mr. Bush, said Mr.
Obama’s plan was more comprehensive than Mr.
McCain’s.

“That’s because Obama is proposing what
somebody called a Christmas tree of new
programs,” Mr. Petrilli said. “McCain is
suggesting a couple of new things, but doesn’t
think Washington should spend more on education
than we already are.”

Mr. Obama’s interest in education extends back
to his work as a community organizer here in
the mid-1980s. In his memoir, “Dreams From My
Father,” he describes a school system plagued
by textbook shortages and teacher strikes. He
carried those experiences with him to Harvard
Law School, where he took courses on school
issues taught by Christopher Edley Jr.

“Barack became committed to the notion that
progress in school reform can’t come through
volunteerism and professional aspiration
alone,” said Mr. Edley, now dean of the law
school at the University of California,
Berkeley. “It has to be undergirded with a
legal and regulatory structure that rewards
success and goes after failure.”

Mr. Obama immersed himself in education issues
after his return to Chicago, where he began
lecturing at the University of Chicago Law
School and joined the boards of two education
foundations.

Chicago received $49 million from a $500
million endowment by Walter H. Annenberg, the
billionaire publisher, for school reform
efforts nationwide, and the city added $98
million in matching funds for the Chicago
Annenberg Challenge, a philanthropic campaign
that financed enrichment projects at a third of
the city’s 600 schools.

Mr. Obama was nominated to the Challenge board
and was elected chairman in 1995, said Ken
Rolling, executive director of the group, which
operated through 2001. Mr. Obama continued to
teach law during his five-year unpaid tenure as
board chairman, and he was twice elected to the
Illinois Senate.

Several board members, including two university
presidents, far outranked Mr. Obama in
education experience.

“Let me say the room had no shortage of egos,
including my own,” said Stanley O. Ikenberry, a
board member who at the time was president of
the University of Illinois. “It was unusual:
here you had a person trained in the law
chairing a board on school reform.” Still, he
said, Mr. Obama won his colleagues’ respect.

Supporters of Mr. McCain have been trying to
taint Mr. Obama by highlighting his ties to
William Ayers, a member of the violent Weather
Underground in the 1960s, by pointing out that
they worked on the Challenge project together.
Mr. Ayers was indicted on conspiracy charges
that were later thrown out for prosecutorial
misconduct.

Mr. Obama has acknowledged that he is a friend
of Mr. Ayers but has sought to minimize their
interactions. Records show that Mr. Ayers, now
a professor of education at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, helped write the Challenge
proposal. The records also show that he and Mr.
Obama worked on the Challenge project together
and that they attended some of the same
meetings.

The Challenge’s overall approach — supporting
many diverse education projects rather than a
coordinated school improvement strategy — had
been established before Mr. Obama was named
board chairman, and the board came under
immediate pressure to approve grant proposals
quickly.

“If you throw $10 on the table in Chicago,
people are going to fight over it, and we had
$50 million,” Mr. Rolling recalled.

Proposals poured in and the board eventually
financed projects involving 210 schools. Some
were imaginative: one, for example, connected
schools with museums in the Chicago area so
that students learned science from a
paleontologist at the local dinosaur exhibit.
But many were not.

“The project proposals by and large were
awful,” one board member told an evaluation
team in 1998.

Relations with school authorities were
difficult. Just as the Challenge got under way,
the Illinois Legislature gave Mayor Richard M.
Daley control of the school district, and he
began an improvement campaign based on high-
stakes testing and other measures. Annenberg’s
let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach often
seemed at cross-purposes with that strategy.

Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign,
said the reading and math scores of the lowest-
achieving students improved in the years when
the Challenge was investing in the Chicago
schools.

But a final report on the Challenge concluded
that the huge effort had brought little change.

“The Challenge’s ‘bottom line’ was improving
student achievement,” the report said. “Among
the schools it supported, the Challenge had
little impact on student outcomes.”

But the experience gave Mr. Obama an
appreciation for the multiple problems facing
urban schools, Mr. Rolling said. The city has
been a pioneer ever since in exploring ways to
recruit, train and support teachers.

This has been especially true since leadership
of the city schools passed in 2001 to Mr.
Duncan, a friend of and sounding board for Mr.
Obama. The two also frequently play basketball.

Mr. Duncan accompanied Mr. Obama on his visit
in 2005 to the Dodge school, now the Dodge
Renaissance Academy, on the West Side of
Chicago. After the school’s makeover, student
scores rose significantly, and Mr. Obama wanted
to know why.

The two men arrived with no entourage and sat
down with the staff in a library. Mr. Obama
asked about the best way to train teachers,
according to those who participated. What would
it take to keep qualified teachers from leaving
the profession? Would merit pay help? “He
wasn’t checking his Palm Pilot,” recalled Karla
Kemp, a teacher.

Mr. Obama has brought a similar intensity to
discussions of early childhood education, on
which he proposes to spend $10 billion a year.
A Chicago expert who has influenced his
thinking on this is the Nobel laureate, James
J. Heckman, an economist at the University of
Chicago. Mr. Obama’s plan cites Dr. Heckman in
connection with research that found that for
every dollar spent on prekindergarten education
and the care of infants and their families,
there is a $7 to $10 decrease in spending on
special education, remedial education and
prisons.

The two men have never met, even though they
live so close to each other in the Kenwood
neighborhood that they use the same dry cleaner
and it occasionally sends Mr. Obama’s suit
coats to Dr. Heckman’s home.

Last year, when Mr. Obama started his
presidential campaign and began preparing his
education plan, an assistant to Mr. Obama
contacted Dr. Heckman and asked him to react to
an early draft of the early childhood plan.

“I completely redrafted the section,” Dr.
Heckman said. “Most striking about the campaign
was that they listened to what I said.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Dayton,
Ohio.



— Sam Dillon
New York Times
2008-09-10


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