Brizard to hear what politicians, community has to say

After fewer than two weeks on the job. Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean Claude Brizard has embarked on a listening tour, trying to find out what Chicago parents, teachers, principals and students want, but he's also doing a lot of talking, expounding on his own philosophy for improving schools. Brizard has already met with the City Council's Black Caucus, CPS principals and other groups, sharing his views on what can be done to improve performance in Chicago.

He sat down with the Defender editorial board, and talked about - among other topics - school turnarounds, a process that has met with much consternation here in Chicago.
"I'm a little concerned about this last round, this past year, because Terry (former interim CEO for CPS Mazany) pushed a lot of transformation model . . . which can be the more loosey-goosey approach." said Brizard. "It is softer. You keep all of the adults, you don't change anything, you just pour some money, change the curriculum, change some things.
"That stuff works if you have the right leadership in place. So imagine that you're not the greatest leader, you don't have the greatest of teachers, but I'm going to give you up to $6 million over three years, and will tell you to change yourself. So it is kind of hard to do that."
Brizard said that his preferred way to turnaround a school is to change the dynamic of the student body.
"In most failing schools, you tend to have a concentration of either low-performing, or special ed or English language learning kids in one place," he said. "As educators, we know a homogenous population of struggling kids is arecipe for disaster.
"You bring in a heterogeneous group of kids - high-performing, low-performing, middle of the road." he continued. "You put kids together in the same room. The kids who are low-performing they benefit from the high-performing."
Brizard said his recent meeting with the City Council Black Caucus was very important, noting that the aldermen wanted to have more information on the front end about schools, rather than after the fact.
"They said we know you are doing a facilities survey. We know we are going to have to consolidate, because there are too many schools and we've lost a lot of population. Bring us in on the front end of this conversation and not on the back end," said Brizard.
"There are unique dynamics in Chicago that we have to pay attention to," he said, noting that gangs in Chicago were smaller and didn't have the well-defined lines of demarcation that are in place in New York City, where he was schools superintendent. He said the prevalence of neighborhood schools also figures into school closings.
"We need to look at this as not just a school restructuring, but a neighborhood restructuring." he said.
Brizard said that while he is a supporter of charter schools, he worries that "at times you may put a school in place that is drawing from the entire city, and at the same time, if you are doing that you are hurting a neighborhood school. You could be, sucking the lifeblood out of a school by building another school nearby, even though it is serving a lot of kids.
"It's going to be tricky." he told the Defender. "It goes back to not just the politics, but it goes back to the culture of the community that will make this work a little bit more difficult."
Earlier in the week Brizard and Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced cuts in the school district's central office and other areas that totaled $75 million, in an effort to pare down the estimated $700 million budget deficit. Unfortunately, at almost the same time, the state Legislature announced that it would cut the appropriation to Chicago Public Schools by $77 million.
"We're kind of running in place with that," said Brizard. But he said that the new school board, which has not yet met, would come up with spending plans to eliminate the budget hole. Both he and Emanuel stressed that the state should pay up the estimated $330 million it already owes, which would nearly halve the deficit. Emanuel also stressed that all of the stakeholders should expect to make some sacrifices - including teachers - to bring the district into solvency.
Brizard said that it would be up to the school board to decide whether to ask the teacher's union to open up the contract to forego negotiated 4 percent raises, which is one tactic former CEO Ron Huberman proposed.