There was plenty of scope for improvement in the nation’s third largest school district. Fewer than half of all Chicago students ever graduate. Last year 51 of the city’s 64 public high schools scored in the lowest 4 percent nationally on the ACT, a standardized college-entrance exam. In the past two decades the budget had ballooned from $719 million to $2.3 billion while the student population had shrunk by nearly a third, largely because of white flight to private and parochial schools. (Only 12 percent of the system’s students are white.) Even Chicago’s deputy mayor for education sent her daughter to a private school. “The problems are in many ways out of your control,” says Michael Bakalis, former state superintendent of schools. “I’m not sure who could move in there and deal with this situation any better.”
Kimbrough got no honeymoon on his new job. After just five months he received a D minus on a mock report card from the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools. Some criticized his salary, which is twice what former superintendent Manford Byrd was paid. And the reforms that helped lure Kimbrough to Chicago in the first place have come under attack on many sides. Principals challenged the legality of changes that diminish their authority and strip them of tenure. A month ago the state Supreme Court said the local councils violate the “one person, one vote” principle since one category of voters - parents - elected a majority of the board members. This week the Illinois General Assembly may revise the legislation so that all voters choose the six parents, two community residents and two teachers who sit on each school’s council.
Some critics worry that Kimbrough is in over his head. Although he has experience in Los Angeles, he spent the past seven years in Compton’s system, about a tenth the size of Chicago’s. “He’s certainly small town,” says high-school teacher George Schmidt. But he’s putting in big-city hours - 80 a week, he says - and doing his best to stand up to the bureaucracy. Aware that administrators often go on buying binges at the end of the school year to use up their budgets, he froze spending last May and June. In the fall he slashed more than 100 administrative jobs and 1,234 teaching positions. And he persuaded local businesses to kick in funds to pay for high-priced consultants to help run the system’s business operations. Unable to find a business administrator who also possesses a Master of Education (as state law requires), Kimbrough has had to leave the post of chief financial officer vacant.
If past Chicago history is any guide, Kimbrough has two more years in which to try to meet the expectations of disillusioned parents and skeptical politicians, after which his contract will expire and not be renewed. That, he knows, is the penalty for taking a job that requires “more than Superman - a miracle worker.” But there are compensations. For one thing, he now gets stopped for his autograph. “In California,” he says wonderingly, “no one asks a school administrator for his autograph.”
