Health services were the most dire problem, and publicly funded “medical insurance systematically misdirects public wealth from income to the poor to income to medical professionals.” Yet change would be difficult because “many institutional leaders” had come to see communities as nothing more than “collections of parochial, inexpert, uninformed, and biased people” who understood their own needs far less well than did service professionals. “Institutionalized systems grow at the expense of communities,” and America’s “essential problem is weak communities.”
John McKnight’s influence on people exposed to his social vision was profound even if unobtrusive. Ellen Schumer, a fellow Gamaliel board member and UNO veteran, said that within the world of Chicago organizing, McKnight “really challenged the old model.” His impact was also felt throughout Chicago’s progressive foundations, with Wieboldt acknowledging that it was “fortunate to have John McKnight join us” at the board’s annual retreat “to talk about the substantive changes in Chicago neighborhoods today that require new strategies for organizers.”32
If McKnight was Chicago’s most significant social critic, the front pages of the December 3, 1986, editions of all three Chicago daily newspapers announced another: G. Alfred “Fred” Hess, a little-known policy analyst, education researcher, and former Methodist minister. After completing a Ph.D. in educational anthropology at Northwestern University in 1980, with a dissertation on a village development project in western India, Hess had joined the foundation-funded Chicago Panel on Public School Finances, and in 1983 he succeeded Anne Hallett as executive director.
Hess had made the front pages of Chicago’s daily papers nineteen months earlier thanks to a lengthy study entitled “Dropouts from the Chicago Public Schools: An Analysis of the Classes of 1982–1983–1984.” The Chicago Sun-Times had summarized Hess’s findings in a boldface banner headline: “School Dropout Rate Nearly 50 Percent!” His discovery that 43 percent of students who had entered Chicago high schools in September 1978 dropped out prior to graduation was a percentage that Obama had accurately cited a year earlier when he had written to Phil Boerner about the worst ills plaguing the neighborhoods where he worked. Hess’s data readily showed that high schools with predominantly minority populations had a dropout rate as high as 63 percent.
One Tribune story highlighted how at one Roseland high school, remaining in school did not mean students were studying. “We were sitting at a lunch table in the cafeteria rolling joints one morning,” a seventeen-year-old girl told reporter Jean Latz Griffin. “There was a security guard right next to us, but he didn’t say anything. People smoke it anywhere. Some teachers say ‘Put it out,’ but no one really does anything. You can’t snort coke inside school though. That would be too obvious.” Out of Corliss High School’s eighteen hundred students, only forty-eight were taking physics, only seventeen had qualified for the school’s first-ever calculus class, and almost 50 percent were enrolled in remedial English. A report similar to Hess’s, from a parallel research enterprise, Donald Moore’s Designs for Change, revealed that only three hundred out of the sixty-seven hundred students who had entered Chicago’s eighteen most disadvantaged high schools in 1980 had been able to read at a twelfth-grade level if they graduated in 1984.
In a prominent Tribune feature four weeks before Obama arrived in Chicago, Hess had warned that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) were damaging the city’s future. “We are in danger of creating a permanent underclass that is uneducated and unable to advance. It means a set of neighborhoods in which the majority of people are constantly unemployed and a strain on the social system in welfare and the high cost of crime. If we don’t take strong action now, we’ll pay for it later.” Don Moore emphasized how job losses were magnifying the consequences of CPS’s failures. “Parents are feeling a real desperation now because they are seeing unskilled jobs disappearing … 20 years ago the manufacturing industries in Chicago didn’t depend on employees being terribly literate. The economy has changed.” Former Illinois state education superintendent Michael Bakalis wondered to the Tribune why “the general community of Chicago, particularly the business community, has not been absolutely outraged by the performance of the Chicago Public Schools.” In July 1986, Hess told Crain’s Chicago Business that the way to reform public schools was to develop “real power for local citizens to control their local schools. Let local citizens hold local school officials accountable for the effectiveness of their schools. This would be real and significant decentralization of power that could make a difference.”
Illinois state law mandated that high school students receive at least three hundred minutes of daily instruction. Beginning in spring 1986, Hess’s Chicago Panel discovered that many Chicago high schools had fictional “study hall” classes in their students’ otherwise skimpy schedules that created a false paper trail to meet that requirement. The resulting report, “Where’s Room 185?,” released on December 2, created an immediate uproar. The Tribune editorialized that CPS “administrators are deliberately and illegally cheating students of part of the education to which they are entitled.” It also showed that in an overwhelming majority of actual classes, teachers actively taught for less than half of the class period. Noting how recently promoted CPS superintendent Manford Byrd’s response was to “hunker down and criticize the design of the study,” the Tribune declared that it was “inexcusable that it took an outside research panel” to uncover CPS’s “fundamental failure.”
The Chicago Defender ran a prominent page-three story, “Dropout Rate Irks Parents,” publicizing DCP’s desire to meet with board of education president George Munoz to discuss the problem. “We have a lot of dropouts,” DCP project director Barack Obama told the Defender. “We acknowledge that the dropout question is complicated, and there are no quick fixes to keep kids in school. We are urging Munoz to study the counseling system, recommend changes, and expand the numbers. This will have a direct effect on kids in the schools now.” Obama also said that students’ preparation prior to their high school years should be examined, “because there are a lot of possibilities out there.”33
In addition, two public controversies highlighted Altgeld Gardens residents’ problems with both the CPS and the CHA. On December 4, one day after “Where’s Room 185?” debuted in Chicago newspapers, the Defender’s Chinta Strausberg reported on six teachers at the Wheatley Child-Parent Center who had transferred to other schools because they feared that Wheatley was permeated with asbestos. Superintendent Byrd insisted that tests had shown the air at Wheatley was “safe,” but Wheatley parents threatened to boycott the school and demanded an immediate inspection. On December 15 just 37 of Wheatley’s 377 young children attended school, and for the next two days that number dropped to 17 and then 11. One parent told the Tribune, “We can’t help but notice that the kids go to school all week and come home with rashes and wheezes. When they are home for the weekend, it all clears up.”
The boycott continued until the Christmas–New Year’s break, but being “home” at Altgeld was no picnic either, as a Tribune series detailing what it called the CHA’s “national reputation for mismanagement” documented. “If I had a job, I wouldn’t be here. This is not a good place to raise kids,” one young Altgeld mother told the newspaper while complaining about the prevalence of youth gangs. Two days later the Tribune reported that Zirl Smith was resigning as CHA executive director, and the next day’s paper emphasized how “Chicago has used the CHA as a way to isolate blacks.”
When news broke that administrative ineptitude had cost CHA $7 million in federal aid, CHA’s board chairman resigned as well. Fifteen months would pass before asbestos removal finally began in some 575 Altgeld homes, almost two years after Smith’s tumultuous visit to the Gardens. Harold Washington’s press secretary, Al Miller, later recounted the mayor remarking that “he didn’t believe there was a solution” to the CHA’s profound problems.34
Shortly before Christmas, Barack Obama and Sheila Jager flew to San Francisco to spend a holiday week at her parents’