“You were never supposed to talk to the media,” says an educator with decades of experience in the Chicago Public Schools. “Some did and some didn’t, and a lot of the old-timers who were willing to take risks are gone. This is not an atmosphere where risk taking is encouraged.”
The educator offered me a context for thinking about Bond’s service to the public schools. I heard the atmosphere at CPS is pervaded by trepidation: a lot of old faces have vanished, while new, young, and inexperienced faces popped up in positions of command. “I’ve had people I’ve talked to for years whose voice will literally shake when I get hold of them, and they’ll say, ‘I can’t say anything,’” says another Chicago reporter who frequently covers the schools. “They’re laying off hundreds of people, especially at the central office, and job security is really high on people’s list. As much as they might not agree with what Huberman’s doing, they don’t want to be out there trying to find a job.”
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Transparency is a virtue throughout government, and the need for it is especially compelling in public education, where every policy change affects the lives of tens of thousands of children. But openness doesn’t thrive in a climate of fear. Huberman took over as chief executive officer of CPS in January after a couple of years running the CTA, and Bond, who’d been in charge of news affairs at the police department, joined him in February. After a while I began hearing that the flow of news out of CPS had all but dried up under Bond, that everyone was afraid to say anything to the media, and that Bond was gaining a reputation among reporters as more of an obstacle than a conduit.
Huberman, like Duncan before him, has no background in education. But then, CPS has been taken over by “really bright young people with minimal experience,” the educator interviewed at the start of this column tells me. People like that make familiar mistakes, and one of them is to think the way to get their hands around a massive and complex institution is to reduce it to numbers. “Everything’s about data now,” said the educator regretfully. “It’s got to be measurable.”
Reporters had Duncan’s cell phone number, and when they left messages they knew he’d get back to them, even at unlikely times like 7:30 in the morning. Cunningham and his number two, Mike Vaughn, didn’t drop the protocol, but they let it out a couple notches. They wanted a policy person in headquarters explaining policy to reporters, but principals were certainly entitled to talk about their schools. Their advice to principals contacted by reporters, Cunningham says, “was to call us first and let us know what it’s about. But that was not a mandate. It was strictly a suggestion. We just may know a lot more things about the reporter and where they’re coming from than you will. Sometimes the principals know the reporters well, and we’re fine with that.
When I called Bond, she told me nothing at the CPS communications office has changed from Duncan’s day, at least not formally. “When I got here it seemed there was already a system in place,” she said. “I found a lot of principals automatically called the office of communications. I think that is a very good coordination process. Sometimes there are issues a principal or teacher is not comfortable speaking about. We kind of serve as the conduit to get out as much information as we can.”
I e-mailed Bond back with three questions: What’s online now and what will be online? Is the Freshman On-Track Lab data going online? And did the process of putting information online begin with Huberman or earlier?
