The first day of school was two months away and already the new principal looked like a bust. After a national search, in April 2006 the Waukegan school board had picked Edward Guerra to head up Waukegan High School. Guerra had been the longtime principal at Chicago’s Farragut High School, where he was credited with reducing violence and absenteeism. But in June 2006 the Chicago Tribune revealed that Guerra was the target of a grade-fixing investigation involving star athletes at Farragut.
At the start of Guerra’s year at Waukegan, in the fall of 2006, Lake County United, a group composed of 37 area churches, synagogues, mosques, unions, and social service agencies, began a series of small-group meetings to identify its members’ concerns, expecting them to focus on crime or illegal immigration. But the primary concern of its members turned out to be the quality of education at the high school. No other issue came close.
They didn’t have to look far: In Chicago, Lake County United members found a number of open-enrollment public schools where large concentrations of poor and minority students attended classes regularly, challenged themselves academically, graduated on time, and went to college.
Proponents say charter schools foster healthy competition for students and tax dollars and give parents choices. They say the lack of red tape can make charters more nimble and innovative than regular public schools. And they see no problem with public money following students to whichever public school they choose—whether it’s run by the district or not. Opponents counter that charter schools spread already insufficient tax dollars even thinner and skim off a disproportionate share of the most capable, most motivated students; they siphon money from “real” public schools, which have fixed costs that don’t decrease when charters assume responsibility for educating a relative handful of students.
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The Lake County Federation of Teachers took the opposite view. Teachers’ unions tend to be among the most outspoken critics of charter schools, in large part because few have collective bargaining agreements. Some Waukegan teachers felt betrayed by the coalition. “We were one of the early members of Lake County United and one of the bigger members,” says Mike McGue, president of the Lake County Federation of Teachers. “We worked hand-in-hand with them on a number of issues, including trying to accomplish school funding reform. We represent three bargaining units in Waukegan, and they were just livid with the idea these guys were going to shove this down the throat of the school board and administrators.
“Basically, the reason we fell out of grace with this is we think schools should be publicly funded and publicly run, and school boards should be elected and shouldn’t be corporate run,” McGue continues. “I was cautioning leadership that there were a lot of things we could help them with, a lot of proactive things we could do under the umbrella of the local school board. If the issue was to have a separate building or kids who work in different learning models or use different learning strategies, we’re open to that. . . . We were happy to help put together a good school model, but they wanted an adversarial relationship where you wrest away power.”
Lake County United members, veterans of battles for affordable health care and housing, began soliciting support. In July ’07 ’08 they unveiled the plan at a town hall meeting at the Holy Family Catholic Church. About 900 people packed the pews.
