Dive Brief:
- Chicago principal Troy LaRaviere, a vocal critic of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s education policies, published a letter of resignation this week, explaining all the ways the mayor inhibited his ultimately successful goal of making Blaine Elementary School the best neighborhood school in the city.
- LaRaviere says ending selective access to advanced curriculum and working with teachers to select evidence-based practices to improve performance helped move the school from Chicago Magazine’s 16th rank to No. 1 — and resisting mayor-backed reforms like tracking, choice and over-evaluation of teachers was critical.
- LaRaviere was elected president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association shortly before Chicago Public Schools moved to terminate his employment, but LaRaviere fought the termination to bring attention to the politics involved in the process until this week, when he tendered his resignation.
Dive Insight:
Top-down school reforms have received a lot of negative attention for their impact on teacher morale and performance, but principals often get caught in the cross-fire as well. In Chicago, the public schools are under control of the mayor, who appoints the school board — though activists have been fighting to change that for years and recently made some progress. Emanuel stormed into office with a lengthy list of education reform proposals and he has expanded the charter footprint in the city while overseeing what some have called the largest mass school closing in U.S. history, and certainly the largest in Chicago.
The Every Student Succeeds Act returns power to the states after tight control by the federal government for more than a decade. But that won’t do much to return control to schools, or even districts, when city and state government leaders have their own agendas. Still, LaRaviere found ways to resist the policies he did not believe in, bringing his school to the top of the rankings in five years.