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By DONALD SEVENER

The evolution of the State Board of Education


As with any organism, the survival of the Illinois State Board of Education has depended upon finding an ecological niche. Donald Sevener examines the latitude inherent in the creation of the board out of political chaos and the way in which the board has responded to a changing public and political climate. The first stage in this evolution was described in Illinois Issues (May 1976), when board independence was identified as the central issue. Sevener's inquiries reveal the degree to which independence has been achieved as he traces the board's evolution during its 15-year history.

The Illinois State Board of Education. Around the table from left are state Supt. Ted Sanders and 10 of the 17 board members: Louis Mervis of Danville, Denene Wilmeth of Decatur, David Juday of Sycamore, board secretary Dorothy O'Neill of Champaign, Jacqueline Atkins of Chicago, Hugh Brown of Evanston, G. Howard Thompson of Prophetstown, board vice chairman Thomas L. Burroughs of Collinsville, Frederick Rabenstein of Ottawa and Carroll Ebert of Naperville. Board members not shown in the photo are Ronald Blackstone of Homewood, Michael Bruton of Chicago, Carol Johnston of Des Plaines, Peter Monahan of Northfield, board chairman Walter W. Naumer Jr. of Du Quoin, Peggy Pilas-Wood of Chicago and Nilda Soler of Chicago.

Photos courtesy Illinois State Board of Education

GIVE Dwight P. Friedrich an A for effort — he never quits trying. Last fall, the Centralia Republican legislator renewed a battle he lost 15 years ago and many times since. He introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish the Illinois State Board of Education and replace it with an elected school superintendent. "Before enactment of the 1970 Constitution, Illinois had an elected superintent," Friedrich said. "When it was an elective position, the superintendent was responsive to the legislature, the school boards and the general public. The appointed system was touted as a way to take education out of the political arena, but instead, it has taken education out of the hands of the people."

Friedrich's amendment could not have been more ill-timed or his conclusion, probably once true, further off the mark. There have been growing pains for the state board as it evolved from its early, spoiled brat childhood into an awkward, uncertain adolescence. Now the chief policy making body for nearly two million Illinois schoolchildren, thousands of teachers and hundreds of school districts finally may be coming of age. After an often stormy and sometimes sleepy decade of existence, the Illinois State Board of Education stands today on the threshold of being the sole catalyzing force for giving public schools back to the public.

It has been a dozen years since the first members of the first state school board gathered to get acquainted April 18, 1974, as luncheon guests of Gov. Dan Walker. Later that day, in an official meeting in his Capitol office, the govenor told board members: "You are very important. You are the first board — you represent all sections of the state; you represent a number of different walks of life. We have Spanish-speaking persons, we have some black members, we have men and women. I am proud of this board. But the board is really going to be judged as time goes on, and not by how you were chosen and not by your background, but by what you do."


8/July 1986/Illinois Issues


Walker's admonition, of course, would prove to be true. Strangely, what a state school board would actually do had seemed to be the least of the concerns of the authors of the current Constitution when they debated the structure of educational decisionmaking in Illinois. How the decisionmakers would be chosen was the consuming question as the Sixth Illinois Constitutional Convention began deliberations over the future of education on April 22,1970. The convention's education committee had proposed what it believed to be a cleverly crafted (some believed wishy-washy) plan to eliminate the elected office of state school superintendent and create in its place a board of education with power to appoint the chief state school officer. The clever part was the way the committee skirted the controversial issue of the method for choosing the board. "We thought about electing," Delegate J. Lester Buford of Mount Vernon told the convention. "Half of the members of our committee favor election of that state board; the other half favors appointment of that state board. So we were perfectly willing to leave this matter of whether it would be elected or appointed to the General Assembly."


This conviction was underscored by the
assertion ... that the real state board of education was
and would continue to be the General Assembly


Others found less virtue in leaving so important a matter unresolved. "Are we passing the buck?" asked Delegate Robert Butler of Marion. "It would appear so." Butler proposed an amendment to elect the state board by region. "Unless this amendment is adopted, we quite unnecessarily run the risk of leaving the way clear for the installation of another layer of insulation between a state superintendent and the people he must serve." Dwight Friedrich. who also served as a delegate, was more biting in his defense of electing those who set educational policy: "We see here an open distrust of the people's ability to govern themselves and turn it over to — and I want to quote this [from a committee report] — 'the wise, the virtuous, and the well-born,' and that doesn't include me and you. It includes that little group that wants to take government away and have a hierarchy up here that runs it."

But those who favored a change turned the arguments of Butler and Friedrich around to justify a superintendent appointed by an appointed board. Delegate Anne Evans of Des Plaines: "I think that it has been the view of most of the groups that have been supporting an appointive superintendent over the years . . . that this would relieve him of the burden of having to go out and politick to be re-elected, which is, of course, it seems to me, an obvious interruption of his professional duties as chief administrative officer for the state educational system." The insulation from politics was considered valuable in another respect. In response to an inquiry Buford said that the state board would not supplant any powers or role of local school boards — with one possible exception: "It might change in Chicago because you would have a chief state school officer who would not be in a position of having to get a number of votes out of Chicago in order to be elected the next time. It is possible that he would go in and see that some of the legislation that is enacted would be enforced."

Butler's amendment to elect the state board failed by a scant two votes, although eventually the education committee's language was amended to say that the board would be "elected or selected on a regional basis," as if the General Assembly were likely to overlook the option to elect. An attempt by Friedrich to retain an elected superintendent failed on voice vote, as did an effort to give the governor the power to name the state superintendent.

Establishing broad mandate

In contrast to the divisive question of appointment, curiously little debate was devoted to the duties and power of the state board, although delegates spent hours haggling whether or not to define education in the constitution as the "paramount" goal of the state ("I do know what Patrick Henry did not say," observed one delegate, "and he did not say, 'Give me education or give me death.' ") before settling on the declaration that education is a "fundamental" goal. Beyond appointment of the state superintendent, the role given the board was vague. "The board," says the Constitution, "except as limited by law, may establish goals, determine policies, provide for planning and evaluating education programs and recommend financing." To a large extent, this broad constitutional mandate reflected the convention's belief that the board would have an advisory function only Buford, who was a school superintendent and thus favored the local model of a board advising and overseeing the administrator, derided the existing system under which the elected superintendent conceived, established, administered and evaluated educational policy. "Now, a lay board, concerned with education and representing all sections of the state, would certainly be a valuable educational asset to the determination of educational policies. At the local level, we never think of anything else."

This conviction was underscored by the assertion — undisputed by state board proponents — that the real state board of education was and would continue to be the General Assembly. The legislature, noted Friedrich, "will fix the policies, it will decide the programs, how much money you've got to spend, how you can spend it — have you considered that?" Replied Buford: "We want it that way. We want the General Assembly to be the final school board. But we think that the General Assembly would be willing to take some advice — some words — from a board of education it has confidence in."

The legislature had almost as much trouble grappling with the method of choosing board members as did the constitutional convention. The first attempt, during 1972, failed when lawmakers rejected the proposal of House Speaker W. Robert Blair and Minority Leader Clyde Choate for an eight-member board appointed by the legislative leadership. "Legislative leaders are elected not by the people, but by other politicians," Majority Leader Henry Hyde said. "They should not be picking boards that govern the people."

In the following session three bills emerged as possibilities for establishing the structure of the state board. One, sponsored by Rep. Roscoe D. Cunningham of Lawrenceville, would have created a superboard to govern all of education. Another, offered by Rep. Robert E. Brinkmeier of Forreston, proposed an elected state board. The third, drafted by the School Problems Commission and sponsored by its chairman, Rep. Gene Hoffman of Elmhurst, recommended an appointed board. Hoffman's bill had wide support from school management organizations and other establishment groups such as the League of Women Voters and the Illinois State Chamber of Commerce. It survived the opposition of teachers' unions and the maneuverings of then-Supt. Michael J. Bakalis, who wanted to be named as the first appointed school chief and who wanted a hybrid board of elected and appointed members that he

July 1986/Illinois Issues/9



Presenting her views at a recent meeting of the Illinois State Board of Education is member Carol Johnston of Des Plaines. In the background is board staff member Susan Bentz.

thought would serve his ambitions. Bakalis got his way on one issue. Recalls Hoffman: "I wanted a seven-member board. Bakalis wanted a larger one, 17 members. I said, 'That's too many; it would never get anything done.' And he said, 'How many members are there on the School Problems Commission?' He had me there — we had 17 members." Democrats generally followed Bakalis' lead on the issue and favored an elected board, but Republicans were in the majority and passed Hoffman's bill. "The way we held Republicans in line was we convinced them an elected board would be controlled by the teacher unions," Hoffman says. "They were the ones with the stake in the board and the money for campaigns." The desire to avoid union control of the board prompted a prohibition against board membership by school district employees, a provision that elicited an unsuccessful court challenge to the law by teachers.


'It rightfully became known as the
"desegregation board" because it spent more
time on that than any other thing'


By spring 1974 Walker had selected the 17 board members from a secret list of 50 people nominated by a special panel that the governor had created to screen candidates and recommend appointees. It was this board (minus three that the Republican Senate refused to confirm on the grounds that Walker was stacking the board with Democrats) that went from the meeting in the governor's office April 18, 1974, to undertake its only formal duty — the search for a new state superintendent. Out of 200 applications, three finalists emerged — Bakalis, the last elected superintendent; Joseph M. Cronin, the Massachusetts secretary of education; and Carl Candoli, superintendent in Lansing, Mich., who was the board's first choice. When Candoli rejected the board's offer, it turned to Cronin, who became state superintendent January 13, 1975. It was that day the board took the helm of Illinois education — a position that would take it into a maelstrom of controversy as it became known as the "desegregation board."

Launching activist role

The first State Board of Education wanted to be an activist one. According to a 1980 research paper written by Justine Walhout, a member of the first board, her colleagues were "aware from the beginning of the weak reputation of some state boards" and had read that most state board members had less influence on educational policy than the heads of teachers' union. However much the constitutional authors envisioned a background role for the state board, the first board members were, by inclination and ideology, disposed to be a strong, progressive body. They selected as their chairman Jack Witkowsky, a renegade liberal who had battle scars from campaigns against the entrenched establishment interests of the Chicago Board of Education. And in Cronin, board members had a superintendent with the philosophy, the intellectual force and the guts to lead them where they wanted to go.

The board used its regulatory power rather than its policy-shaping role as the expression for its activism. Two months after it took the helm of Illinois education, the board voted to join a desegregation lawsuit against the Rockford School District, and in May 1975 it unanimously affirmed support for rules initiated by Bakalis in 1971 enforcing racial balance in classrooms.

It was not only the emotional nature of the school desegregation issue that earned the state board notoriety and, among some local school district officials and state politicians, enmity. Between 1975 and 1979, the board took more official actions on desegregation matters than on any other issue that came to its attention, including budget resolutions. In most cases board action simply approved desegregation plans or waivers for school districts attempting to comply with the stringent rules the state board inherited from Bakalis and embraced as the means for integrating classrooms. But frequently, the board used its regulatory club — the threat to withhold recognition of a school district and hence state dollars — to prod local boards and administrators to move more quickly or more sincerely toward desegregation. The rules, which Bakalis developed in 1971 to implement a state law prohibiting racial discrimination in public schools, required each school to have a minority enrollment within 15 percent of the districtwide minority enrollment. "It rightfully became known as the 'desegregation board' because it spent more time on that than any other thing," one observer notes. Much of that time was devoted to the touchy issue of integrating Chicago's massive school system, a situation exacerbated by the dwindling numbers of white students in the state's most populous district. But other districts also experienced the state board's tough desegregation enforcement stance as they attempted to resist integration of their schools. Two of them — Aurora East and Chicago Heights — took their resistance to court in a challenge that ultimately succeeded in circumventing the board's authority. But a more immediate threat lay in another branch of government.

Ending the first era

The state board's controversial stand led some legislators to conclude that constitutional convention delegates who worried about an appointed board being isolated from the people may have been on to something. Many who have been closely associated with the board share the belief today that an elected board or superintendent could not have survived the mounting public backlash against school desegregation that was sweeping the country concurrent with the Illinois board's continued uncompromising position. Even the survival of the appointed board was sometimes in doubt.

10/July 1986/Illinois Issues


At the meeting, from left, are Gordon Brown, Illinois State Board of Education staff member; state Supt. Ted Sanders; Louis Mervis of Danville, who is chairman of the board's legislative and finance committee; and board member Denene Wilmeth of Decatur.

Through the years, beginning as early as 1974, there were resolutions sitting on legislative calendars proposing constititutional amendments to abolish the state board and return to an elected superintendent. In 1978, one of them did more than sit. Senate Joint Resolution 31 was introduced in 1977 and by the November veto session had reached passage stage in the Senate. The next April it reached the House, having left the upper chamber with just enough votes for the required three-fifths majority. It failed House passage by 10 votes, a close enough call to signal the state board that it ought to slow down its rapid pursuit of school desegregation. Robert Leininger, lobbyist for the state board, recalls that state superintendents sometimes did not appreciate the depth of legislative feeling about how far the board was distancing itself from popular opinion. "They thought we had stoppers up our sleeves, and sometimes we weren't sure we had stoppers up our sleeves."

It was the court, however, rather than the legislature that proved the undoing of the board's adamant enforcement of school desegregation. In October 1982 the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the board had overstepped its authority in the unyielding administration of desegregation regulations. The board, said the court, could not withdraw recognition of nor withhold funds from school districts that violated the desegregation rules. An era had ended.

That era had been waning for at least a couple of years. In early 1980, the flamboyant and sometimes unpopular Cronin announced that he was returning to Massachusetts. During his tenure Cronin had managed to alienate or anger just about anyone with any authority in state government. Gov. James R. Thompson disliked Cronin because the superintendent had a habit of highlighting the gap between the administration's rhetoric and its performance on education funding. Many legislators despised him because Cronin disdained the chummy good-'ole-boy network that dominated legislative decisionmaking. Local school officials often thought him haughty, patrician — an interloper with a Brahmin accent who was out of place in provincial precincts of the drawl. Although Cronin retained the confidence of the state board, its members had become increasingly weary of, even nervous about, their superintendent's high and controversial public profile.

Searching for identity

The board chose as its second superintendent a man who was everything its first one was not. Donald G. Gill was a native Illinoisan. He was superintendent of a large school district in Florida and thus brought a perspective to the job that the educational establishment thought was overdue. Most importantly, he was a plain man, not given to brash statements or behavior, willing to stand in the shadow of the board that hired him.

Yet the selection of Gill revealed more about the state board than just an inchoate desire to step out of the glare of public combat. The board seemed to be searching for more than a new personality. Having demonstrated its courage and its independence with the desegregation battles, the board realized it needed something different, more far-reaching, more long-lasting if it were to leave its imprint on Illinois education. It was seeking a new identity.

It would find its new persona as the result of a casual remark of dubious grammar that Gill made to a legislative committee in the spring of 1981. As a former local administrator, the superintendent had a strong faith in local decisionmaking. It might be time, said Gill, to "de-mandate" certain state requirements and let local districts have more freedom. With that statement, Gill laid the groundwork for what would become a major shift in emphasis, and ultimately identity, for the state board.

Largely under the direction of Gill's chief deputy, Nelson F. Ashline, the bureaucracy came to life. Half a dozen studies into every nook and cranny of state education policy were undertaken: special education, physical ed, driver's training, the three R's, noninstructional mandates, the quality of teachers and other personnel, vocational education, student achievement, even the purposes of schooling. The board's policy and planning committee supplanted its equal education opportunity panel as the place to be, the place where educationally exciting things were happening. The state board was finally assuming the role envisioned for it by the drafters of the Constitution: It was trying to become a major voice in articulating education policy. The trouble was, no one was listening.

During Gill's timorous tenure the governor's office regularly ran roughshod over the education agency on budget matters. The Illinois Education Association did so with impunity on substantive matters. Local school officials and their representatives in Springfield who once looked to Gill as their champion became exasperated with his enervation. The disenchantment even began to permeate the state board. Although the board was gradually becoming more conservative as some of its more ideological members were replaced by Gov. Thompson, not all board members were pleased with their new mission or their new leadership. Some on the board, notably Edward Copeland of Highland Park, who became the board's third chairman, and Hugh Brown of Evanston, the board member answerable to the Illinois Education Association, were not prepared to abandon the commitment, or the public limelight, of the desegregation fight. Even after the Supreme Court ruling striking down the board's authority to enforce desegregation rules, the issue served as a symbol of growing dissatisfaction with Gill's leadership. Some board members became openly contemptuous of the superintendent and were privately out for his scalp. Factions developed that split the board almost in half, with the anti-Gill coalition led by Brown, and state PTA President Arlene Zielke of Chicago barely falling short of capturing the board chairmanship in 1983.

July 1986/Illinois Issues/11


Robert L. Mandeville. director of the governor's Bureau of the Budget (standing), gives an address to the Illinois State Board of Education.

Crafting a new role

By 1985, the Year of Education had arrived in Illinois and Gill had departed for Florida. The board, after a divisive search for a replacement, settled on a new superintendent who seemed to embody the best elements of his two predecessors while avoiding their most egregious shortcomings. Ted Sanders brought a rare combination of qualities that the board needed at a critical crossroads — a keen political sense, broad experience in manipulating a bureaucracy, a talent for sweet-talking or tough-talking as the occasion arose, sedulous work habits, the willingness to stroke legislative egos, and the vision to recognize the importance of doing so.

The state board had tired of shouting into the wind. A policy role was empty, it decided, if the policies did not become law. When the Year of Education ended, the state board of education had the law it wanted, a newfound respect and something of a new role, although one that almost brings it full circle.

The board began the Year of Education with an ambitious agenda. Its studies of state mandated programs and services, its investigations of the nature of schooling and the quality of personnel had given it a lengthy shopping list. There were suggestions for toughening teacher education and evaluation, the omnipresent proposal to loosen physical education and driver's training requirements, a recommendation for a massive early childhood education effort and the board's crown jewel — a new curriculum approach based on what students should know as a consequence of their schooling. When the General Assembly adjourned, the board had about everything on its wish list — and more.

During negotiations over the final reform package, many of the details of the law were left blank, and incredibly, the board was to fill in the blanks. For example, it was directed to conduct studies of the initial year of teaching and of teacher compensation and career ladder approaches. The board was given authority to review and approve local district staff development programs. It has responsibility for defining the learning objectives, approving testing programs to measure the student performance, and demanding remediation efforts for students who fail to meet the standards. The board has the job of devising what could become the most effective citizen weapon in influencing what happens in public schools — the school report card.


The board has the job of devising what could
become the most effective citizen weapon in influencing what
happens in public schools — the school report card


All of these measures imply a strong element of state control. Indeed, many of them would seem to portend a revitalization of the board's puissant regulatory role. The image of the state education bureaucracy bludgeoning local districts into submission on testing or curriculum or teacher training or a number of other things is not unimaginable. It could happen.

What also could happen — what, in fact, should happen — is that the board will use its power not to constrain creativity in the classroom but to liberate it. Most of the policies the board has pursued in its policymaking phase — learning outcomes, repeal of mandated courses and services, local rather than nationally normed student achievement tests — have been intended to allow local districts flexibility to maneuver within the framework of broad state standards. Moreover, the board has signalled its intent to pursue a more gentle regulatory approach with approval recently of yet another study — this one an examination of the proper relationship between the state and local school districts. In proposing the study, Sanders told the board it must craft a role within the changing character of state-local relations. It must be a role, he said, that "recognizes the pitfalls for schools and children in a state response which presumes that the content of local education programs is best determined at the state level, but at the same time, one that does not shrink from implementing the law's clear intent that accountability for rationally addressing the learning problems of students is to be placed squarely on local schools."

Only a state board of education pretty secure in its identity and fairly mature in its outlook would want to examine such a portrait of itself.

Donald Sevener is a writer for Illinois Times in Springfield.

12/July 1986/Illinois Issues


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