Accountable Autonomy: Toward Empowered Deliberation in Chicago Schools and Policing

Abstract

The city of Chicago hardly seems fertile ground for deliberative democratic institutions to take root and bear fruit. Although its history and environs have many contradictory strands—a tradition of machine politics, insular administrative bureaucracies installed in reaction to political manipulations, a vibrant tradition of neighborhood activism, extreme socioeconomic inequality typical of urban areas in the United States—none is particularly friendly to a politics of fairness and reason.1 It is altogether surprising, then, that two recent institutional reforms have remade Chicago’s public school and police systems into the most formally participatory and deliberative departments of their kind in the United States. Consider the basic features of these organizations. The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) consists of some 540 elementary schools and high schools. Since 1988, each of these schools has been governed by its own elected “local school council” (LSC). LSCs are elected every two years and each consists of six parents, two community representatives, two teachers, the school’s principal, and an additional nonvoting student for high schools. They enjoy substantial powers and responsibilities such as