Parental and community empowerment: The Chicago model

One of the major school-reform experiments using parent and community involvement was created by the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988. The Act created a number of changes to a centralized system, among the most important being the creation of "local school councils" (LSCs) at each of the nearly 600 public schools in Chicago. Each LSC is comprised of six elected parents, two elected community members, two teachers, the principal, and, at high schools, one student representative. The LSCs were given much more authority than had ever been tried with other attempts at local control. In the 1988 Act, the LSCs were given responsibility for hiring and firing principals, designing and approving budgets (particularly overseeing discretionary funds), and creating local school improvement plans (Hess 1991).