The challenge

Public schools in America’s largest cities have long faced shrinking budgets and pressure to adopt high-stakes testing. At the same time, their students have become increasingly diverse in language and background. Back in the 1980s, the Chicago public schools were doing a particularly poor job of meeting these challenges, according to the leaders of Parents United for Responsible Education. Indeed, the organization was founded during that difficult decade. The school system was limping from crisis to crisis, and its administrators and boards often left parents out of decision-making, especially parents from low-income and minority backgrounds, PURE’s leaders say. They considered this lapse particularly egregious, considering that fully 85 percent of students in Chicago public schools are from low-income families.


Seeds of commitment

Wanda Hopkins, Johnny O. Holmes, Ismael Vargas, and Julie Woestehoff come from Chicago’s “four corners”: the predominantly African-American West and South sides and the Latino community, which is divided between the Southwest Side and more ethnically mixed North Side. Each of these leaders is or has been the parent of children in the Chicago public schools. And all can cite multiple connections with their client population: For more than two decades, for instance, Hopkins has helped lead the Cabrini-Green public housing community. A dynamic speaker, she attended Chicago Board of Education meetings for years, testifying on critical issues, prior to her involvement with PURE.

Holmes became involved in PURE when, as the chairman of the Local School Council (LSC) at his son’s school on the South Side, he asked the organization for help creating new music and computer programs. Vargas, bilingual in English and Spanish, chaired his children’s school council, advocating for the needs of immigrant families. And PURE helped Woestehoff address problems at her sons’ overcrowded school. That school’s LSC subsequently increased parent involvement, ending what PURE said was the illegal misdirection of school resources to a gifted program serving mostly white children.


Accomplishments

PURE was created in 1987 by parents and teachers who pledged to hold public officials accountable for a series of crises in the Chicago public school system. In an early move, the organization helped establish a six-parent majority on each of Chicago’s elected LSCs. But in 1998, the LSCs’ power to help set school policy and curriculum, hire principals, and decide on local expenditures was threatened. When local officials tried to eliminate the school councils, PURE and other organizations stopped the move. PURE has also tackled school budget crises, controversial disciplinary procedures, alleged misuse of system funds, and barriers to parent involvement.

PURE is particularly concerned when children are denied enrollment. When this occurs—through suspension or the threat of expulsion—PURE’s leaders work to return children to the classroom. They have helped stop grade retentions they judged inappropriate, won needed bilingual services, and trained approximately 25,000 parents to understand their legal rights. The organization has further helped reverse policies that based third-, sixth-, and eighth-grade graduation on passing one standardized test. PURE also operates an extensive electronic and newsletter network and produces cable TV programs to reach often-isolated parents.

With 800 paying members, the organization remains Chicago’s only citywide, parent-based school reform group. “Each of us was that one parent in the school who researched the law, made dozens of phone calls, stood up in front of everyone, and said what needed to be said,” the PURE leaders say. Now they train other parents to take similar action.


Their Leadership style

Among PURE’s leadership tools and strategies are bilingual parent training, testimony at public meetings, demonstrations, lawsuits, and civil rights complaints. Priding themselves on their “pit-bull” persistence, PURE’s leaders take on new issues only after extensive research and collaborative strategizing. Although the four awardees each have separate projects and clientele, they share decision-making and pool information to identify systemic problems and trends.

“When we find out that a problem comes up in more than one school, suddenly we have a mission,” they report. “We value and protect PURE’s integrity by doing our homework and not taking on an issue until we know it well, and know what we want to do.” PURE offers workshops to parents and LSCs, participates in LSC meetings, and conducts individualized education-plan meetings for students who need special education. “We advocate for parents, and then we challenge them to learn how to be strong advocates themselves. We show other parents by our example what they can do,” PURE’s leaders write. “We say, ‘If I can do it, you can do it.’”


The future

“We intend to spread the word everywhere about what parents can do and how LSC-style school governance works to empower parents here in Chicago,” the PURE leaders write, describing their plan for a national organization, PURE USA. Hopkins, a powerful motivational speaker, will be its spokesperson while continuing to conduct parent workshops in Chicago. Holmes, PURE’s television producer, plans to produce a growing number of high-quality programs and videos. Vargas, who recently moved to Cicero, a Chicago suburb, hopes to enter politics. He is also encouraging suburban school districts, particularly those with large Latino populations, to adopt more parent-empowering LSCs. Woestehoff will continue to oppose high-stakes testing and focus public attention on better ways to improve public education, and to build support for LSCs throughout the Chicago public school system, and beyond.


More about Hopkins, Holmes, Vargas, Woestehoff and PURE

“In a city of groups vying for scarce resources, it takes a special set of skills to be successful—you have to be smart, wise, assertive, and know how the system really works on the ground…This is what PURE has done.”
— John Simmons, Executive Director, Participation Associates, Chicago

“Wanda, Johnny, Ismael and Julie are fearless leaders in the seemingly endless fight against bureaucratic intimidation and misinformation, especially of those from low-income communities. Parents across the nation are increasingly looking to PURE for advice and as a model of advocacy and training that they might replicate in their communities.”
— Diana Lauber, Managing Director of the national Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform