The Education of Maribeth Vander Wheele
“It was sort of a deadly beat nobody really wanted,” a former education reporter told us after the collapse. “The stories the desk liked were the ones about the board members shouting at meetings, and maybe they were shouting about finances but that got lost.” Another old beat writer recalled, “I always found myself covering riots and demonstrations and labor crises, and there was hardly any time to devote to education itself.”
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Five years ago the Community Renewal Society founded Catalyst, a monthly newsletter, to follow school reform. Four years ago the Sun-Times hired investigative reporter Maribeth Vander Wheele away from the Daily Herald to do the same. In another era Vander Wheele would have long since paid her dues on the thankless education beat and gratefully moved on to lusher pastures. Times have changed. Vander Wheele’s still happily covering schools, and she’s just published an impressive book on the subject, Reclaiming Our Schools: The Struggle for Chicago School Reform.
John Callaway’s angry foreword to Vander Wheele’s wide-ranging book accuses the General Assembly of passing legislation that would both create school reform and doom it–by not funding the schools adequately and creating no means of monitoring them. “Believe me,” wrote Callaway, “many of these legislators want school reform in Chicago to fail so that they can confirm their worst prejudices, of which race is prominent.” Vander Wheele is not that harsh. But her book made us wonder whether reform has fundamentally changed Chicago’s educational system or simply made it easier to buck.
Marveling at this tyrannical impudence, we asked Vander Wheele if Johnson’s edict exceeded her authority. “Yes, and that’s why she rescinded it. Originally it was for every employee in the system. It’s still in effect for Pershing Road, which makes my life very frustrating.” Vander Wheele said she waits two months for answers to Freedom of Information requests, “which by law must be returned within 14 days.”
The station’s audience, if any, was largely suburban. “I wanted to show the suburbanites how the system has been undermined. In many cases the legislators are responsible for doing that. They write very weak ethics laws. They write the laws creating an inspector general and giving him virtually no staff.
“That way you don’t have to quote yourself.”
