Pursuing Peace in Chicago Ron Huberman has spent his first year as schools CEO confronting an epidemic of urban teen violence. By Ron Schachter February 2010

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He's patrolled the streets of Chicago, kept the local trains running on time and become a player in the highest echelons of City Hall. But at age 38, Ron Huberman—born in Israel and raised just outside of Chicago—is facing his most formidable challenge.

The new Chicago Public Schools CEO, who took over from Arne Duncan after President Obama tapped Duncan to lead the U.S. Department of Education, has spent his first year on the $225,000-a-year job addressing a daunting landscape of inner-city violence that students can encounter simply by walking to school. Huberman is the third CEO appointed by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley since he took over CPS—the country’s third-largest school district—in 1995.

The first was Paul Vallas, who is best known for rebuilding the sprawling school system’s physical infrastructure. Duncan’s legacy includes Renaissance 2010, a project he designed with Daley to replace 100 low-performing schools by this year with newly constituted “turnaround” schools and a large number of brand-new charters.

Huberman prepped for his seven-year run, starting in 2001, by serving as Vallas’ chief of staff . Now it’s Huberman’s turn to lead the district’s more than 400,000 students and 23,000 teachers. “Chicagoans know Ron to be a devoted public servant who can accomplish any task he is given,” Daley declared in January 2009, announcing the appointment of Huberman. “My experiences with the Chicago Transit Authority and as the mayor’s chief of staff had difficult fiscal challenges and challenges around performance, and they let me implement complex management solutions,” he says. “They were great grounds to learn what works and doesn’t work in large organizations.”

Ron Huberman talks with parents on Chicago’s South Side after a Back to School rally last September.

Huberman was born in 1971 in Israel to parents who had survived the Holocaust, moving to Tennessee and then to the suburbs of Chicago, as his father, a cancer researcher, changed jobs. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Huberman joined the Chicago Police Department, where he worked as a beat cop and gang specialist before moving into administration. “I was looking for a different kind of experience and loved public service, where I could give back,” Huberman says of his career decision. “And nothing could be more interesting then being a beat officer.”

While working for the police department, he added to his public service credentials with a master’s degree in business and social service administration from the University of Chicago. He then served as the mayor’s chief of staff and head of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), where he spent almost two years before starting at CPS. At the CTA, Huberman often took the train to work and was known occasionally to remove unruly passengers by himself.

At CPS, Huberman hit the ground running with a flurry of initiatives, none so urgent and nationally publicized as his extensive plan for school security and student safety, which will use $30 million in federal stimulus funds over the next three years and draws heavily on the new CEO’s background.

“My years as a police officer, viewing the world from the streets of Chicago, gave me a very good lens on the challenges our students face,” he says. “On a very fundamental level, the issues of violence and how it affects communities and schools hasn’t changed that much since then.”

Michael Shields, the district’s director of security, says the city’s nearly 300 street gangs and 10,000 gang members—many of whom are enrolled in Chicago’s schools—represent a longstanding problem. “Many of these gangs, especially the larger ones, have been in this city for 50 years,” says Shields, who is a 22-year police veteran who rose to the rank of deputy superintendent of Chicago’s police department before he was hired as security director. “We’re talking about third- and fourth-generation members. It’s part of the fabric of this city, and it’s something we’re trying to overcome. Ron has an excellent grasp of how gangs impact schools on the outside and inside.”

Shields, who emphasizes that Chicago’s schools themselves are generally safe, says the district has been keeping track of casualties to its students outside of school for more than two years. In the 2007-2008 school year, 23 students were killed on Chicago’s streets, while 211 were shot. The number of student deaths rose to 34 in 2008-2009, when there were a record 290 shootings.

But one particular attack brought the city’s problem to national attention. Last September, an honors student on his way home from Christian Fenger Academy High School on Chicago’s tough South Side was bludgeoned to death by a group of young men.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, with Huberman behind him, outlines initiatives to curb violence at Chicago schools in October. The plan includes more police officers at schools during dismissal times and after-school programs.

The attack was captured on cell phone videos for a shocked country to witness. Kenyatta Stansberry, the principal of William Rainey Harper High School, which also is located on the South Side, says that particular crime has also left its mark locally. “Parents are speaking up more. They’re very fearful,” she says. “And we have more parents picking up and dropping off kids than ever before.” “It put the spotlight on what we had set out to do, and it underscored the need for the program that Ron was pushing,” Shields adds.

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