Abstract
Chicago’ s mayoral control has been criticized for taking away democracy from educational administration. The mayor has promoted school closures and privatization rapidly with objectives that are far away from children’ s development, such as urban renewal. Under this situation, residents in Bronzeville began developing“Community Educational Plan”which draws a picture of what the school education should be through discussing the future of children and their community. This movement seems to pursue the resident autonomy in educational administration autonomously. It’ s important to examine this movement for the purpose of rethinking the way that the democracy or resident autonomy in educational administration should be. This article analyzes the process of making and contents of this plan and reveals its features and significances. Through this analysis, this article reexamines the principle of the local residents’ autonomy in educational administration. This article concludes with implications that 1) this case seems to prove the necessity of establishing schools rooted in the community by the local residents’ autonomy, 2) residents were able to consider a long-term outlook of children’ s development as responsible individuals by community-level resident autonomy, and 3) it’ s essential to propose what the appropriate urban renewal should be from the perspective of children’ s development.
