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Council of the Great City Schools

The Council of the Great City Schools originated in a meeting of an ad hoc coalition of a dozen urban school leaders in 1956. The coalition was founded by Ben Willis, superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools, and Sargent Shriver, president of the Chicago Board of Education and brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy.

Historical Context

The period in which the coalition was founded would prove to be a tumultuous and prophetic one for urban public education. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned de jure segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, setting in motion a series of wrenching efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to integrate schools across the land. A year after that momentous decision, Emmett Till, an African American youth, was murdered in Mississippi, an event that accelerated the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. In December of that same year, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a White man on a Montgomery bus. In 1955, too, Levittown-type housing represented 75% of all new housing starts, marking the point when the majority of the nation's big cities began losing population to the suburbs. That year, also, conservative economist Milton Friedman first proposed the idea of private school vouchers. In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act, providing a ready exit from the cities that African Americans were flocking to for jobs and opportunity. In 1957, a reluctant Eisenhower called the Army's 101 Airborne Division into Little Rock to protect nine Black high school students, who would form the vanguard of efforts to make the promise of Brown real. In the same year, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, triggering major reform in America's educational system.

It is lost to history whether Shriver and Willis fully understood the forces that swirled around them when they formed that initial coalition, because much of the group's original work centered on the need for more vocational education in the cities that were suffering from a profound decline in their manufacturing base. What was not lost to history was that the coalescing of those leaders of big-city school systems in 1956 would lay the groundwork for an organization that would eventually devote itself to addressing the issues of equity, equality, and excellence that emerged during this volatile period.

Early Years

In its first year, the ad hoc coalition took the steps necessary to ensure the group's sustainability by forming an executive committee of superintendents and school board members—a unique organizational feature that is a hallmark of the Council of the Great City Schools today. The coalition also created bylaws and offered memberships to leaders of other big-city school systems. By early 1959, the group, which then operated without staff, adopted the formal name the Great Cities Program for School Improvement. The new entity participated actively in the Gray Areas Project, a Ford Foundation–funded initiative to address problems associated with urban poverty, including those pertaining to education, and it identified a broad range of issues on which it would focus: demographic changes, fiscal needs, teacher recruitment, aging facilities, and urban economic development.

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