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About Pure

Our Mission

Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) exists to build support for and enhance the quality of public education in the city of Chicago by informing parents about educational issues, bringing the views of parents into the decision-making process, and acting as an advocate for parents in their relationships with the school administration.

Each year, PURE provides direct assistance or referrals to hundreds of parents and local school council (LSC) members calling our hotline for help and information. PURE provides informative and empowering workshops for LSCs in all areas of their responsibility. PURE also offers a variety of parent workshops and develops new workshops to meet parents expressed needs. PURE publishes four newsletters to keep parents, LSC members, and other school leaders informed of current educational changes and issues. PURE works actively to focus attention on the parents' perspective in any discussion of critical school problems through such means as press conferences, public testimony, and editorials.

Some of PURE’s recent accomplishments and honors include:

With a staff of four presenting 2,220 workshops with a total attendance of over 30,000 between 1996-2005. About half of those workshops were presented in Spanish.
Last year alone we attended 370 meetings in 64 schools for individual advocacy, discipline and IEP hearings, and other issues. This work has helped dozens of students get back into school and improved services to special education students.
Filing a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights which led to major improvements in the fairness and educational soundness of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) student promotion policy in 2000. For example, the policy’s segregated Academic Preparatory Centers for eighth graders unable to “pass” the Iowa test have been shut down and the programs moved into high schools. Recent reports show that the eighth grade graduation rate of the students in the programs has doubled and the one-year drop out rate has decreased from 21 percent to 16 percent.
Creating a national model for successful public school parent advocacy work cited in the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’s November 2003 Educational Leadership magazine, national parent involvement expert Anne Henderson’s book, The Case for Parent Leadership, and as a case study at the November 2004 national conference of the Applied Research Center of the University of California, Berkeley.
Winning a 2003 Ford Foundation Leadership for a Changing World (LCW) award, one of 17 awardees selected from a pool of more than 1,300 nominations representing individuals and leadership teams that are tackling some of the nation’s most entrenched social problems.

While there are other groups working to improve public schools, PURE has a special role in focusing on issues from the parents' point of view. PURE’s Board of Directors, membership of nearly 800, staff, and constituency are multiracial, multi-cultural, and economically diverse.

PURE's History

PURE originated during the infamous 19-day school strike of 1987. We began holding classes for our children outside City Hall while the schools were shut down. To give parents a voice in this struggle, we held weekly meetings at Wells Park which resulted in the famous march on City Hall. At the culmination of this march, we met with Mayor Washington who assured us that the schools would be open the following Monday.

After the strike ended, we agreed that sweeping changes were needed to improve our schools. We continued to meet so that parents would play an active role in planning these changes. In the spring of 1988, we, along with other school reform groups, were invited to the office of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan to hammer out the school reform law. We developed a list of 13 objectives we wanted to see incorporated into the law. One of our most significant points, resisted by other groups, was that the majority of LSC members should be parents. All 13 objectives were written into the law.

Until the law was passed, our efforts went towards lobbying for passage of the law, informing the public about the law, and combating special interest groups which were trying to sabotage our efforts. We also filed a lawsuit charging the Chicago Board of Education (CBOE) and the Illinois State Board of Education with misuse of $2 billion of State Chapter I money.

After the law was passed, we organized parents and gave workshops to encourage parents, teachers, and community members to run for the LSCs. More than 17,000 candidates ran in that first election. After the election we trained thousands of LSC members in the details of the new law. We held other citywide workshops in areas of interest for LSCs. We published a newsletter which provided up-to-date information about education and school reform issues.

We became advocates for schools and their parents and teachers. We filed a lawsuit against the CBOE when they ordered the LSCs to make a decision about principal retention by February 28, 1990. The CBOE backed down in court. In 1991 we successsfully challenged a proposed amendment which would have permitted schools to reevaluate special education students without their parents' permisson. We have filed complaints with the U.S. Office of Civil Rights on behalf of special education parents when schools misused their special education teachers, failed to provide speech services, and in other ways denied appropriate services to special education students.

We established by-laws, a permanent Board of Directors, and a paid membership. In spite of these formal actions, we have maintained that ability to make quick decisions and take action which has made PURE such an effective organization.