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To occupy myself on a couple of long airplane rides I took this week, I decided to check out what “urban school reform” meant in a different time and a different place: Chicago, fifteen years ago.

Before Ira Glass was the host of the nationally-known radio and television documentary series This American Life, he was an education reporter for National Public Radio in Chicago. He spent two years in the early 1990s examining how a set of ambitious changes played out in two schools on Chicago’s west side: in one case, a principal broke his large high school into four small schools and in the other, an elementary school overhauled its teaching methods

What struck me about the series was how familiar many of the conversations and arguments Glass recorded still sound, even though much of the context is radically different. Consider this comment from a Chicago school board member, following sudden budget cuts in 1993 that stymied the effort to break the large high school, Taft High, into smaller schools:

Taft is a prime example of how reform should work. How successful would it be? Depended upon the ability for it to have a nice, stable environment in which to work from. Current funding by the state of Illinois makes it impossible for any school to have a current stable funding source which allows it to carry through the multi-year experience necessary to set such a program. This is just one more example of that. And it’s a tragic example of it.

You can listen to the full NPR series, which ran over the course of two school years in 1993 and 1994, on This American Life’s website. Also worth checking out if you’ve never heard it is the This American Life episode Two Steps Back, in which Glass goes back to the elementary school ten years later to see how the school has fared. It includes, among other things, an interview with the future U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.