Chicago Hope

By David Hill

Power walking down a deserted corridor at the Chicago Public Schools' massive headquarters, Maribeth Vander Weele suddenly notices a fresh tag on the wall, courtesy of the Latin Kings, one of the city's more notorious gangs. "That's new," she says, not breaking stride for even a nanosecond. "I'll have to get someone to paint over it." She'd probably do it herself--if she only had the time. And for Maribeth Vander Weele, time is of the essence. Since being named the district's chief of investigations one year ago, she has devoted practically all her waking hours to ridding the Chicago schools of corruption, fraud, and abuse. "This is a mission," says the former Chicago Sun-Times investigative reporter, who made a name for herself by exposing wrongdoing in the school system once dubbed "a terrible human tragedy" by former Secretary of Education William Bennett.

A petite woman with a sunny personality that belies the toughness within, Vander Weele, 36, spent five years at the Sun-Times , the scrappier of Chicago's two daily newspapers. She was like a one-woman Woodward and Bernstein, documenting a culture of corruption that had long been taken for granted by the bureaucrats at "Pershing Road," Chicagospeak for the school district's factory-like central office. (Sample headline: "Widespread Waste, Foul-Ups Uncovered at School Board.") "She was a tough, indefatigable reporter, primarily in the areas of corruption and waste," says Linda Lenz, editor of Catalyst , a monthly newsletter that chronicles school reform in Chicago. Vander Weele, Lenz adds, was the first reporter at either daily to take an investigative approach to covering the school system. "That kind of reporting had never been done before."

Vander Weele saw herself as carrying on the tradition of people like Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel, The Jungle , about Chicago's meatpacking industry, shocked Congress into passing the nation's first pure-food and drug act. She wasn't just a reporter;...