The usefulness of Galileo, a neural-network computer program, was explored in the analysis of 157 eleventh-grade essays on the problems of the Chicago Public Schools and how to solve them. Without subjective coding or characterization of the essays, the program detected salient and meaningful patterns of statistically associated words that pervade the essays. The patterns were grouped into the following categories: funding and school facilities, violence, teachers and administrators, student self-perceptions, and families and communities. In view of current scholarly interest in qualitative data, often in the form of writings and transcripts of interviews and field notes, network analysis appears to have considerable potential.