Battle for public education in Chicago heats up on road to first school board elections

Chicago, IL – The resignation of the entire Chicago Board of Education on October 4 exemplifies a new phase of the fight for Chicago’s public schools. Current contract negotiations are happening with a mayor who is a former teacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer, and amidst school board elections coming up on November 5, both of which are unprecedented in Chicago’s history. The Black and brown and working-class people of the city have an opportunity to undo the damage done to the public school system by decades of systematic defunding under neoliberal mayors, and to take further steps towards community control of the schools.

“None of the members leaving the current board planned to continue onto the hybrid board, and none are running for election,” the outgoing board said in a joint statement with Mayor Brandon Johnson. “With the unprecedented increase in board membership, transitioning new members now will allow them time to orient and gain critical experience prior to welcoming additional elected and appointed members in 2025.”

The statement also highlighted areas of agreement between the outgoing board and the mayor, such as “shifting away from inequitable student-based budgeting, completing the change to a school safety model that does not rely on school resource officers and focusing on black student success.”

The main point of contention between Johnson and the school board is the job of CPS CEO Pedro Martinez. CTU Vice President Jackson Potter referred to Martinez as a “Lightfoot leftover” not simply because he was appointed by previous Mayor Lori Lightfoot, but mainly due to his commitment to neoliberal budget cutting policies typical of Lightfoot and every other Chicago Mayor since Harold Washington. His proposed budget for 2025, approved by the outgoing board, made no provisions for raises, new positions, programs, and other features of the new contract.

With federal COVID relief funds drying up in 2025 and the city already in a $500 million deficit, funding for schools is a complicated question, but there are clear differences between those who prioritize fully-funded schools and those who don’t.

Johnson and the CTU have proposed various sources of funding including tax increment financing (TIF) development funds, short term loans, taxing “not for profit” university hospitals with billions of dollars in their endowment, and money from the state of Illinois. Martinez on the other hand favors layoffs and budget cuts to cover the deficit.

For decades, Chicago mayors have also preferred cuts and layoffs. From when career privatizer Paul Vallas was appointed by Mayor Richard M Daley as the first CEO of CPS in 1995, Chicago saw hundreds of schools closed and thousands of teachers laid off. Despite these cuts, neoliberal mayors still took out short-term loans which created the budget deficit inherited by Johnson.

The ire aimed at Johnson over his approach to the school board and budget is therefore not about loans or stability, as the same groups that are attacking him over education had no issues with loans or personnel changes under previous mayors. The agenda of groups like the Illinois Policy Institute and the Illinois Network of Charter Schools is to gut the public education system and replace public schools with charter schools, which are ultimately accountable to shareholders and not the students and communities they are supposed to serve.

The Illinois Network of Charter Schools has pumped money into the campaigns of pro-charter school board candidates to oppose candidates endorsed by the CTU and allied organizations; those candidates include longtime defenders of public schools such as Aaron Jitu Brown and Reverend Robert Jones, who both joined a 34-day hunger strike to save Dyett High School from closure in 2013.

With election day less than three weeks away, the CTU is once again at the front lines of a fight between corporate power and people power. If candidates like Brown and Jones win, these historic elections will move Chicago towards a fully-funded school system where decision making power is in the hands of teachers, parent, and students, rather than corporations that own charter schools.

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