Chalkbeat

Chicago Public Schools and Chicago Teachers Union to hold first public bargaining session

2024-06-13T23:40:00+00:00

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Chicagoans will get a window into collective bargaining between the city’s public school district and its teachers union at a first-of-its-kind meeting Friday night.

Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union will hold a public bargaining session at Marquette Elementary in the city’s West Lawn neighborhood on the South Side. As of midday Wednesday, registration to attend in person had reached capacity, but officials said it will be livestreamed on YouTube.

But at Friday night’s session — held on the first weekend of summer break — the two sides do not plan to discuss any provisions of the current CTU contract, such as those dealing with class size limits, pay raises, or other benefits. Instead, they plan to discuss “healthy, safe, and green schools.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teachers union organizer, made “green schools” part of his education platform last year. School facilities are typically dealt with in the district’s capital budget, which had its own series of public hearings already this year.

Tonight’s meeting is another sign of a more friendly relationship between the two parties.

The CTU’s current contract expires on June 30. Last week, CPS posted their opening proposals online and sent an email to parents sharing more information about how they will approach labor negotiations. CTU has posted their proposals online for members to access using a passcode, and the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, published a copy of the union’s ideas to their website.

While there is a lot for the two sides to sort out, one thing seems certain: Chicago’s new, partially elected school board likely won’t have much say over the teachers union contract during board members’ first few years on the job.

Though the length of the contract won’t be discussed Friday, the dueling proposals put forward by both sides would lock a new contract in place that would last through the first two rounds of school board elections.

CPS is proposing a five-year contract that would expire on June 30, 2029, while CTU is putting forward a four-year deal expiring on May 1, 2028.

Ten new school board members will be elected from 10 districts on Nov. 5, 2024. Those 10, plus 11 appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson, will be sworn in on Jan. 15, 2025. In November 2026, 20 members will be elected from 20 districts and the school board president will be elected at-large.

The current contract is a five-year deal that began after a 12-day strike in 2019, but negotiations between CPS and CTU occurred multiple times during the COVID pandemic around schools returning to in-person learning. The previous contract covered three school years starting in 2016, and the one negotiated in 2012 ended up being four years.

It’s common for public sector labor agreements to extend through one or more election cycles, said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment at the University of Illinois.

“Things like school board elections, things like a mayoral and city council elections, really should not be first and foremost,” Bruno said.

“They should bring a package forward that says, ‘This will be good for the district, it’ll be good for students, and it’s affordable, and teachers, our employees will be supportive of it,’” Bruno said.

A CPS spokesperson said the district wants a five-year contract “to ensure stability and predictability” to allow the district “to more effectively plan our academic and operational programming, supports, and services.”

A CTU representative said school board elections did not factor into their proposal for a four-year contract. The representative added that the union supports giving parents and communities more say over the public school system through an elected board.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson pushes education agenda with ‘urgency’ during first year in office

2024-05-14T11:00:00+00:00

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On a recent Tuesday morning, Mayor Brandon Johnson visited classrooms at Kelvyn Park High School in Hermosa to present certificates of recognition to teachers for Teacher Appreciation Week.

Flanked by an alderman and the chief of finance for the teachers union, Johnson posed for photos and created a scene rare to find before last year: The mayor standing side-by-side with teachers, some wearing bright red Chicago Teachers Union shirts.

The scene was an indicator of the pivotal role education has played in Johnson’s agenda in office.

When Johnson, a former middle school teacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer, was elected last year, it was no surprise education would be a central priority.

The union catapulted Johnson into office, and his win was the result of a decade of CTU organizing against how previous mayors approached public education. Instead of a system in which schools compete for students and parents choose the best option no matter how far they may have to travel, Johnson promised to focus on bolstering neighborhood schools, many which have seen declining enrollment and fewer resources.

As Johnson hits the one-year mark in office, his appointed school board has overseen a change in the district’s funding formula and directed district leaders to come up with a new five-year strategic plan, to be voted on this summer, that would rethink the city’s school choice system, which includes charter, selective enrollment, and magnet schools that require applications for admission.

“We have to fund our schools based upon the need,” Johnson said in a February 2023 video interview with Block Club Chicago. “Every single school should have a social worker, counselor and nurse as the bare minimum.”

But Johnson faces a big challenge in carrying out his education agenda: Chicago Public Schools is facing a projected $391 million budget deficit next fiscal year and has provided little detail on how it will close the gap. Federal COVID money is running out and he must bargain a new contract with the teachers union.

Johnson’s agenda also called for free public transit for students, housing for the district’s 20,000 homeless students, and creating up to 200 more Sustainable Community Schools – a partnership with the CTU that provides wraparound services at needy schools. None of these promises have seen any progress.

Still, education may be the one area where Johnson has made progress during his first year in office, said Dick Simpson, professor emeritus of politics at University of Illinois at Chicago and a former alderman.

“In comparison to, say, his other problems — solving crime, for instance — he is much further along on the school agenda,” Simpson said.

The speed with which Johnson can deliver on his education promises is important because he will soon lose exclusive control over the Chicago Board of Education, as the school board begins to transition to a partially elected body this November.

In an interview with Chalkbeat, Johnson said his focus on education “has more to do with the urgency that families are calling for.”

“We’re talking about decades upon decades of school closures, the defunding of our schools, the attack on veteran educators, particularly Black educators,” Johnson said. “So our urgency is really centered around the needs of our young people and the needs that our families have.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson visits the classroom of English teacher Noe Castro at Kelvyn Park High School with Principal Keith Adams and Ald. Felix Cardona Jr. (31st) in Hermosa on May 7, 2024.

Bolstering neighborhood schools, but not without backlash

Johnson’s plans to bolster neighborhood schools kicked into gear last December.

Just before winter break, the board of education passed a resolution aimed at boosting neighborhood schools and rethinking Chicago’s school choice system, which encourages kids to enroll in public schools outside their attendance zones. Half of all elementary students go to schools that are not their zoned neighborhood schools and more than 70% of high schoolers do.

Johnson has described the choice system as a “Hunger Games scenario” that forces schools to compete for students and resources and results in less investment in neighborhood schools. The resolution said the choice system “reinforces, rather than disrupts, cycles of inequity” and must be replaced with “anti-racist processes and initiatives that eliminate all forms of racial oppression.”

Though many selective enrollment and magnet schools were created under court-ordered desegregation, many still lack the diversity of the city and are largely segregated by race and class. A couple dozen are integrated, but serve more white and Asian American students than the rest of the school district.

The board’s resolution did not change any current policies or suggest the closure of any schools. Board members emphasized that public feedback would drive any changes, such as to admissions policies. Board members have, however, said they plan to scrutinize charter schools more.

The resolution was praised by advocates who have long pushed for more investment in neighborhood schools and the Chicago Teachers Union.

Johnson “ran on equity,” said Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. “He said that our school district had to be more equitable, and the resolution that came from the Board of Education is speaking to the inequity and their efforts to ameliorate inequity that are often disproportionately experienced by neighborhood schools.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson meets students as he tours Kelvyn Park High School in Hermosa on May 7, 2024.

But the resolution also sparked backlash from families whose children attend schools of choice, including those already frustrated that CPS was not providing bus service to general education students, largely those attending selective and magnet schools.

Those concerns pushed state lawmakers to file a bill that is up for a final vote this week, which would prevent the district from changing admissions policies for selective enrollment schools – something the current board signaled it may do. The bill would also prevent CPS from cutting funding for selective enrollment schools or closing any school until 2027, when the school board will be fully elected. The bill is supported by powerful state lawmakers and Gov. J. B. Pritzker.

Johnson said the bill would prevent the board from taking actions to help create “real equity” and would prevent the district from balancing its budget. He began rattling off the relatively small percentages of Black students at some of the city’s most sought after selective enrollment high schools and noted how those figures were higher about two decades ago.

“What I’m troubled by is that you have a school district that is hypersegregated and that stratification has continued to grow because you haven’t had leadership like mine directing the school board and the Chicago Public Schools to commit to real equity,” Johnson said. “So is Springfield intervening to protect segregation?”

Simpson noted that Johnson has “a more strained” relationship with the legislature and Pritzker, meaning he doesn’t have a lot of clout to fight for what he wants.

Mayor Brandon Johnson pats the head of kindergartner Triston during a back-to-school event at Jackie Robinson Elementary School in Bronzeville on Aug. 21, 2023.

CPS changes funding formula

In March, CPS announced it would change how it distributes money to schools, delivering on another major promise Johnson made on the campaign trail to end student-based budgeting, which provides schools a set dollar amount for every child enrolled.

The new funding formula will now give every school a base level of staff and discretionary money based on need, which principals can use flexibly. This “needs-based” formula is meant to break a cycle in which underenrolled schools in underinvested neighborhoods lose money because they’re losing students.

That change, too, has drawn a fresh batch of concerns.

Parent leaders at selective enrollment and magnet schools said their budgets provide for fewer staffers next year under the new formula. Some Local School Councils are voting against their budgets for next year.

CPS officials have said that overall funding to schools remains the same as last year but individual schools could see changes. The district is looking for cuts at the central office to address the $391 million deficit, CPS CEO Pedro Martinez has said. CPS has not yet released school budgets for next year to the public.

The union also raised concerns about the formula, saying it lacks guaranteed positions, such as teacher assistants, and said some neighborhood schools have also seen cuts. Davis Gates blamed Martinez – not the mayor – for those flaws, because she said he is not explaining the changes well to the public or lobbying the state legislature hard enough for more money to prevent staffing cuts to some schools.

Mayor Brandon Johnson hugs art teacher Meredith Kachel at Kelvyn Park High School as he surprised her for Teacher Appreciation Week. Johnson visited the school with Principal Keith Adams and Ald. Felix Cardona Jr. (31st) in Hermosa on May 7, 2024.

Sylvia Barragan, a spokesperson for Chicago Public Schools, said “multiple staff members” have visited Springfield throughout the session to advocate for more funding, and Martinez has pushed for more funding “for well over two years in Springfield, at our Board of Education meetings and beyond.”

CPS officials have said that no type of school is being disproportionately impacted. But Martinez has acknowledged that they are working to fix concerns at individual schools.

Mayor inconsistent on police out of schools

Some education-focused organizations have criticized the mayor’s administration for pushing big changes through or flip-flopping on commitments without properly engaging the public.

Hal Woods, director of policy and advocacy for Kids First Chicago, shared some examples. For one, the board publicly posted its resolution stating its intent to rethink school choice two days before the board voted, leaving little time for the public to digest it, Woods said. The district is currently holding hearings to collect feedback for the next strategic plan.

Parents and schools have also demanded more information about why the district is changing its funding formula, Woods said. He added that the former formula wasn’t working for many schools, but the district hasn’t shared enough about the new formula or its impact on schools.

Woods also said the mayor could be more clear with communities on his position to remove police from schools. Johnson supported getting rid of campus police on the campaign trail but later said local schools should have the power to choose whether to have school resource officers. Then in February, the mayor backed the school board when it voted to unilaterally remove officers from all campuses by next school year.

School police officers in the hallways of Lane Tech High School in Chicago.

“There’s plenty of data that shows how police in schools impact youth mental health, right, and the disproportionate impact on Black students and Latino students, but … they’re kind of making a decision based on their values without kind of educating the public on why they’re making that decision,” Woods said.

Johnson said “he will talk to anyone” and rejected the idea that his administration isn’t transparent enough. He pointed to the handful of board of education meetings that have been held at high schools in the evening instead of downtown during the day. He believes some of that criticism comes from people who “have had unfettered access” to previous mayors, and there are “people who now have access who were shut out before.”

“I’ve said all along,” Johnson said, “there’s plenty of room at the table for everyone.”

Fulfilling other promises before school board shifts

There are several promises Johnson hasn’t made progress on, including expanding Sustainable Community Schools, a CPS partnership with the teachers union that pairs needy schools with community organizations that provide wraparound services to families. Each program costs about $500,000.

While Johnson has shifted focus toward neighborhood schools, his administration is struggling to support the 8,900 migrant students and families who have arrived in Chicago from the southern border since at least August 2022.

As a candidate, Johnson promised to invest more money in bilingual education. Between August 2022 and last August – five months after he was elected – the number of bilingual-certified educators grew by 90, according to CPS. Between last August and the end of April, that figure grew by another 106 teachers.

CPS and the city also opened a welcome center to help migrant students enroll in school and access other resources. CPS said it helps direct families to schools with the proper resources when they are struggling with enrollment.

Mayor Brandon Johnson speaks at a press conference at Roberto Clemente Community Academy before the opening of a pilot CPS welcome center for newly arriving families on July 17, 2023.

Still, the union, lawmakers, and families have reported that many schools are struggling to meet the needs of migrant children, most of whom are learning English as a new language and are homeless. Those challenges include lacking enough staff to help children with specialized English instructions.

Johnson again blamed state lawmakers for their efforts to protect selective enrollment schools, saying it would “prevent us from having the type of budget, autonomy, and flexibility to invest in those schools” that lack resources to help English learners.

Johnson also hasn’t gained ground on providing the district’s 20,000 homeless students with housing — a bold promise tied to a signature campaign promise to pass the Bring Chicago Home referendum. That ballot measure, which would have used a tax on property sales over $1 million to help fund housing for homeless families, failed in March.

Ultimately, Johnson’s education legacy and the fate of his preferred policies will depend on what the future elected school board does, Simpson said.

“I do think the new school board, as it begins to take shape, will revisit these issues and either move forward with the general direction of Johnson and the current school board, or will roll them back to an extent,” he said.

It could also depend on the ongoing financial challenges for Chicago Public Schools. Asked how he will achieve his goals in the absence of more money from Springfield, Johnson said he’s exploring other “measures and steps that we can take as a city.” When pressed for details, Johnson’s office declined to elaborate.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

New leaders, COVID spending, bus troubles: 6 Chalkbeat Chicago stories that defined 2023

2023-12-21T22:45:44+00:00

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This year brought big shifts for education in Chicago and Illinois. As schools continued to return to normal and recover from the COVID pandemic’s impact on learning, the city elected a new mayor who appointed a new school board.

Schools grappled with a wave of migrants, who partly helped stave off continued enrollment declines, and the district entered a third straight year of transportation troubles.

As we approach the end of 2023 and look ahead to 2024, here are six of the biggest education stories we covered this past year:

New leadership to shape a new era

If the 2023 education beat had a theme, it might be leadership transitions. The state of Illinois got a new superintendent in Tony Sanders and Chicago got a new mayor and a new school board.

When Brandon Johnson, a former public school teacher, union organizer, and public school parent, made it into the runoff in February, he unexpectedly dashed incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s hopes for a second term. He would face Paul Vallas, a former CPS CEO who made a career as an education consultant and “fixer” turning around urban school districts.

Johnson’s victory over Vallas reflected, in part, ongoing shifts in local and national education policy. By July, he replaced six of seven school board members — a common act of new mayors — with more public school parents, community activists, and the leader of the parent group Raise Your Hand. The new board has already signaled some significant policy shifts, including moving away from a system of school choice and redoubling efforts to boost neighborhood schools.

What’s to come in 2024? Chicagoans will soon elect school board members, though state lawmakers are still working out the details of how that will happen. Before the legislature wrapped up its veto session, they did appear to agree on how the city would be divided into 20 districts after releasing their third draft of a district map.

Teresa Przybyslawski, an interventionist at Chicago’s Brunson Elementary School, works with a student on multiplication and division using flashcards. Przybyslawski, a former classroom teacher, took on the interventionist role this school year to help catch up struggling students.

COVID recovery money fuels interventionists, tutors

Federal COVID recovery money is dwindling and set to run out in 2024. But districts across the country have continued to spend millions on everything from tutoring to summer school to existing staff. In Chicago, more than $2 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds have already been spent.

After months of questions and public records requests, Chalkbeat found a complicated picture of summer school spending in Chicago in February of this year. Many schools reported strong success in offering students robust programs, but tracking participation and attendance proved difficult. Data obtained six months after an initial request showed repeat sign ups or unusually high enrollments, raising questions about accuracy.

Chicago also continues to spend a large amount of its federal funds on existing staff, including a cadre of academic interventionists. These are mostly classroom teachers already on the district’s payroll who were tapped to help struggling students catch up. The district also spent $25 million to create a Tutor Corps to support students who may have gaps in their learning from when schools switched to virtual learning during the pandemic.

But the district is not only spending its money on staff. It also used some of the money to pay vendors to help develop a new $135 universal curriculum bank known as Skyline. In partnership with WBEZ, Chalkbeat took a closer look at how Skyline is being implemented and what teachers think of it.

Outside of Chicago, one south suburban school district is moving ahead with an uncommon technology plan to keep hybrid learning at the ready.

What’s to come in 2024? Chicago is planning to spend the final $300 million of the $2.8 billion it got in the 2024-25 school year and Illinois’ education budget could see some belt-tightening as districts set about spending roughly $1.9 billion of the $7 billion.

Migrant support group at Brighton Park Elementary in 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.

Schools see influx of migrant students

Chicago has seen an estimated 4,000 migrant students coming to the city from the southern border, most of them via bus from Texas. Among the many people stepping up to help families, especially children, adjust to a new country are teachers. During summer, we featured a few teachers volunteering at a south side police station to help refugee youth navigate a new language, a new culture, and in the fall, new schools. We also spent time at one school trying to help newcomer students navigate trauma.

Amid back-to-school season, it was not clear if schools would be ready to welcome waves of newcomers. A Chalkbeat analysis of staffing data obtained through records requests found the number of bilingual teachers had declined in recent years, but teachers with endorsements to teach in a bilingual program had grown.

What’s to come in 2024? Chicago continues to struggle to manage the influx of new arrivals, which has slowed in recent weeks. Plans to construct temporary tents in two locations have been put on ice. But the city instituted a 60-day limit on how long people can stay in temporary shelters just before Thanksgiving. However, migrant students do have a right to remain in the same school and receive transportation if they’re forced to move. (Leer en español.)

Joshua Long is the new Chicago Public School District district's department leader for students with disabilities on Mon., Dec. 11, 2023.

Special education sees shakeup

Chicago Public Schools has struggled to provide services to students with disabilities for several years and the COVID pandemic only exacerbated the issue.

In June, Chalkbeat obtained documents that found the district was violating state law on the use of restraint, timeout, and seclusion in school. Two days later, the top official overseeing the department that serves students with disabilities stepped down.

After that departure and after Johnson appointed a new school board, the district asked the public for input in hiring a new special education chief. In December, officials announced it had found a new special education leader from among its own ranks. Joshua Long, the longtime principal of a school for students with disabilities, was approved by the school board and will start his new role in January.

What’s to come in 2024? Long inherits a troubled department that remains under state watch for use of restraint, timeout, and seclusion in school. It also continues to face challenges providing students with disabilities with transportation, which they’re entitled to under federal law. Last year, hundreds of students with disabilities were on the bus for longer than 90 minutes each way, but that has declined significantly. Just over 100 were riding the bus longer than an hour, as of the end of November.

School bus at the front of North-Grand High School in Chicago. Photo by Stacey Rupolo/Chalkbeat �May, 2019 photo�

Transportation troubles continue

Amid state oversight, Chicago Public Schools announced in late July it would only provide bus transportation to homeless students and those with disabilities. Both groups are entitled to transportation under federal law.

Citing a bus driver shortage, district officials also offered families of students with disabilities and those in temporary housing a $500/month stipend to cover their own transportation, which nearly 4,000 families have taken as of late November. But those payments were initially delayed and the first checks weren’t mailed until late September.

By late September, district officials also confirmed that general education students attending schools outside their neighborhood, most of them selective or magnet options, would not get busing for the rest of the semester, leaving some parents grasping for help or switching schools.

What’s to come in 2024? CPS officials announced this week that the district would not provide busing to general education students for the rest of this school year. At a City Council meeting last month, officials outlined possible solutions for next school year, including having students picked up at a regional site rather than their home and working with schools to adjust bell schedules.

A Haugan Elementary classroom on Thursday, August 4, 2022 Chicago. | Christian K. Lee for Chalkbeat

Preschool expansion goes statewide

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker is promising to expand preschool and make child care more accessible in his second term. He said he hopes to make Illinois one of the best states to raise a family.

A longtime supporter of early childhood education, Pritzker’s push to boost the sector in his first term started off with a $100 million increase in 2019, but got sidelined by the COVID pandemic. Now, he’s making moves with a plan to increase early childhood by $250 million over the next four years and the creation of a standalone agency to bring together programs that are now housed across three separate departments. He also signed a bill requiring school districts to get up to speed by offering full-day kindergarten by 2027.

Chicago started rolling out universal preschool for all 4-year-olds in 2018, when then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel made it a re-election promise before bowing out of the 2019 mayoral election. Now, full-day preschool is a reality in every neighborhood, officials say, and enrollment figures from this fall show pre-K helped, in part, stabilize enrollment in CPS.

What’s to come in 2024? The governor typically gives a speech and releases a budget in early February. It’s likely he’ll continue increasing early education funding, but also could begin to detail the shape and scope of the new early childhood agency.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

From middle school teacher to Chicago mayor: Brandon Johnson sworn in to city’s top office

2023-05-15T20:30:33+00:00

Brandon Johnson, a public school parent, teachers union organizer, and former middle school teacher, has been officially sworn in as Chicago’s 57th mayor.

Johnson defeated former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas in a runoff election on April 4 after both candidates surpassed incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot during a Feb. 28 general election, dashing her hopes of a second term.

“We get to write the story of our children’s and our grandchildren’s future,” Johnson said during his inaugural address Monday at the Credit Union 1 Arena at University of Illinois at Chicago on the city’s Near West Side. “What will that story say?”

As the last mayor with control of Chicago Public Schools, Johnson will oversee the city’s transition to an elected school board, which he lobbied for as an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union. In his speech Monday, he once again promised to double the number of youth jobs, provide “child care for all,” and partner with school district leadership to “provide every single child with a world class education that meets their needs.”

“Let’s create a public education system that resources children based on need and not just on numbers,” Johnson said.

“Let’s have a system that respects its parents, educators and school employees,” he said. “Where the president of the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU Local 73 and the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools can work together to advocate for more resources for all of our children.”

Roughly three hours after taking the oath of office, Johnson signed four executive orders — one which directs the budget office to find available money to pay for youth employment this summer and year-round. It also tasks his new Deputy Mayor of Education Jen Johnson to identify entry-level jobs “suitable for young people” within city departments and agencies. Chicago’s youth unemployment rates increased during the pandemic, hitting Black young women particularly hard, according to a new report released last week.

Johnson’s own story from middle school teacher to mayor began more than a decade ago. He left the classroom in 2012 to join a grassroots effort by the Chicago Teachers Union to build political power in order to improve the conditions beyond the classroom walls that impact students and their families, such as housing affordability, poverty, crime, and environmental racism.

“I’m struck by how much work it took to bring us to this moment,” Johnson said, with CTU president, Stacy Davis Gates, and vice president, Jackson Potter, seated behind him on the stage.

While running for mayor, Johnson promised free public transit for students, an expansion of child care programs and health clinics in schools with available space, and an increase in support staff, such as social workers and counselors.

Johnson’s election signals a national shift on education within Democratic politics away from an emphasis on high-stakes accountability and market-based school choice. That view of reform, at times, also vilified teachers and their unions and came with legislation that stripped teachers of their bargaining rights and tried to tie job security to student test scores.

The Chicago Teachers Union began to push back on that thinking in 2010 with the election of the late Karen Lewis as CTU president. Their movement gained momentum and national attention going on strike in 2012, protesting mass school closures in 2013, and electing the first teacher to City Council in 2015. The CTU’s activism galvanized unions in other cities.

In a narrow election in 2018, Johnson upset an incumbent to win a seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners, a position he officially resigned on Friday.

Mayor Brandon Johnson shakes hands outside Michele Clark Magnet High School in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood hours before taking the oath of office.

Prior to taking the oath of office on Monday, Johnson stopped at several schools on Chicago’s West Side, including DePriest Elementary, Michele Clark Magnet High School, and Leland Elementary. A drumline and crowd of students, teachers, and elected officials greeted him outside Michele Clark.

Torrence Bell, 15, held up a poster congratulating the new mayor and stood along a fence outside the front entrance, where dozens of elected officials gathered, including Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, City Clerk Anna Valencia, and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.

“He’s a Black male, you know, I’m a Black male, so it’s really very inspiring for me,” Bell said.

Up the street, outside Leland Elementary students cheered and chanted for the new mayor, shaking his hand as he walked through the playground before getting in a black SUV to head to the inauguration ceremony.

“He’s one of our own,” said Alesia Franklin-Allen, acting principal at Leland. “That’s a great asset to have in a leader. He knows the needs of the schools.”

Speaking outside Michele Clark Magnet High School, current union president Davis Gates said she felt like the “personification of joy.”

“We deserve a mayor who’s going to invest in our children, who is going to practice justice and equity, not just as a value, but as a policy imperative,” Davis Gates said. “I am so very happy for us right now.”

Students from Leland Elementary on Chicago’s West Side wait to meet Mayor Brandon Johnson Monday morning before he took the oath of office.

Ten years ago this month, Davis Gates said, she and Johnson were in Springfield lobbying lawmakers to stop then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his appointed Chicago Board of Education from closing 50 schools. Ultimately, the board voted to close those schools, which became a galvanizing moment for the CTU. After the May 22, 2013 vote, then-CTU president Karen Lewis said the union would start training people to run for office.

“Clearly, we have to change the political landscape in this city,” Lewis said at the time.

Davis Gates choked back tears Monday morning as she recalled that moment.

“I’m so happy that teachers and clinicians and paraprofessionals believed their union who said that we could bargain for the common good, that we could be in coalition with the community, that we could transform Chicago,” Davis Gates said standing outside Michele Clark High School before heading downtown for the inauguration. “This is so amazing. And my only regret is that Karen is not here.”

A few hours later in his inaugural address, Johnson nodded to Lewis, calling her his “mentor and dear sister.”

“We all are here because of the work of giants who came before us and without whom this day would not be possible,” he said.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Teachers Union chief of staff named city’s deputy mayor of Education, Youth, and Human Services

2023-05-11T18:55:11+00:00

Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, a former teachers union organizer, has named chief of staff at the Chicago Teachers Union and former high school history teacher Jennifer “Jen” Johnson to be the city’s next deputy mayor of Education, Youth, and Human Services.

Jen Johnson replaces Jaye Stapleton, who was appointed to the job last year after outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot promoted Sybil Madison from deputy mayor of education to chief of staff.

Johnson taught at Lincoln Park High School from 2003-2013 and left the classroom around the same time as Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, who will be sworn into office Monday. The two are not related.

Both were part of a grassroots movement led by the teachers union focused on social justice, community organizing, and pushing back against top-down school reform policies, including the closure of public schools and the expansion of privately-run, often non-unionized charter schools.

“These appointments reflect our policy priorities and strategic goals as we set a bold agenda for the next four years,” Mayor-elect Johnson said in a statement. “Together we can achieve our vision for sustainable, thriving communities, responsive services for our children and most vulnerable, and a budget that illustrates our values as a city.”

Chicago Teachers Union chief of staff Jennifer “Jen” Johnson has been appointed to be the city’s next deputy mayor of Education, Youth, and Human Services.

Jen Johnson’s appointment is a signal Chicago Public Schools could enter a period of labor peace with the teachers union for at least the next four years. At the bargaining table, she has sat across from past deputy mayors, who have historically served as the mayor’s representative in negotiations.

On the campaign trail, Brandon Johnson faced repeated questioning about how he would handle contract talks with his former employer, to which he replied during one debate: “Who better to deliver bad news to friends than a friend?” The current CTU contract expires in 2024.

A spokesperson for the mayor-elect declined Chalkbeat’s request to interview the new deputy mayor Thursday.

As CTU chief of staff, Jen Johnson supports and represents 30,000 rank-and-file educators and union leadership. Recently, she spoke with Chalkbeat about the district’s rollout of a universal curriculum bank called Skyline. She applauded the effort, but said the union does not believe it should be mandated as that would take away teacher autonomy.

Jen Johnson has been at the bargaining table multiple times over the past several years and gave updates to the press and the public during the negotiations over virtual and in-person learning in 2020 and 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and during an 11-day strike in 2019.

Chicago remained fully remote longer than many school districts, returning in-person on a hybrid basis in the spring of 2021.

During talks in the summer of 2020, Jen Johnson said the district’s proposal for a six-hour virtual school day was not age-appropriate for the youngest students and lacked an infrastructure to serve students with disabilities and English learners.

“You have too much screen time and not enough prep time,” she said at the time. “You can’t impose in-person school on at-home learning.”

In a speech at a labor conference in 2012, Jen Johnson called herself a “born Michigander” whose dad also taught high school history for 34 years in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She said her grandfather taught high school English in Winnetka, a wealthy suburb north of Chicago, and mentioned that her mother wrote a book in 1970 “about her experience being the only white student in an all-Black public high school called Marshall on the West Side of Chicago in 1966.”

“I knew from a very early age that I wanted to be a history teacher and that I wanted to work in public schools,” Jen Johnson said at the time.

According to a press release from the Mayor-elect’s transition team, Jen Johnson has sat on the boards of the Illinois Federation of Teachers Executive Board, Grow Your Own Illinois, and the Illinois State Board of Education State Educator Licensure and Preparation Board.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson’s win reflects local and national shifts on education

2023-04-12T20:35:00+00:00

The direction of public education in Chicago changed last week when voters elected a teachers union organizer and former middle school teacher to be the city’s next mayor over a former schools chief and education consultant.

Brandon Johnson, 47, clinched victory with 52% of the vote over Paul Vallas, 69, and will be sworn in as mayor on May 15.

He comes to the job with more experience in public education than most, if not all, previous mayors. Johnson will also be the first mayor in recent memory to hold the title of a public school parent. And he’ll be the last with the power to appoint the school board.

But most significantly, Johnson brings a teachers union-friendly perspective that rejects many of the education ideas that once dominated Democratic politics and defined Vallas’ career: a focus on accountability for schools, teachers, and students, market-based school choice, and top-down decision-making from the mayor. Support from Democrats for those ideas began to erode years ago, making Johnson’s rise part of a bigger national shift.

“The former bipartisan ground that the Paul Vallas-esque reformers used to occupy, where do they stand anymore?” said Sarah Reckhow, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies education policy. “The ground has shifted beneath them.”

Brandon Johnson announced his bid for Chicago mayor on Oct. 27, 2022. His win over Paul Vallas on April 4, 2023 marked the culmination of a years-long effort by the Chicago Teachers Union to influence public policy beyond the classroom.

Johnson’s win is also a win for local progressives, who see it as the culmination of years of effort. His education agenda — which closely mirrors policy papers put out by the Chicago Teachers Union over the past several years — calls for more funding for traditional public schools, higher pay for teachers, and additional social services for students.

Emma Tai, executive director of United Working Families, which endorsed Johnson and helped turn out the vote with an army of field organizers, said Johnson’s victory comes after a “years-long journey” of “sustained, aspirational” organizing.

“Both (Donald) Trump’s secretary of education and (Barack) Obama’s secretary of education endorsed Paul Vallas and he lost,” said Tai. “A working-class majority defeated a bipartisan, wealthy donor consensus on public education. And I think that any Democrats with national aspirations or presidential aspirations need to pay pretty close attention to that.”

Johnson’s victory follows a decade of growing union strength

The start of Johnson’s political career can be traced to the summer of 2011, when he left the classroom to become an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union.

For more than a decade prior, Chicago had been a testing ground for a vision of school improvement that relied on accountability and pushed publicly-funded, privately-run charter schools as engines of improvement.

In this worldview, held by Democrats and Republicans alike, teachers unions were seen as stubborn barriers to progress, intent on preserving an adult-centered status quo.

When Johnson became an organizer, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff, had just been elected mayor and Illinois lawmakers had passed a new law reforming teacher tenure and limiting the Chicago Teachers Union’s ability to strike. It was one of dozens of laws passed across the country — in red and blue states alike — aimed at weakening the collective bargaining rights of teachers.

That did not sit well with classroom teachers.

A year earlier, a high school chemistry teacher named Karen Lewis had been elected as the new president of the Chicago Teachers Union on a platform promising to oppose charter school expansion, stop neighborhood school closures, and take on high-stakes testing and accountability.

The headquarters of Chicago Teachers Union sit on Chicago’s Near West Side.

Lewis and Emanuel became foils on the future of public education in Chicago — and nationally. They battled over seemingly everything — how long the school day and year should be; how teachers should be evaluated and compensated; and eventually, whether or not 50 public schools should be shuttered.

Though Emanuel succeeded in shuttering 50 schools, Lewis said the “fight for education justice” would “eventually move to the ballot box.”

“Clearly, we have to change the political landscape in this city,” Lewis said on the day the school board voted on the school closures in 2013.

That moment galvanized more than just the teachers union. Tai, now the head of United Working Families, said those closures prompted her to get into politics.

“I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t want them to be able to do this anymore,’” Tai said. “What’s it going to take so that I never have to be at a Board of Education meeting again, watching as Black parents are dragged out by white jacketed security guards while they’re crying? I never want to have to see that again.”

Johnson was one of the boots on the ground for the teachers union during this time, convening groups of teachers from schools on the South and West Sides and building coalitions with community organizations.

He helped elect City Council members in 2015 and supported Jesus “Chuy” Garcia’s bid for mayor when Lewis was sidelined by a brain tumor. In 2018, Johnson ran for a seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners and won — a victory Lewis applauded in a letter to teachers when she resigned as CTU president.

But in 2019, the union’s endorsed candidate for mayor, Toni Preckwinkle, lost to outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot in a landslide. That fall, teachers went on strike for 11 days and although the union secured some significant wins, the protracted fight left some teachers and parents frustrated. Still, this spring, the union’s existing leadership won re-election.

Chicago Teachers Union members rallied outside City Hall on the 11th day of their strike in 2019.

Johnson’s ascension to mayor is now an ironic — and perhaps fitting — end to three decades of mayoral control over Chicago Public Schools, a major priority of the union’s. In an interview last week, Johnson told Chalkbeat that he still supports eventually relinquishing control to an elected school board now that he’s been elected.

“Anyone else would say, ‘Well, now that we have it, we’re good because we have our mayor. So let’s keep it. Let’s keep mayoral control,’” he said. “That would miss the moment … We still believe that democracy is the best form of governance for our public school system.”

Mayoral campaign becomes an indictment of education reform

The union had tried and failed twice in the last decade to put an ally in the mayor’s office. But Vallas was a different kind of opponent, and the union capitalized on growing skepticism among Democrats about his education record.

He rose to prominence in 1995 as the first CEO of Chicago Public Schools after the state legislature handed control of the system to then-Mayor Richard M. Daley. He became a leading advocate for and adopter of the education-reform playbook touted by both Democrats and Republicans throughout the early 2000s.

Defenders of Vallas say he fixed entrenched problems and improved outcomes for students. But others, including the CTU, say he left a “trail of destruction” in the places where he worked — which Johnson supporters highlighted during an event on the city’s South Side just weeks before the election. Vallas supporters disrupted that event and called their claims “completely untrue.”

Still, Johnson’s campaign continued to focus on Vallas’ complicated schools legacy, even releasing a two-minute ad with parents from New Orleans and Philadelphia talking about teachers being fired during Vallas’ time leading those districts.

Paul Vallas represented a different kind of opponent for the Chicago Teachers Union, which had tried twice to put an ally in the mayor’s office.

Peter Cunningham, founder and board chair of Education Post and former assistant secretary at the U. S. Department of Education, said Vallas — and his record on education running school systems in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Chicago — were mischaracterized and unfairly maligned. Vallas advocated for more than just school choice and high-stakes accountability, he said. For example, he started a program that still exists to provide Chicago Public Schools students with free eye exams and eyeglasses and developed a school-based teen pregnancy program. He built more than 70 new school buildings — including the one where Johnson eventually taught middle school.

“I would not say the reform movement was a failure in any sense,” Cunningham said. “I would say that it had considerable successes.”

And even though Johnson’s campaign criticized Chicago’s system of school choice that Vallas helped to build, he has taken advantage of it for his three children, two of whom attend a magnet elementary school and one who attends a neighborhood high school that is not his zoned school. That’s a reflection of the way Chicago Public Schools has been reshaped by the changes of the last two decades in ways that are likely to outlast any mayor.

“We’ve seen a lot of improvement in Chicago over the last 15 years,” said Elaine Allensworth, Lewis-Sebring director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, which has studied Chicago Public Schools since 1990.

More students are graduating high school, going to, and finishing college. Student learning accelerated between 2009 to 2014 — with students gaining six years worth of education in five — according to research out of Stanford University. Out-of-school suspensions have decreased.

“No matter what you think about the reforms of the last 30 years, that’s not the question,” Cunningham said.

“The question is: What do you want to do in the next 10?”

The work beyond the classroom walls begins

The vision laid out by the teachers union more than a decade ago will come to fruition on May 15 when Johnson is sworn in as mayor.

Now, he will have the chance to tackle the issues beyond the classroom, beyond the school building, beyond the district administration. As he moves from an outsider advocating for a certain ideology to decision maker, Johnson will face the realities of governing a city known for its provincial politics, despite being dominated by Democrats.

Johnson will be responsible for a police department grappling with reforms mandated by the federal government and a public health department still dealing with a global pandemic. He’ll oversee multiple city agencies that determine when libraries are open, whether trains run on time, how businesses are licensed, and how to manage garbage pickup and alley rats.

Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson spoke at a City Club of Chicago luncheon during his campaign for mayor.

Allensworth said educators have an “innate sense” of how those different sectors — such as transportation, public health, and safety — all impact public schools.

“I do hope that having that knowledge will help him be a good strong coordinator of all those different services in the service of young people in Chicago,” she said.

And although Chicago Public Schools has seen a lot of improvement, the pandemic stymied some of its progress. Chicago’s scores on the nation’s report card last year dropped in math and flat-lined in reading. Long-standing gaps between students of color and their white peers remain. The district’s handling of students with disabilities is being monitored by the state, after a 2018 report found it delayed and denied services to those children.

“There’s so much more work to do,” said former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who led Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2008 and now heads a nonprofit focused on violence prevention.

Duncan endorsed Vallas and in doing so, didn’t mention education or schools. In an interview with Chalkbeat, he said the mayoral election was as much about education as it was about public safety, noting that when students drop out of high school, they’re more likely to be shot and killed.

“The consequences here in Chicago for educational failure are pretty staggering,” Duncan said. “This is absolutely about education. It’s absolutely about breaking cycles of poverty and helping people have upward mobility and enter the middle class.”

Now, he said the city needs to rally around Johnson. And he applauded the former teachers union organizer for promising to double the number of youth summer jobs from 30,000 to 60,000 and make that employment program year round.

Johnson has also promised to fund the city’s public schools based on need, not enrollment, which has been declining for the past decade. With schools slated to get their budgets this month, it’s not clear if the formula for doling out money will change in time for next school year. He’s vowed to continue investing in support staff — such as social workers, school nurses, and librarians — which Chicago Public Schools has already started doing using federal COVID recovery money.

He’ll have to negotiate a new contract with his former employer, the Chicago Teachers Union, and decide whether to keep current district leadership, including CEO Pedro Martinez, in place.

Tai, with United Working Families, said Johnson’s win does not mean their work is finished.

“I don’t think it’s ever really over,” she said. “But it’s a game changer, a conversation changer, and once again, Chicago’s in the center of it.”

Patrick Wall contributed reporting.

This story has been updated to correct Peter Cunningham’s title.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Q&A: Chicago’s Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson on how being a public school parent will guide him

2023-04-06T18:30:05+00:00

Brandon Johnson took an unconventional path to becoming Chicago’s next mayor.

A decade ago, Johnson, 47, was teaching middle school at Jenner Academy of the Arts, which served mostly low-income Black students from the Cabrini-Green public housing complex. In 2012, he became an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, and in 2018, he was elected to the Cook County Board of Commissioners.

Now he will be the first mayor in recent memory with children in Chicago Public Schools and the last to have control of the school system before it transitions to an elected school board.

Chalkbeat Chicago sat down with Johnson for a brief interview Thursday. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you talk to your own children about becoming Chicago’s mayor?

I spoke with my children about them being children. Not about me running for mayor. Our conversations were more about, “What are the things that are important to them? What are the areas of support they need from me and their mother?” We had a thoughtful conversation about their own personal desires. And that conversation led into: “Daddy’s running for mayor. You all are an important part of Daddy’s story. But you’re not running for mayor. Daddy’s running for mayor.”

It was important for me to sort of lay some of the foundation around making sure that my children know that whatever adventure that I take on, it’s attached to my purpose, and that they too will have to find their purpose. I spoke to it and in the biblical sense. As Jesus said, “We don’t bury our talents. We double, we multiply them.”

It got them thinking more about their purpose, their talents, their gifts, and how they will make a contribution to society by utilizing their gifts. The transition from running for mayor and the conversation about being mayor was pretty similar. Obviously, there’s more details around security, but my children are chill.

You will be the first mayor in recent memory that has children attending the Chicago Public Schools, and I wonder what you think of that?

I think about that (in the context of) the question about my ability to negotiate contracts particularly for the Chicago Public Schools, because I am now responsible and tasked with negotiating from the perspective of the public schools, right?

The question came up repeatedly about my ability to do that. I’m going to be negotiating that not just as a mayor, but as a parent. I want parents and students to win a good school system, not a contract. That negotiation is actually far greater now as mayor of the city of Chicago having children in the public schools.

I’m not calling for a system to be better so that other people can experience it. I’m calling for a system to be better that works through the lens of someone who trusts the system to provide the education that will ultimately prepare (my children) to fulfill their purpose. I’m going to take the lived experience of not just as a teacher, as an organizer, but as a parent.

What were the things that were frustrating for me and my wife? I’m confident that whatever we were frustrated about, there are countless other parents who have that same frustration. That will be the impetus behind whatever decision is being made or whatever dynamics are being negotiated.

How do we not only help children fulfill their purpose? How do we make sure that parents that rely on this system for their children have an experience that is not just pleasant, but that motivates parents to continue to trust and believe in this system?

What do you think the election result and your win say about how Chicagoans feel about the approach to public education policy in this city under previous mayors?

I believe that my election sets us up to fulfill a promise of what public education should be about. There’s more of an acceptance and agreement around a system that is not just equitable and just, but a system that works for every single family in the city of Chicago.

That’s the message that they accepted — that you do not necessarily have to subscribe to a stratified system, where there are winners and losers, (but that) every parent who gets what they want out of the Chicago Public Schools.

If you talk to most parents, it’s a relief. Why? Why is it a relief? Why do parents make sort of the internal motion of: “Whew! I don’t have to worry about my child’s education!”? If that’s the response of parents where they have like this relief, generally speaking, then what’s the opposite response? When you don’t get what you want or need for your children?

This election is about really eliminating these pressure points. Where you can still be curious and searching juxtaposed to “Oh, my gosh, thank God we don’t gotta worry about that.” Do you understand what I’m trying to say? I hope so.

I think so. You’re saying that because we have a system where you “win” admission to a school, then you’re happy and relieved, but if you don’t, you are just in the struggle?

We want to eliminate the struggle and the pressure of: “How do I get to a release point where I can take a deep breath?” Because that in of itself is very hostile and traumatizing, as well. There’s this dynamic of you got to be grateful because you could be at this other place.

What are we saying? We literally have places in the city of Chicago that people dread going or they’re in fear of having to attend or somehow they’re going to lose the quality of instruction or won’t be offered the fulfillment of what education should be about.

I believe people have accepted that Brandon Johnson believes that public education is far more dynamic than a bubble sheet. It’s about the fulfillment of purpose, and what is available within our public school system that sets up all of our children to be able to find their purpose, discover their purpose, and be good to live it out.

You’ve been part of a movement, built by (the late CTU President) Karen Lewis, to kind of turn the tide in Chicago when it comes to public education and mayoral control of Chicago Public Schools. What do you think about being the last mayor with control of the city’s public schools?

Karen really loved the opera. As I understand opera — and I’m going down a rabbit hole here — there’s always tragedy and triumphs, right? That’s my general frame. And I know that’s a real simplistic way to look at an incredible art, so please be gentle, I do not want to piss off opera lovers. But there’s this tragedy. There is this tension. And then you start to get to a point where there’s going to be a very dramatic end to something that would have otherwise been a constant state of tragedy.

That’s how we look at mayoral control. And to know that our movement has culminated at the very time (mayoral control ends) and we are actually really true to our word. Because anyone else would say, “Well, now that we have it, we’re good. Because we have our mayor. So let’s keep it. Let’s keep mayoral control.”

And that would be a flat note, as Karen would say. That would miss the moment. I think it’s actually quite the crescendo of the movement that pushed the political dynamics around public education, and particularly the harm of mayoral control.

Even with us being in a position where we could impose our ideology onto an entire system, we are still saying that even with us having the ability to direct traffic, we still believe that democracy is the best form of governance for our public school system. So I think it’s an incredible crescendo to our movement.

You will have some chances to appoint members of the Chicago Board of Education. Do you have any shortlist of names? Do you plan to keep any current school board members?

Well, I don’t have a shortlist of names. What I do have, though, is a commitment to a process that is committed to equity in the distribution of the seats that I have the ability to assign. We will provide a process that allows for real community input. An equitable education really requires a dynamic, diverse makeup of experiences that I believe will be necessary to have the type of democratic structure that the city of Chicago has already united around.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago 2023 mayoral election: Brandon Johnson defeats Paul Vallas

2023-04-05T04:26:20+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for our free Chicago newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and state education policy.

Brandon Johnson, a teachers union organizer, county commissioner, and former middle school teacher, will become Chicago’s next mayor after winning 51.4% of the vote to defeat former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas in a runoff election.

Johnson’s win marks a stunning achievement in the grassroots movement started by Chicago Teachers Union leadership roughly a decade ago to focus on issues beyond the classroom, such as affordable housing, public health, environmental justice, and police reform.

“We have ushered in a new chapter in the history of our city,” Johnson said. “Whether you wake up early to open the doors of your businesses, or teach middle school, or wear a badge to protect our streets, or nurse patients in need, or provide child care services, you have always worked for this city. And now Chicago will begin to work for its people.”

Brandon Johnson’s supporters celebrate during the winning mayoral candidate’s watch party.

Bankrolled by the teachers union and other labor groups, Johnson broke through a field of nine candidates, securing about 21% of the vote, finishing second to Vallas, who captured 33% of the vote in the first round of voting on Feb. 28. Incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot finished third with 17% of the vote — dashing her hopes for a second term.

With 99% of precincts reporting, preliminary results posted by the Chicago Board of Elections had Johnson with 51.4% to Vallas’ 48.6%.

The two have spent the last five weeks knocking on doors, holding events, debating one another, visiting churches, and collecting endorsements in an effort to sway voters who may have picked another candidate or didn’t vote on Feb. 28. The narrow results illustrate how contentious and divisive the campaign had become and was a stark contrast to the Lightfoot’s runoff landslide in 2019.

“It’s clear based on the results tonight that the city is deeply divided,” Vallas said in a concession speech Tuesday night. “Even though, of course, we believe every vote should be counted, I called Brandon Johnson and told him that I absolutely expect him to be the next mayor of Chicago.”

Former principal of Whitney Young Magnet School Joyce D. Kenner, a Paul Vallas supporter, was holding out hope for a Vallas victory.

Johnson offered an olive branch to those who didn’t vote for him.

“To the Chicagoans who did not vote for me, here’s what I want you to know: that I care about you, I value you, and I want to hear from you. I want to work with you, and I’ll be the mayor for you too,” he said.

Both candidates’ deep ties to education propelled them into politics — though the two have been on opposite sides of the debates over public education policy in the past two decades and presented contrasting visions for the future of Chicago Public Schools.

Vallas, a torch bearer for school choice and charter schools who has supported voucher expansion, faced criticism and applause for his complicated schools’ legacy. Johnson taught at Jenner Academy of the Arts and Westinghouse College Prep before becoming a union organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union. His education platform, which aligns closely with the teachers union, promises more staff, free transit for students, and green schools.

Now, Johnson will be the last mayor to have control of the city’s public schools, a perhaps fitting irony for someone who advocated for an elected school board. He will oversee a number of challenges facing the nation’s fourth largest district including declining enrollment, closing pandemic-related academic declines, and the transition to an elected school board.

“On education, the contrast was clear,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the parent union of the CTU. “Brandon wants to ensure parents have a say, teachers can teach, and students can learn without the intrusion of those who measure their success by closing schools rather than strengthening them.”

Former Chicago Teachers Union President Jesse Sharkey said Johnson’s victory is a vindication of the union’s massive organizing push over the past decade. He said members threw themselves into campaigning for Johnson in a big way, from knocking on doors to making art for his campaign materials.

“There was an outpouring of creativity and organizing in this election,” he said. “It turned out it was just enough.”

Throughout the campaign, Johnson has faced questions over whether he would be impartial in negotiations with his own union, to which he responded: “Who better to deliver bad news to friends than a friend?”

“Brandon is going to have to govern,” Sharkey said. “I don’t think the CTU gets to decide what it wants. Brandon is a remarkable person who has a lot of principles and deeply believes in governance.”

As Johnson took the lead, the crowd at his election night watch party at the Marriott Marquis downtown pumped their fists and cheered. The volume of the dance music went way up, and supporters danced, snapped selfies, and hugged.

Nina Hike, a science teacher at Westinghouse College Prep and a teachers union leader, said the ground game that the union built was crucial. Teachers turned out to volunteer and campaign for Johnson in full force, she said.

Hike estimated she spent hundreds of hours phone banking, knocking on more than 500 doors, recording a podcast attacking Vallas’ education record, and talking with news reporters.

Wallace Wilbourn Jr., a middle school social studies teacher at DePriest Elementary in Austin on Chicago’s West Side, knocked on doors for Johnson and hosted a canvassing event in his East Garfield Park living room. Early on election night, he was taking deep breaths as the two candidates remained neck-and-neck with razor-thin margins.

“The whole city has been working toward this one progressive goal,” Wilbourn said.

Brandon Johnson was a middle school teacher before rising in the ranks at the Chicago Teachers Union. He was elected to Cook County Commission in 2018.

The CTU called Johnson a “protege” of the late former union president Karen Lewis, who almost ran for mayor herself in 2015 before being diagnosed with a brain tumor.

“You don’t have a Brandon Johnson without a Karen Lewis,” said CTU president Stacy Davis Gates said. “She transformed the political debate in our city. She showed Chicagoans how to stand up and demand what their schools and their city need and deserve. Tonight affirms Karen’s dream of a city that works for us all, not just a privileged few.”

At the Vallas election night party at the Hyatt Regency, his supporters held on to hope even as the results showed Johnson taking the lead. Joyce D. Kenner, former principal of Whitney Young Magnet High School who endorsed Vallas, said she did not expect the race to be so close.

Paul Vallas, alongside his family, speaks to his supporters after conceding the race to Brandon Johnson.

Beverly Miles, a former aldermanic candidate and Vallas supporter, said she was “expecting a landslide for Vallas.”

Miles said she thought Johnson was “a nice guy but I don’t think he’s the right guy.” Despite being a county commissioner, she felt he hadn’t done enough for the West Side.

“We knew it was going to be a nail-biter,” Ald. Tom Tunney said earlier in the night when only about 1,000 votes separated the two.

Chicago Board of Elections spokesperson Max Bever said earlier in the day there were still thousands of vote-by-mail ballots outstanding. The Chicago Board of Elections has until April 18 to count all ballots and certify the results.

The early voting and vote-by-mail numbers are double what they were in 2015 and 2019 and Monday’s early voting turnout set a municipal record, according to the Board. Turnout in the first round of voting on Feb. 28 was around 35%, with 566,973 people casting ballots out of roughly 1.6 million registered voters.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org. Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org. Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Like the candidates themselves, donors in Chicago’s mayoral race have deep education ties

2023-03-31T23:36:51+00:00

Like the candidates themselves, the people and organizations giving big money in Chicago’s mayoral election have strong ties to public education — and the debates around it for the past two decades.

Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas’ campaign has been propelled by wealthy business executives, while county commissioner and union organizer Brandon Johnson has been fueled by labor unions.

The Chicago Teachers Union is Johnson’s biggest donor, while Vallas has received six-figure donations from wealthy individuals with ties to school choice and education reform, including some who have charter schools named after them. Vallas, a torch bearer for school choice and charter schools, has supported voucher expansion. Meanwhile, Johnson’s progressive platform aligns closely with the teachers union’s vision for the district.

While a full accounting of campaign donations and spending won’t be available until after the election, a Chalkbeat Chicago analysis of Illinois State Board of Elections records shows Vallas has received at least $15 million since October and Johnson has collected more than $10 million since October 1, 2022.

Johnson’s campaign fueled by labor unions and educators

Johnson received the backing of the Chicago Teachers Union, his largest donor, before officially launching his campaign last fall. Since then, the union’s Political Action Committee has donated almost $2.2 million to his campaign, according to state board of elections records.

The union has poured millions into aldermanic and mayoral campaigns in recent years as a way to influence broader policies that affect public schools. Some rank-and-file CTU members have filed a complaint against union leadership, alleging members’ dues were being funneled to the union’s political action committee, according to WTTW’s Paris Schutz.

A handful of other labor unions are among Johnson’s other top donors. The parent unions of the CTU — Illinois Federation of Teachers and American Federation of Teachers — each gave $940,000 and $2.1 million respectively. The country’s other largest teachers union, the National Education Association, donated $50,000, and its Illinois counterpart gave $75,000. Several political committees connected to the unions that represent special education aides, classroom assistants, school bus aides, child care workers, and nurses, have collectively donated more than $2 million, according to a Chalkbeat analysis.

United Working Families, a progressive group and CTU ally, has also donated almost $47,000 in in-kind contributions, usually in the form of staff help, to Johnson’s campaign and the national Working Families Party donated $70,000.

Aside from labor unions, Johnson’s campaign coffers have mostly been filled by smaller individual donations — many from teachers and educators. For example, he received $20,000 — one of his largest individual gifts — from Elizabeth Simons, a former bilingual education teacher, who now chairs the board of the Heising-Simons Foundation. The foundation provides grants to organizations aimed at strengthening early childhood education for low-income families.

Attorneys who have represented the Chicago Teachers Union at the bargaining table donated to Johnson. Robin Potter, mother of union Vice President Jackson Potter, gave $6,000 and Robert Bloch’s law firm donated $5,000.

Others who have advocated for more funding for public schools gave to Johnson, as well. Cassie Creswell of Illinois Families for Public Schools gave $5,000, and National Education Association President Rebecca Pringle donated $2,000. Kenneth Williams-Bennett, father of CPS graduate Chance the Rapper, also donated $8,000 to Johnson. Williams-Bennett was previously an aide to late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, and former Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Chance donated $2.2 million to Chicago Public Schools in 2017, as the school district was fighting for more state funding.

Vallas backed by wealthy donors with ties to education reform

Vallas’ campaign war chest is bigger than Johnson’s and has been throughout the campaign. The former district CEO has seen an infusion of cash from corporate business executives, many of whom have ties to charter schools and other education organizations.

One of his largest individual donors is Paul J. Finnegan, co-founder and co-CEO of Madison Dearborn Partners, a private investment equity firm in Chicago. Finnegan has donated $400,000 since October. He is a past chairman and current local advisory board member of Teach for America. Finnegan also sits on the board of CDW Corporation, a technology and services provider for businesses, governments, and school districts, including Chicago Public Schools, which has ramped up purchasing in recent years using COVID-19 recovery dollars.

According to tax filings from 2019, the Finnegan Family Foundation supports dozens of education nonprofits, including Teach for America and the Academy for Urban School Leadership, and charter schools networks, including Noble, LEARN, KIPP, and Intrinsic.

Golf resort owner Michael Keiser, who also sits on the local advisory board of Teach for America, and his wife, Rosalind, have donated $400,000 to Vallas’ campaign since October. He also made a $500,000 donation last summer, shortly after Vallas announced his bid. Finnegan and Keiser are also supporters of the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute.

Other six-figure donations include Craig Duchossois, executive chairman of the Duchossois Group, has donated $760,000. The Duchossois Family Foundation has given grants to After School Matters, according to the foundation’s website.

Citadel executive Gerald Beeson has donated $300,000 since October. Beeson and his wife have an ongoing scholarship for students at Big Shoulders Fund, which provides support to Catholic elementary and high schools in low-income communities.

Two of Vallas’ top donors helped open charter schools in Chicago that now bear their names. Donald Wilson, CEO of DRW Holdings, supported the opening of the Noble Network of Charter Schools 12th campus — DRW College Prep —on the West Side in 2012. He has donated a combined $350,000 to Vallas’ campaign since January.

Joseph Mansueto, a billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the Chicago Fire soccer team, donated $250,000 to Vallas’ campaign. In 2017, he donated $18 million that largely funded the construction of Noble’s 17th campus in Brighton Park, now named Mansueto High School.

Deborah Quazzo, a controversial ex-Chicago school board member, and her husband donated $7,500 and $10,000, respectively, to Vallas’ campaign, as first reported by WBEZ. Quazzo left her seat after the Sun-Times reported on her business dealings with the district. The district Office of Inspector General said Quazzo violated Chicago Public Schools’ ethics code, according to the Sun-Times.

Even though they have not given direct donations to Vallas’ campaign, two political action committees focused on school choice and education reform are backing his candidacy by running ads for his platform and against Johnson.

On March 23, the American Federation for Children, a group founded by former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, donated $65,000 to the Illinois Federation for Children PAC. On the same day, the group gave $59,385 to a political strategic media firm Go Big Media, for digital media supporting Vallas, records show.

INCS Action Independent Committee, which supports candidates who are supportive of charter schools, spent $258,000 on television ads and $359,000 on digital media opposing Johnson, as first reported by WTTW.

INCS Action has received most of its funding since October from James S. Frank, who gave the committee a collective $1.5 million. Frank is on the boards of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools and Chicago Public Education Fund, in addition to Teach for America’s local advisory board. He has donated $225,000 directly to Vallas since January.

Campaigns have until April 17 to file a full accounting of their fundraising and spending activities through March 31.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

How will Chicago’s next mayor shape early childhood education? Advocates warn of challenges ahead.

2023-03-31T19:00:16+00:00

Chicago’s youngest residents cannot vote for the city’s next mayor, but their parents can.

As Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas face off in an April 4 runoff election to become the city’s next mayor, both have promised to support early childhood education and provide families with accessible and affordable options for high-quality child care. Johnson said he would focus on affordable child care and increasing wages for staff, while Vallas’ plan would support children from birth until they reach the classroom.

But experts, advocates, and child care providers say both candidates have given few details about how they would help the city’s over 200,000 youngest learners. They hope whoever is elected will increase funding for early education, address current staffing shortages, work across several agencies, and make child care more affordable.

Chicago Public Schools currently offers full-day free preschool for 4-year-olds. Community-based organizations also offer pre-kindergarten with full and half day programs for 3- and 4- year-olds. Head Start, which is federally funded and administered by the city’s Department of Family and Support Services, also offers child care and preschool for low-income families. In addition, some parents pay for private child care centers.

Kyrsten Emanuel, senior policy manager at Start Early, a nonprofit organization in Illinois that advocates for early childhood education and child care, said the mayor’s office is influential in shaping the city’s early childhood education and child care landscape, especially as community-based organizations and public schools are competing for students.

“Every time Chicago Public Schools expands pre-K, it impacts enrollment and staffing in community-based programs,” said Emanuel. “To mitigate that impact, there really needs to be intentional coordination happening both at the city and the community level.”

Johnson, a Cook County commissioner, has proposed “child care for all.” He says he would focus on making child care affordable for families and wants to increase wages for child care workers. In a statement to Chalkbeat Chicago, Johnson said he will work with Gov. J.B Pritzker and the general assembly to increase state funding for early childhood education.

“I will advocate in Springfield to end the system of giving wealthy corporations tax breaks at the expense of working families who desperately need safe, reliable child care,” Johnson said.

Vallas, former Chicago Public Schools CEO, wants to expand support for young children from birth until they enter the classroom — with a focus on teen mothers and their children. In February during an early childhood education mayoral forum, Vallas said he wanted to use under-enrolled school buildings for child care centers and create tax incentives for private centers to make child care more affordable for families.

Chalkbeat Chicago reached out to both campaigns for details on their early childhood education and child care plans. As of publication, Vallas’ campaign had not responded.

No matter who wins the election, Chicago’s next mayor will face a series of challenges while shaping the city’s early childhood education and child care landscape.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot has continued rolling out universal preschool to families with 4-year-olds in the city, continuing the work of her predecessor Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Under Lightfoot’s administration, the city’s early learning chief stepped down in the second year of the rollout and the early days of COVID-19 slowed down the city’s efforts.

Bela Moté, president and CEO of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning, who has seen the expansion of universal preschool under Emanuel and Lightfoot, hopes the next mayor has a dedicated team working on early childhood education issues. This is especially important, she added, because in Chicago early childhood programs are run by a mix of agencies, including Chicago Public Schools, the city’s Department of Family and Support Services, and community-based organizations.

“The machine doesn’t work if these three pegs aren’t moving together,” Moté said.

There are also challenges when it comes to staffing. Child care providers are struggling to attract and retain workers, who are often paid less than their elementary school peers. The early childhood education workforce is mostly women of color, who are often paid less than their white colleagues.

Meghan Gowin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Erikson Institute, said that as the city grows capacity for more 3- and 4-year-olds to enter pre-K in Chicago Public Schools and community-based organizations, the next mayor needs to look at what resources are currently available and the needs of the workforce.

“What are some of the supports and resources that are going to be provided to those centers and educators to make sure that as they’re getting in more children, they’re able to actually support those children in ways that are culturally sustainable and inclusive?” Gowin said.

Earlier this year, Gov. J.B. Pritzker proposed a four-year plan called Smart Start Illinois that would increase funding in order to serve more children. In the coming fiscal year, the governor is proposing an additional $250 million that would add 5,000 seats statewide in preschool classrooms for 3- and 4-year olds.

The state board of education’s early childhood education block grant would receive an additional $75 million — of which 37% would go to Chicago Public Schools. Pritzker’s budget still needs approval by the legislature.

Even with the state increasing funding to early childhood education, the city should look for additional ways to boost revenue, said Emanuel of Start Early. She also recommends addressing the staffing shortage through increased funding for Chicago Early Learning Workforce Scholarship, a program that supports Chicagoans who want to become early childhood educators in schools or community-based organizations.

Correction: March 31, 2023: This story has been updated to correct Bela Moté’s title from founder and CEO to president and CEO of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning.

Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education, and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago schools are at a crossroads. The new mayor will determine the district’s next steps.

2023-03-28T23:01:03+00:00

Public education in Chicago is about to enter a new era, defined by the person elected mayor on April 4.

Voters will choose between Brandon Johnson, a former middle school teacher turned county commissioner who is also an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union, or Paul Vallas, a former city budget director and Chicago Public Schools CEO turned education consultant.

Either candidate would bring more knowledge and experience in Chicago Public Schools to the job than most, if not all, previous mayors. It’s nearly impossible to untangle their identities from the debates over public education policy during the past two decades that have left Vallas and Johnson with different perspectives on critical education issues.

“You have two people who really come to this position largely as a result of their work in education,” said Robert Bruno, professor of labor and employment at University of Illinois.

Johnson has roots as a labor organizer and progressive politician focused on improving the lives of working class and low-income people. Vallas is a technocrat and policy wonk who built a career as a “fixer” and “turnaround specialist” for large, complex school systems.

Those experiences will shape their responses to the once-in-a-generation challenges and opportunities facing the nation’s fourth largest school district. The next mayor will write the final chapter in Chicago’s story with mayoral control, appointing school board members as the district shifts toward an elected school board. He will grapple with declining enrollment as federal COVID recovery money runs out and will negotiate the next Chicago Teachers Union contract.

Perhaps most importantly, the next mayor will shape how more than 300,000 students are educated — after three years of pandemic disruption and decades of inequity.

Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson faces former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas in an April 4 runoff for Chicago mayor.

The challenge ahead: Moving to an elected school board

Chicago’s era of mayoral control will end in 2027, when the next mayor is up for re-election. Vallas or Johnson’s first term will be a period of transition in which he will oversee the school system and still appoint more than a dozen school board members, ahead of and during the transition to an elected school board.

If voters pick Johnson, his election would be the crowning achievement in a decade-long grassroots battle waged by the Chicago Teachers Union against mayoral control and many of the controversial policies that came with it, like school closures and charter expansion. Johnson opposes adding charter schools and closing small district schools, of which Chicago has a growing number.

Vallas would bring a long history of expanding school choice and remaking big-city school districts. He’s signaled his approach wouldn’t precisely mirror the past, though, and recently said Chicago had enough charter schools.

They have also expressed different priorities for future board member appointments. Vallas has said he would endorse candidates for school board who align with his vision for the district. He also told Chalkbeat that he would work with the school board “as an equally elected official that is representing the needs of the community that elected them.”

Johnson, who advocated for the legislation creating the school board, has said he wants it to represent Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods “who are deeply invested and knowledgeable” about the communities they serve.

“We cannot have uber rich, arch-conservatives usurping the power that working people in Chicago fought so hard to win,” he told Chalkbeat in a questionnaire published earlier this year.

Reversing enrollment declines in a changing city

Chicago has lost more than 100,000 students since Vallas was schools chief.

When he left the job in 2001, there were roughly 435,000 students. Now, there are just over 322,000. Because schools are largely funded based on enrollment, this trend puts pressure on the district’s budget, even as Illinois has overhauled and increased funding for public education.

Creg Williams, a Vallas supporter who worked with him in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, said the mayoral hopeful has experience re-enrolling students. After Hurricane Katrina hit, public school enrollment dropped from 65,000 students to 25,000, according to Louisiana state records.

“When we got to New Orleans, there were no student records, there were no teachers, there were no students,” Williams said. “We drove up and down streets, recruiting children who were walking up and down the streets with no place to stay, no schools to go in.” (Enrollment did increase under Vallas’ tenure in New Orleans, but it did not return to pre-Katrina levels.)

Chicago’s declining enrollment, like many cities across America, is driven not by a natural disaster but rather by declining birth rates and a confluence of factors pushing people to leave the city, including the loss of public housing, gentrification, crime, and past school closures.

These are problems the school system cannot fix by itself. City Hall, which has control over zoning, tax policy, and economic development, will play a key part.

Both candidates have talked a lot about making the city a place families want to live, but offer different paths for getting there. Vallas says neighborhoods need to be safe above all else and is proposing a crime-fighting strategy that staffs up the police department and keeps school buildings open on nights and weekends. Johnson has promised not to raise property taxes and wants to grow jobs for both the parents of public school students, and for teens and young adults.

Working with fewer federal dollars and a looming fiscal cliff

Those promises will cost money, and the next mayor will need to find it.

Last week, district officials warned that Chicago Public Schools is facing $600 million-plus budget deficits beginning in 2026, when a $2.8 billion windfall of COVID recovery money ends.

“These issues have been papered over by federal support, but we need to confront them head on,” district CEO Pedro Martinez said recently.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez recently warned school board members that the district is projecting annual deficits starting in 2026.

Johnson has said he will not raise property taxes, a primary source of funding for local schools. Vallas has not ruled out property tax increases, but has talked about pushing more money down to individual schools and cutting costs at the central office.

The mayor has other options.

Johnson has talked about getting state lawmakers to ramp up funding increases to the state’s funding formula so Chicago and all districts get to so-called “adequate funding” more quickly.

He – and district officials – have also suggested pushing the state to kick in more for Chicago teachers pensions, which have been underfunded since the mid- to late-2000s. Chicago Public Schools began skipping annual payments to the pension fund in 1995 under Vallas, and did so until 2004. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, state lawmakers again allowed the district to skip pension payments. Today, the fund is less than 50% funded and requires much larger annual payments, which also puts pressure on the district’s budget.

The next mayor could also undo decisions made by current Mayor Lori Lightfoot to shift costs for police in schools, crossing guards, and non-teaching staff pensions from the city’s budget to Chicago Public Schools. Neither candidate has signaled they would reverse those cost shifts.

Bargaining a high-stakes contract

The Chicago Teachers Union’s current contract expires in 2024. If history is any guide, negotiations will begin this winter under the leadership of the new mayor. Two of the last three contracts were settled only after teachers went on strike, and the next mayor will be under considerable pressure to avoid another one.

It’s clear from Johnson’s education platform that he would approach the demands of the teachers union as an ally.

“Now more than ever, we need a partner in City Hall willing to work with school communities to ensure smaller classes, adequate staffing for special and bilingual education and a school nurse in every school,” the union said in a recent press release. “Brandon Johnson is that candidate.”

Throughout the campaign, Johnson has faced questions over whether he would be impartial in negotiations with his own union, to which he recently responded: “Who better to deliver bad news to friends than a friend?”

Vallas has said he would be at the bargaining table with the teachers union if elected. He’s touted his experience negotiating contracts across multiple school districts, including two four-year deals in Chicago in the late 1990s. The city’s chief labor negotiator, Jim Franczek, recently told the Chicago Sun-Times those contracts provided “stability, flexibility, and predictability” to the school system, which had seen multiple work stoppages in the 1980s and early ‘90s.

“It wasn’t as if the Chicago Teachers Union were a bunch of pansies back then,” Franczek said. But even he acknowledged that the current teachers union is a different kind of bargaining partner now.

Since 2010 – under the leadership of the late former CTU president Karen Lewis — the CTU has pushed to negotiate more than just “bread and butter” issues like pay and benefits, to include broader social justice issues like affordable housing, homelessness, and environmental justice.

That broader approach to bargaining contributed to labor strife with newly-elected Lightfoot in 2019, when teachers went on strike for 11 days. Ultimately, the union secured significant wins to increase support staff, pay, and benefits.

Protesters with the Chicago Teachers Union march in downtown Chicago on Oct. 31, 2019.

Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan alluded to that strike in his recent endorsement of Vallas — arguing that the CTU went to war with Lightfoot after she defeated the union’s preferred candidate for mayor in 2019. The teachers union has been clear in their dislike for Vallas, highlighting what they say is a “record of failure” and a “path of destruction” he’s left behind in the public school systems he led.

Vallas has not been shy about his disagreements with the teachers union. But he said the 2019 strike and the COVID-related work stoppages could have been avoided and has vowed to bargain in “good faith.”

Deciding how to measure school and student performance

Early in the pandemic, district officials halted the annual school ratings based on test scores, attendance, and other metrics. And last spring, district leaders announced the old system, known as the School Quality Rating Policy, would no longer exist.

The decisions have prompted a broader conversation about how schools should be measured — or if they should at all — that will continue under the next mayor.

For some, the pause on high-stakes accountability has been a welcome reprieve. The teachers union and others have argued it put too much emphasis on test scores and penalized schools serving high-need populations. A low rating could turn off prospective new families, contributing to a cycle of declining enrollment and continued disinvestment.

But for others, the lack of a system for measuring quality can leave parents and the public wondering: How are students and schools doing?

For two years, the district, the union, and several stakeholders, including Kids First Chicago, have been working together to develop a new, more “holistic” accountability policy. Hal Woods, the chief of policy at Kids First Chicago, said the school board is expected to vote on it next month.

“A new mayor might come in and say, pump the brakes,” Woods said. “Obviously, we hope not.”

It’s not likely Vallas would do that. He created Chicago Public Schools’ first accountability system — putting more than 100 schools on probation for poor academic performance before the federal No Child Left Behind law required districts to do so.

Johnson is likely to be more skeptical. He has said the district does not need its own rating system since the state already has one, and has said schools need more support and resources, not accountability.

The new policy, Woods said, aims to do just that.

“It should be a tool to diagnose where extra support is needed and what that support looks like,” Woods said. “That could be financial, it could be other forms of support.”

Chicago students and schools are facing a pivotal moment. Test scores have fallen. Mental health concerns are rising, particularly among young girls. Additional social workers, counselors, and school staff worry the extra resources still won’t be enough.

The city’s next mayor will have to face these challenges — and decide how to respond.

Mauricio Peña contributed reporting.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Comparing Chicago’s 2023 mayoral candidates on 5 key education issues

2023-03-21T17:10:53+00:00

Chicago voters are facing a choice between two mayoral candidates with vastly different backgrounds and views on education.

Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas has a long record managing urban school districts as an appointed bureaucrat. His opponent, Brandon Johnson, is a former middle school teacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer.

The next mayor will be the last to have control of the school district before it transitions to being governed by an elected school board. The city’s runoff election will be held on April 4.

Here is a side-by-side breakdown on where Vallas and Johnson stand on five key education issues:

Mila Koumpilova contributed to this report.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org. Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago mayoral candidates offer divergent paths on declining enrollment and small schools

2023-03-17T21:09:06+00:00

Chicago’s two mayoral candidates have starkly different visions for reckoning with the city’s steep enrollment losses and under-enrolled schools.

Paul Vallas has said these shrinking campuses could become or share space with specialized magnets, charter schools, or alternative high schools — the kinds of overhauls he oversaw during his tenure as Chicago Public Schools CEO from 1995 to 2001. The city should continue to give families more quality choices, he argues.

Brandon Johnson, on the other hand, says Chicago’s system of choice — in which families can pick from a myriad of district-run, charter, and private programs anywhere in the city — has created a “Hunger Games scenario” in which neighborhood schools lose out to better-funded competitors. The solution, the Chicago Teachers Union organizer says, is a major influx of resources for schools that already exist.

The divide between Vallas and Johnson — both Democrats facing off in an April 4 runoff — embodies the party’s swings and tensions on school choice and other education policies. And it comes at a pivotal time for Chicago, which will transition away from mayoral control to an elected school board in 2025 as a moratorium on school closures ends.

Both candidates’ plans raise questions. The approach of fully rebranding struggling schools Vallas champions has a checkered record, and it would come after three years of COVID-era disruption for students. He has called for expanding the city’s alternative high schools to reengage students who disconnected from school during the pandemic, but these campuses have no shortage of seats after massive enrollment losses recently.

Yet with leaner times looming after federal COVID relief money runs out, it’s tough to say whether the city can pull off the significant influx of resources Johnson wants to revitalize all of its shrinking schools. It would be up against demographic headwinds reducing the number of school-age children — and costs that have swelled to as much as $40,000 per student a year at some under-enrolled high schools, compared with $13,000 on average.

Kate Phillippo, a professor in Loyola University’s Schools of Social Work and Education, notes the city’s system of choice, where most students travel to magnet, charter, or private schools rather than attend their assigned neighborhood campus, is likely here to stay. But it’s also under pressure as the number of small schools grows.

“What we don’t need in Chicago is more schools, unless we are doing it with the goal of other schools going away,” said Phillippo. “I don’t know how much more choice we can introduce.”

More recently, the two mayoral candidates have walked a careful line on charter schools and school choice, with Vallas suggesting that the city actually doesn’t need more charters, and Johnson stressing that he doesn’t oppose them. But their platforms and records are illuminating.

Vallas, a well-known education reformer who helped to remake New Orleans as a charter-centric district after Hurricane Katrina, is a pro-school choice Democrat in the mold of former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, but he has also broken with the Democratic canon in backing an expansion of an Illinois program that pays for some students to attend private schools. Johnson, a Cook County commissioner and former teacher, is staking out a more traditional Democratic position, based on steering more money to traditional public schools.

Vallas argues expanding school choices remains important

If elected mayor, Vallas has made it clear that he would work to support the system of school choice that he promoted as the district’s CEO, when he touts presiding over the creation of 78 magnet, charter, and other schools.

His approach was a precursor to what became known as the “portfolio model” of managing districts — a decentralized, open-enrollment system where cities incentivize high-performing schools and close or restructure struggling campuses. The model was popular in the 2010s, but it has lost much of its luster in more recent years. Research has shown mixed results for students, and advocates have come to champion a less top-down approach based on trust and buy-in from local communities.

On the campaign trail today, Vallas has tried to reflect that shift. He said he wants to empower local communities to invite charter schools into under-enrolled or vacant buildings to take over or share space with traditional schools. Struggling schools could also be converted into magnets or other models, making them more attractive to students and families. He has singled out for expansion the Youth Connection Charter School, or YCCS, network of alternative charters that serve former dropouts and students at risk for dropping out.

At a Saturday mayoral debate hosted by the Chicago Women Take Action Alliance, Vallas — who helped engineer major, polarizing expansions of charters and school choice in New Orleans and Philadelphia — distanced himself from the unchecked growth of charters in Chicago under his successors. He said his administration only green-lit 15 such schools. His focus instead, he said, was on launching specialized magnet programs, such as International Baccalaureate and STEM, housed within traditional neighborhood schools. With enough charters in the city already, he will again focus on pushing for such programs.

“We were very cautious about not destabilizing communities by converting schools into charter schools,” he said. But, he added, “I think it’s very important to expand quality school choice.”

In some ways, Vallas’ comments echo a broader recent conversation about saving some shrinking campuses by rethinking their offerings in a way that can draw local families. His idea of remaking struggling high schools as career and technical academies is one the district’s current CEO, Pedro Martinez, has floated as well; Johnson is also advocating for more career and technical programs.

The tempering of Vallas’ position comes at a time when the city has cooled on charters, which are public schools run by nonprofits or other private entities but in Chicago are overseen and funded by the school district.

In its 2019 contract with its teachers union, the city agreed to extend an earlier moratorium on new charter campuses and limit charter enrollment. The district has also embraced much shorter contract renewals with many more strings attached for its charter providers — more stringent oversight championed by some school board members appointed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Member Elizabeth Todd-Breland, for instance, has questioned recently whether charters that haven’t delivered on a promise of innovation and superior student outcomes should continue to exist.

Others see Vallas as a potential ally for charters. Andrew Broy, president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, said Vallas has a “long history of seeing charters as an integral part of the school system.” A Vallas proposal to do away with enrollment caps for high-performing charters resonates. But Broy said the group has not yet decided whether to endorse a mayoral candidate.

While the massive charter growth of 15 years ago is inconceivable today, Broy sees room for new innovative charters in pockets of the city with crowded schools, such as in parts of the Northwest Side. Broy, who has decried what he sees as cumbersome charter contract renewals, said his group hopes to work with the next mayor on creating a pathway to longer renewals.

Charters have also lost students since the pandemic began — though they have fared better than neighborhood schools. District-run schools lost roughly 10% of their enrollment since 2019, while charters lost about 6%. Alternative high schools — district-run, charter and for-profit — lost a fifth of their students, and the YCCS network that Vallas has touted was especially hard hit and forced to close two campuses.

Research by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research has shown that the rapid expansion of charters in Chicago resulted in some high-performing schools. But student outcomes have varied greatly among charter campuses, said Elaine Allensworth, the consortium’s director. Ultimately, she said opening more than 100 schools as student enrollment was shrinking was bound to lead to under-enrolled campuses.

Johnson and his supporters have argued that Vallas’ approach would bring disruption to the district on the heels of COVID-era upheaval. At a recent press conference organized by the Chicago Teachers Union — a pioneer in unionizing some charter campuses in the city — charter school teachers said the city’s focus should be on steering resources toward its existing campuses. That includes charters that have lagged in beefing up their support staff and programs for students.

Ryan Lindburg, an educator at CICS Northtown Academy, said school funding in Chicago is already spread too thin, a sort of “Wild West situation.”

“What we’ve actually seen in the past is that a school opens up,” he said. “Two years later, we close it. We rebrand it. It’s a new charter. Two years later, it closes. We rebrand it. And you can’t get any stability that way.”

Johnson says neighborhood schools need major investment

Johnson believes some of the district’s enrollment challenges have stemmed from the very system of choice that Vallas champions.

He points to the closure of 50 traditional public schools a decade ago under then Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a move that was deeply controversial and, Johnson says, fed into an exodus of Black families from the city – flight that has contributed to today’s enrollment declines.

Programmatic missteps have added to the problem, he said, such as having an online preschool sign-up system that is difficult for some families to access.

But Johnson has largely refrained from bashing charters, whose parents make up a sizeable part of Chicago’s electorate. He said that families tend to love their schools regardless of the model. He has also spoken about his own family’s decision to choose public schools outside his Austin neighborhood, where he has said campuses did not offer the extracurricular and other programs his children sought.

Still, he said, “It is clear that charter school expansion forces competition for resources and ultimately harms all schools.”

He has held up the idea of making use of vacant space on under-enrolled campuses by bringing in services that their communities need — from health care clinics to child care centers.

Such steps don’t in themselves reverse flagging enrollment, and the scaling back of coursework, extracurricular options, and other resources for students it has brought. But, proponents of the idea argue, they can generate some revenue for these campuses as well as more community buy-in as they bring neighbors into the building, transforming schools into community hubs.

Johnson has also said he wants to steer resources to these small schools on par with what campuses with larger enrollments would receive: a school library with a librarian, counselors and other support staff, art programs, and sports teams. He sees these investments as part of a broader push to make South and West Side neighborhoods more attractive to families.

But that’s a heavy lift in a city where small schools are poised to play an ever more outsized role: Their number grew markedly during the pandemic, and now one in three elementary schools serves fewer than 300 children. Meanwhile, even as high school enrollment remained relatively stable, Chicago high schools that serve 250 or fewer students lost a third of their enrollments since 2019 on average. The gap between the cost of educating a student at tiny and larger campuses has grown dramatically, and Martinez has been blunt: The district is taking money from schools with healthy enrollments to subsidize its small schools.

Experts such as Phillippo are dubious that significant investments in staff and programming can counteract the effects of powerful demographic and immigration shifts that are shrinking the school-age student population across the Midwest.

Gary Miron, a professor of education leadership, research and technology at Western Michigan University who has critically examined the national growth of charters, says investing in struggling buildings can help address the central challenge of high teacher and administrator turnover they face. But the city would need a larger, coherent plan for better supporting its neighborhood schools.

“Throwing resources at these schools isn’t a good idea unless it’s part of an overall management strategy,” he said. “It’s a hard thing to do when you have a decentralized, free-market system of providing a public service.”

Sally Nuamah, a professor at Northwestern University and the author of “Closed for Democracy,” a book about the academic and other fallout from Chicago’s 2013 school closures, says it’s paramount that the next mayor seek solutions to enrollment and other challenges in tandem with local communities. When decisions take place without community input, as with the 2013 closings, they breed disillusionment and mistrust in public institutions.

Johnson recently described those closings, which disproportionately affected Black students, as “one of the most horrific acts done against a group of people in the history of the city of Chicago.”

“The next mayor needs to take seriously the potential consequences of making these decisions on the academic, emotional, and political lives of communities that have already experienced the loss of other important public institutions such as hospitals and libraries,” Nuamah said.

Lilia Guevara, a mother of three, says parents in particular are eager to be a partner in these conversations.

Guevara, who lives on the Southwest Side, has a recent graduate of a Catholic high school and twins with autism — one attending the charter Acero’s Garcia campus and another at a district-run high school. Each of those high schools has proven the right fit for the twins’ distinct needs, she said.

Guevara said she does not want to see the mayoral candidates politicize charter or other schools. Instead, she wants a commitment to appoint more parents to the school board ahead of a transition to an elected board — and to better incorporate parent voices in making decisions more generally.

“The officials are not always thinking about what we deal with as low-income parents raising human beings,” she said.

Ultimately, says Allensworth of the Consortium on School Research, schools are part of a broader, complex governance equation. Affordable housing, transportation, vibrant small businesses, and other factors influence whether families with children move to the city and stick around.

“The mayor is really the one person in a position to influence how different sectors in the city affect education,” she said.

Becky Vevea contributed to this report.

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Vallas supporters disrupt Johnson event focused on Vallas’ schools leadership

2023-03-17T00:19:35+00:00

A press conference denouncing Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas’ record running public schools devolved into a shouting match as his supporters interrupted an event for his opponent at Rainbow PUSH Coalition Thursday morning in Kenwood.

Supporters of Chicago Teachers Union organizer and county commissioner Brandon Johnson gathered ahead of the city’s April 4 runoff election to warn voters of what they called a “trail of destruction” Vallas left in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans — a narrative Vallas’ supporters said was “totally untrue.”

The dust-up underscored the stark differences between Vallas and Johnson — and highlighted a divided electorate. Both candidates are working to shore up support in majority-Black communities on the city’s South and West sides, where current Mayor Lori Lightfoot performed well in the Feb. 28 election.

Parent and activist Melissa Francis traveled to Chicago from New Orleans to share her experience navigating her hometown’s post-Katrina school system, which Vallas led from 2007 to 2011.

“Paul Vallas has never had families in his best interest,” Francis told the crowd of Johnson supporters. “Many citizens of New Orleans recognize Paul Vallas as a scammer.”

Others called Vallas “a thief and a liar” who left “a trail of destruction” in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.

“He comes into our communities and pillages them and leaves,” said Gema Gaete, an activist who was part of a 19-day hunger strike in Little Village when Vallas ran Chicago Public Schools from 1995 to 2001. “We’re here to remind everybody that we don’t forget and he will be held accountable.”

As they began chanting “Vallas, Vallas, Vallas,” Johnson supporters bellowed, “We want Brandon,” in repetition.

Some Johnson supporters called Vallas backers “sellouts” and a few people got into one another’s faces. But the clash quickly ended and the Vallas supporters left the building.

On the sidewalk across the street, Vallas supporters held their own press conference to defend his education record and countered with their own experiences working with him in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.

“Folks who are trying to paint him as a GOP, trying to paint him as a racist, it’s just totally untrue,” said Michael Johnson, CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County in Madison, Wisconsin.

“We weren’t being antagonists or anything like that,” said Caliph Muab-El, an organizer with the Midwest Coalition for Stopping Violence, the group that held the counter press conference in support of Vallas. “We just want to get the message across that there is a different side to this whole story that they’re painting.”

Vallas’ legacy in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans has been the longtime subject of scrutiny. Johnson and other candidates have criticized his record in Chicago for putting schools on academic probation and not paying into the teachers’ pension fund. State law at the time allowed Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration to use money earmarked for pensions to cover operating costs, as long as the fund remained healthy.

When Vallas left Chicago, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission hired him to run schools there after the state took over the public school system. He made dramatic changes, but left the system with a deficit.

Philadelphia City Councilwoman Kendra Brooks said school closures and destabilization of that city’s schools pushed her into politics.

“It was triggered by having someone as CEO come into our city, sell off properties, sell off buildings, steal money that is still unaccounted for, and walk away,” Brooks said.

Creg Williams, a former Chicago principal who was Chief of High Schools in Philadelphia under Vallas and also worked with Vallas in New Orleans, countered Brooks’ take on what happened in both cities.

“Paul did not devastate the community. The community was devastated when we arrived,” Williams said. He noted that in both Philadelphia and New Orleans, state lawmakers dictated some of the policies Vallas and other district officials put in place.

“There are stipulations in the law that you have to follow,” Williams said. “No matter what the people say, or no matter what you feel, or what you may want to do, you still have to follow those stipulations.”

In New Orleans, Vallas faced criticism over “lack of transparency, inattention to the most disadvantaged students,” according to the Times-Picayune. Ultimately, student test scores improved at schools converted into charter schools, but at district-run schools, progress was uneven, according to New Orleans magazine.

If elected mayor, Vallas said he wants to keep school buildings open on nights and weekends, push more funding down to individual schools, and support a system of choice for families. Johnson’s platform emphasizes staffing all schools with enough teachers, counselors, social workers, nurses, and librarians and bolstering youth jobs programs.

Mauricio Peña contributed to this story.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

How former teacher Brandon Johnson organized his way to the doorstep of Chicago City Hall

2023-03-14T23:41:10+00:00

Brandon Johnson has knocked on a lot of doors in the last decade.

A former rank-and-file teacher turned Chicago Teachers Union organizer, Johnson has met with thousands of teachers, pounded the pavement on behalf of dozens of candidates, and lobbied state lawmakers.

Still, he had little to no name recognition as he launched his bid to become Chicago’s next mayor.

“A few months ago, they said they didn’t know who I was,” Johnson told a crowd of supporters when he made it to the mayoral runoff election on Feb. 28. “Well, if you didn’t know, now you know.”

Although Johnson may not have been famous in Chicago politics before he ran, he didn’t come out of nowhere. Johnson is the product of a grassroots movement led by the CTU over the last decade that has focused on issues beyond the classroom, like affordable housing, public health, environmental justice, and police reform. The outcome of Johnson’s race will be an important signal about the strength of that movement.

His progressive message broke through in a field of nine candidates, and he got about 21% of the vote — enough to secure a spot in next month’s runoff election.

Now, Johnson will go head-to-head in the April 4 election with former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, who got about 33% of the vote in February. The two candidates have very different visions for the future of the city’s school system. The district faces challenges disentangling its finances from the city as it transitions into an elected school board, declining enrollment, and academic disparities that widened since the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

Vallas has garnered support by touting his reputation as a “fixer” who can lead in difficult times. But he has faced scrutiny on the campaign trail over his complicated history with public schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.

Robert Bruno, a labor education professor at University of Illinois and longtime observer of the Chicago Teachers Union, said to some degree, Johnson’s journey from classroom teacher to political candidate came as a reaction to policies put in place by Vallas and like-minded officials.

“I think maybe Paul Vallas helped to create the conditions that made Brandon Johnson inevitable,” Bruno said.

Those conditions have prompted the CTU — and all of its organizing power — to try to put an ally into the mayor’s office before. In 2015, the union helped U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia push then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff, only to have him fall short with 44% of the vote. And in 2019, the CTU backed Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who made it to the mayoral runoff, but lost in a landslide to Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

In order to win on April 4, Johnson will likely have to more than double the number of votes he got on Feb. 28. That will be difficult, but not impossible, Bruno said.

“If he’s doing the work as an organizer, then he has to be contributing to the mobilization and the high engagement that you see, “ Bruno said. “And that might be his secret weapon.”

A middle school teacher joins a labor movement

Last fall, Johnson announced his candidacy for mayor, steps from where he taught middle school social studies. Decades earlier, Jenner Elementary Academy of the Arts served students from the nearby Cabrini-Green public housing complex. Now, it is a campus of the Ogden International School after a 2018 merger.

Tara Stamps, a former teacher who now works for the union coaching new teachers, recalled Johnson’s days at Jenner.

“He was very patient,” Stamps said. “He has a very calm demeanor. Brandon is not easily riled and you kind of need that when you’re going to be working with middle school kids.”

These qualities are important for a leader at a critical time for the city, Stamps said.

Stamps was Johnson’s mentor at Jenner and remembered advocating for him during the hiring process. He proved to be committed and connected to his students, and a necessary role model at the mostly Black school, Stamps added.

On the campaign trail, Johnson has shared his own memories of Jenner, such as the time students were displaced when the city leveled Cabrini-Green.

He’s also shared the time one of his students at Jenner told him: “You should be teaching at a good school.”

The comment caught Johnson off-guard. It also served as a call to action for him to address the lack of affordable housing, food insecurity, and gun violence — traumas that students carry into the classroom.

Along the campaign trail, Johnson has called for fully funded schools for all students and families regardless of ZIP code. “Every single child in the city” should get to have their needs met, Johnson said late last month.

After Jenner, Johnson spent about a year teaching at Westinghouse College Prep in East Garfield Park, a test-in selective enrollment high school in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. But then Johnson decided to start solving those problems students faced outside of schools. So in the summer of 2011, Johnson, current CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, and other educators joined an organizing initiative at the union.

They helped to get buy-in from rank-and-file members at school buildings, create partnerships with like-minded unions and community organizations, and worked to bring parents into their movement.

“Many of us became teachers to change the world,” Davis Gates said. “We wanted young people to have a good opportunity at dreaming and reimagining and transforming. And all of us have been committed to that dream as educators.”

Davis Gates said Johnson helped usher in a type of “common good” unionism that their work is about more than wages and benefits for school staff. Led by then-CTU President Karen Lewis, the union pushed a progressive agenda that focused on the broader socioeconomic challenges that affect students and families.

In announcing his campaign for mayor, Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson recalled his time as a middle school social studies teacher and the displacement his students faced as the city demolished Cabrini-Green.

Johnson hit the ground running as an organizer just as the union began strengthening its political identity, Stamps said. “He was very active” organizing members in school buildings, she added.

“We were breaking ground on this new kind of unionism,” Stamps said. “[It] not only just involved its members, but brought the community in as partners in this fight for a city and a school system that Chicagoans deserved.”

In 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union carried out its first strike in 25 years. The strike, which CTU used to highlight policies members said were hurting public education, attracted international attention. It also “reshaped the educational landscape in Chicago and across the country,” Johnson said in a statement emailed to Chalkbeat Chicago.

“Karen Lewis herself said it was a battle for the soul of public education, and about protecting the most democratic institution in America,” he said.

Bruno, the University of Illinois professor, said the strike is seen as a success by labor groups, in part because of the coalition-building done by organizers like Johnson.

From being educators to knowledgeable union stewards to informed about city and state laws, organizers have a diverse set of skills, Bruno said. “They’ve got to be really good coalition builders” because they’re trying to get people to take action, he added.

Since being hired by the union, Johnson has organized CTU members at schools primarily on the South and West sides. He’s also worked with community organizations and families who reside in those neighborhoods. It’s a job he still holds today, though the union said he’s been on leave since last November.

According to the union, while on leave, Johnson earns no salary, but like other CTU staff members on leave, Johnson “is allowed to utilize his unused accrued paid time off.”

That work, which is central to Johnson’s career trajectory, has also attracted skepticism. Some observers have said Johnson would be beholden to the CTU in a way that would not be good for taxpayers. Even fellow progressives who have been supported by the CTU, like Garcia, have raised questions about those ties.

“Will Brandon, if he’s elected mayor, be able to say that he is impartial?” Garcia, who ran for mayor but failed to reach the April 4 runoff, said in an interview with the Sun-Times ahead of the Feb. 28 election.

Garcia — who as of publication has yet to throw his support behind Johnson in the runoff — went on to question whether he would make the best decision for children and taxpayers.

Johnson has promised not to raise property taxes, but has proposed a slew of new taxes, mostly targeting corporations and wealthy individuals. He has also pushed back against the criticism, saying that he is grateful for the support from working class families, and that he would be a mayor for all of Chicago.

Electoral politics become crucial to the union’s mission

To the CTU, the policies put in place by Vallas and subsequent district leaders destabilized the public school system. That perspective prompted a new frontier for the union: electoral politics.

After 50 schools closed under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Lewis took those grievances to voters and made the education system’s needs clear, Davis Gates recalled.

Johnson was a key part in those political campaigns. He helped organize members and allies’ campaigns for city council in 2015 and the state legislature in 2020.

Those efforts bore fruit. In 2015, Susan Sadlowski Garza, a school counselor, became the first CTU member elected to City Council. Union ally Carlos Ramirez-Rosa also won his aldermanic race. In 2019, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez and other CTU allies were elected to city council seats.

And in the intervening period, Johnson decided to test his own appeal to voters. In 2018, Johnson won a seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners, representing Chicago’s West Side and near western suburbs.

Not everyone in the union supports its focus on electoral politics. Some, for example, have said the union donated too much to candidates without a full accounting. Still, last spring, CTU’s leaders were reelected to their posts.

Johnson is the first rank-and-file member to ascend from organizer to CTU political director to mayoral runoff candidate since the union set out to get its members into elected office more than a decade ago. His rise matches Lewis’ vision of the union having political agency in every level of governance, as well as her policy priorities.

“We followed Karen’s lead and here we are today,” Davis Gates said. “We have an elected school board. We have our bargaining rights back. Our pensions are being funded.”

Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson will face off against former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas in the April 4 runoff election for Chicago mayor.

In his statement, Johnson said he views union organizing as key to developing a “coalition of people with interest and commission vision to bring that vision to life.”

“We have real issues in our city — the need to invest in people, the need for a public safety plan that works, the need to ensure schools are stable and predictable, and the need to grow our economy,” Johnson said.

His organizing experience, he argues, will help Chicago meet these goals.

The prospect of an organizer leading Chicago is promising to union members like Lori Torres Whitt, a 36th ward aldermanic candidate.

“I want a mayor who’s going to work with me, and make decisions for us with us,” Whitt said. “And that’s what you get with an organizer.”

Chicago High School for the Arts teacher Megan Pietz feels as though an organizer will leave the door open when it comes to making decisions.

“I feel like Paul Vallas is someone who closes that door,” Pietz said. “Being an organizer also means being willing to listen to and engage in a conversation, to engage in a discussion.”

Johnson performed well on Chicago’s Northwest and North sides, as well as some portions of the south lakefront, according to election results. But now he will have to persuade a divided electorate on the South and West sides of the city that voted for Lightfoot and Garcia.

Stamps said if anyone can do it, Johnson can.

“We earn the votes,” Stamps said. “We do the work. We out-organize and we out-work people. We knock on doors. We do the phone banks. We do the pop-ups. We do whatever is necessary to carry our message to the people. Because, ultimately, you want a people-powered campaign.”

Becky Vevea contributed to this story.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago mayoral election 2023: How Johnson, Vallas answered 10 important education questions

2023-03-01T18:23:38+00:00

Chicago voters will head to the polls once again on April 4 to vote for a new mayor, choosing between two candidates who are vastly different when it comes to public education.

Brandon Johnson is an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union and Paul Vallas is the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Both are Democrats, but their views vary widely on everything from school choice to measuring academic performance to how campuses are funded.

Whoever wins will take office in late May and will get to appoint a school district CEO and seven school board members to oversee the nation’s fourth largest school district, its $9.5 billion budget, 635 schools, and the education of 322,000 children. They will also be the last mayor to have control of Chicago Public Schools before the district transitions to being governed by an elected school board.

Chalkbeat Chicago asked candidates 10 important questions about the city’s public schools in January — some of which came directly from our readers. Explore Johnson and Vallas’ answers below.

Chicago Public Schools is no longer the nation’s third largest school district after a decade of enrollment decline. The loss of students has had significant impacts on neighborhood high schools in particular. How will you address declining enrollment?
What are your plans to address learning loss and social emotional gaps that have emerged during the past three years of the COVID pandemic?
The Chicago Board of Education will expand from 7 appointed members to 21 elected officials over the next four years. How will you ensure parents, students, and teachers are fairly represented on the new school board? And how will you work with the elected board?
The Chicago Teachers Union’s contract ends next year. There was an 11-day strike in 2019, a rocky return to in-person learning in 2021, and five days of canceled classes in January 2022. How do you plan to avoid a strike in the next contract negotiation with CTU?
Chicago Public Schools stopped rating schools and holding students back during the pandemic. Both accountability policies are under review. How do you think schools should be measured, judged, or rated?
What are your thoughts about Chicago Public Schools’ student-based budgeting model, which ties a school’s funding to how many students are enrolled?
The Illinois legislature created a tax-credit scholarship program in 2017 to expand school choice. After a one-year extension, the program is scheduled to sunset in 2025. Do you support continuing the state’s tax-credit scholarship program? Why or why not?
During the early days of the pandemic, students with disabilities had limited or no access to academic accommodations written in their Individualized Education Program. Many students were unable to receive or renew IEPs to meet their needs. What will you do to ensure that students with disabilities are being identified without delay and getting the resources they need to catch up in school?
Are you for or against trade/vocational education? How would you reactivate trade school curriculum and would it be available in all schools?
Describe a high quality school. (How many staff work there? What are students taught? What programs or extracurriculars are offered? What support services are available? What does the facility look like? What is the schedule?) How many CPS schools meet your definition of a high quality school?

Chicago voters will now pick between former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas (left) and Cook County Commissioner and teachers union organizer Brandon Johnson (right) in the mayoral runoff election on April 4.

Chicago Public Schools is no longer the nation’s third largest school district after a decade of enrollment decline. The loss of students has had significant impacts on neighborhood high schools in particular. How will you address declining enrollment?

JOHNSON: If you recall, that decade began in 2013 with the greatest closure of Black and Latinx schools in Chicago’s history. If we can build sustainable community schools alongside quality affordable housing, we will reverse the trend. We must also tackle the violence epidemic with more holistic measures that provide resources and trauma intervention for students and families.

Mayors Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot have both presided over precipitous declines in pre-kindergarten enrollment. This is not simply a result of demographic change, but the district moving to an online, centralized application process for preschool that is elitist and prejudiced against families with little access to technology. Enrollment also decreases due to poor program design. This is also evident in a number of special education crises – from State monitor to transportation – over the last 10 years.

Schools communities need direct investment, guarantees of staffing and program offerings. Every school should have a library and librarian, adequate clinicians and counselors, thriving arts offerings and sports programs and teams. And the mayor of Chicago has an obligation to be actively fighting in partnership for the revenue required to fulfill those basic needs for every school in the city, not just some.

VALLAS: Making the schools more attractive to parents by allowing for schools to take on specialties as well as bring back the work study program for high school students. We must also make our schools safe, so students feel comfortable in their learning environment. We must also have the dollars make it down to the school level, right now only 60% of the budget makes it to the schools. In my career I have worked to make education meaningful to students allowing a greater trust in the system by not only the students but also their parents. I would also expand the alternative schools network to provide for the educational needs for high school students too old for the traditional high school program.

Reader question. What are your plans to address learning loss and social emotional gaps that have emerged during the past three years of the COVID pandemic?

JOHNSON: Let’s remember that students and families are still struggling with the pandemic, and there is much trauma and recovery that must occur – especially among Black and Brown students and families who make up the majority of CPS students (like my own).

First, we must address the trauma that existed pre-pandemic, and acknowledge that COVID-19 exposed and exacerbated conditions around cleanliness, bilingual education, access to technology, special education services and more, that city leaders left unaddressed for decades. Asking a student to catch up on math when they are still recovering from the death of a loved one, or a classmate, is inhumane.

Students and families must have trauma support, such as weekly cognitive behavioral therapy, and students need summer jobs and engaging programming. Support student and staff mental health by infusing schools with mental health professionals like counselors and clinicians so that unaddressed trauma is acknowledged, and treated, and learning is more of the focus from day to day. Teachers and staff need adequate time and professional development to help address student needs. And educators need to be empowered with planning time to reinvigorate curriculum and work with students to ensure instructional practices and pedagogy meet students’ needs and interests.

VALLAS: The loss of learning due to the COVID pandemic has been unprecedented. We must work to ensure that our children catch up and can be competitive in their future. In order to meet the gap our children are facing I will open all school buildings through the dinner hour, weekends and summers. We need to invite community organizations to provide enrichment to students in the CPS during these off hours as well as invite retired CPS Teachers to provide tutoring and academic support to the students.

The Chicago Board of Education will expand from seven appointed members to 21 elected officials over the next four years. How will you ensure parents, students, and teachers are fairly represented on the new school board? And how will you work with the elected board?

JOHNSON: I support a map that ensures all communities in this tremendously diverse city have the opportunity to have their voices heard. This is why I worked so closely with Illinois Senate President Don Harmon and community organizations on the legislation to create this vibrant model of democracy for the first time ever in the history of Chicago Public Schools.

We need campaign finance rules to prevent those with no stake in our public schools, or our communities, from controlling our democracy. We cannot have uber rich, arch-conservatives usurping the power that working people in Chicago fought so hard to win. We need candidates who are deeply invested and knowledgeable from the communities served to have a fair chance to win races to influence the education of their children.

Democratic governance requires partnership. The city doesn’t absolve itself of any responsibility to schools just because there are democratically elected school community leaders sitting at the Board of Education. As mayor, I will continue to fight for resources in our schools, and maintain and build upon the coordinated support and services that the city has to offer children and families.

VALLAS: Like I have done all my career I will work with the elected board of education with the respect that is due to them as an equally elected official that is representing the needs of the community that elected them. In all CPS work I will put the needs of the students first and advocated with the board for any necessary resources. Before this board takes office it is important that they do not inherit a broken system, I will push the dollars to the school level and ensure that schools have the resources they need.

Reader question. The Chicago Teachers Union’s contract ends next year. There was an 11-day strike in 2019, a rocky return to in-person learning in 2021, and five days of canceled classes in January 2022. How do you plan to avoid a strike in the next contract negotiation with CTU?

JOHNSON: We need a mayor who can reasonably work with labor. We cannot have the type of leader who will promise something like, say, an elected representative school board and then fight tooth and nail to stop it from being enacted. We cannot have a mayor who, on the campaign trail, calls for a nurse and social worker in every school, then puts teachers on strike for two weeks when they ask for exactly that in writing. We cannot have a mayor who grants expanded parental leave to city workers, but blocks educators from receiving the same.

Just a shift in consistency and keeping one’s word will more than allow for a much more rational and collaborative process.

As mayor, I will be a partner in working with Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union to remove obstacles in the way of achieving excellent schools, rather than contributing to constant friction. The stakes are too high for our students and families for labor and leadership not to have a positive working relationship. And I will openly advocate and build coalitions to identify revenue sources and structures that, over time, will deliver the fully funded schools that families and communities deserve.

VALLAS: The previous CTU strike could have been avoided and we see the cost of that strike in the already exacerbated loss of learning from the pandemic. Over the course of my career I have negotiated 6 teacher contracts with teachers unions in the largest district in 4 different states that led to no strikes and members getting a pay raise. If all parties work in good faith there should be no need for a teacher strike this year which only leads to a greater negative impact of the education on Chicago’s children who are already struggling to regain confidence in the classroom.

Chicago Public Schools stopped rating schools and holding students back during the pandemic. Both accountability policies are under review. How do you think schools should be measured, judged, or rated?

JOHNSON: We cannot continue to punish schools that have suffered from decades of divestment, violence and destabilization. When a school struggles, we often give them more accountability, yet fewer resources. So any school rating formula must bring greater equity, and greater support, to ensure greater success.

Chicago Public Schools does not need its own rating structure, as the state still has and requires one. CPS’ time is better spent identifying sources of revenue to fill the gaps identified in programs, staffing, and services that we know hold schools back from meeting student needs and increasing enrollment. I live in Austin. My wife and I drive two children to Portage Park and another to Hyde Park every day because there are few schools in our community to meet their extracurricular needs. Families should not have to leave their community to find a school with a music program, a sports program, a nurse in every school, or a library with a librarian. We have to use what we already know about the strengths, weaknesses, and assets in our schools to ensure that we are directing resources to where they are needed to make every school excellent.

VALLAS: We should aspire for high standards, we cannot embrace the bigotry of soft expectations. We must set high standards, we have to measure school’s base on their improvement as a school. We must take every school uniquely and see their growth from where they were to where they are.

Reader question. What are your thoughts about Chicago Public Schools’ student-based budgeting model, which ties a school’s funding to how many students are enrolled?

JOHNSON: Student-based budgeting (SBB) and the former SQRP rating policy have had a devastating impact on our schools. SBB, in particular, has contributed to principals whose budgets are strapped to choose between keeping a veteran teacher or having a librarian and a functioning library. Schools struggling with enrollment need to have a process by which root causes are identified and resources are deployed to ensure students still have the richest possible education, and the school has an opportunity to grow its enrollment.

The state, in its evidence-based funding model, has recognized that student and community needs must drive school funding, and that all districts must be brought up to a certain level of resources to meet those needs. Yet CPS has not adopted that approach among its schools. We cannot keep supporting a system that favors choice, but does not provide schools with the same baseline resources and offerings – then punishes students who attend the less frequently chosen school.

VALLAS: The first priority is to push the funding down to the schools. We have to have the majority of the funding flow down to the local schools as of right now only 60% of the funds makes it to the local schools. My second priority is to make sure that the money that is allocated to the students encompasses the needs of the student, we need to make sure the school district is allocating Title I money directly to the school it is assigned too. This money needs to flow directly to the school with only minimal diversions because unfortunately funding due to poverty has been used as discretionary funds by the administration.

Reader question. The Illinois legislature created a tax-credit scholarship program in 2017 to expand school choice. After a one-year extension, the program is scheduled to sunset in 2025. Do you support continuing the state’s tax-credit scholarship program? Why or why not?

JOHNSON: I do not, because this is the kind of thinking that continues to reinforce unequal educational opportunities. Until every Chicago public school and big-city public school has the baseline of resources provided in suburban districts with high property tax bases, the idea of “choice” is a fallacy.

Parents with resources are able to navigate the system for their students, which I don’t begrudge. What is concerning is that families without the means, time, resources, and access to navigating these same systems have no choice at all.

I am not interested in continuing to shift unequal resources around. I am interested in leveling the playing field for all families.

VALLAS: The tax credit scholarship program is beneficial in empowering parents to pick the school that best suits their child’s needs. Whether the students attend private, parochial, public or public charter schools they are students of the City and we need to ensure quality education regardless of their zip code.

During the early days of the pandemic, students with disabilities had limited or no access to academic accommodations written in their Individualized Education Program. Many students were unable to receive or renew IEPs to meet their needs. What will you do to ensure that students with disabilities are being identified without delay and getting the resources they need to catch up in school?

JOHNSON: Teachers in Seattle last fall ratified a contract with a three adult (two teachers, one instructional assistant) to 10 student ratio to help address the needs of their special education population. Chicago must work toward something similar to address compensatory services and the particular needs of this incredibly vulnerable student population. We also need greater clinical support to properly diagnose and service the individualized education programs of these students. This includes the need to ramp up pipelines with state and local funding to hire many more teachers, special education classroom assistants, and teacher assistants to address the accumulated needs of students living with disabilities.

VALLAS: Students with disabilities are a priority even much more so after the loss of learning experienced due to the pandemic. The key to supporting these students is the availability of resources at the local school level. My administration will reallocate dollars in a way that the schools see the most benefit and allow principals to support all the students in their neighborhood schools.

Reader question. Are you for or against trade/vocational education? How would you reactivate trade school curriculum and would it be available in all schools?

JOHNSON: We need to do much better to train Chicagoans to fill the jobs that exist today. Businesses are hiring and manufacturers are hiring. There may be somewhere around 30,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs across the state, and a good number of them are here in Chicago. But we’ve abandoned vocational training in our schools. Modern manufacturing jobs require tech skills, and it is our job to give our students the skills necessary to succeed. So I am all for trade and vocational education, commonly known as Career and Technical Education (CTE), in Chicago Public Schools. CTE is essential to closing the gap between our district, and skilled trade industries and employers.

There is potential in some of the plans the district and CPS CEO Pedro Martinez have around this. With an aviator simulator in Dunbar, and making Tilden, Phillips, Chicago Vocational, and Fenger sustainable community schools with specialized and relevant trades training, we will have education and apprenticeship pipelines to create the skills and engagement necessary for a CTE corridor that will empower our Black and Latinx students to become the next generation of unionized trade workers.

VALLAS: Yes I support trade and vocational education. However I believe on a broader scale that we need to integrate a work study program into all of our high schools and make elective programs more meaningful. We need to reestablish our VocEd and occupational training programs that were in our high schools during my time at the CPS. My administration will do this by partnering with local trade unions and businesses in our city. We have to leverage these connections in ways that attract our students to take interest in these programs that offer amazing opportunities for success after high school.

Describe a high-quality school. (How many staff work there? What are students taught? What programs or extracurriculars are offered? What support services are available? What does the facility look like? What is the schedule?) How many CPS schools meet your definition of a high-quality school?

JOHNSON: We have a model that works – the Sustainable Community School (SCS) model, which calls for collaborative and effective strategy for increasing educational equity. SCS builds on the traditional community school model to prioritize specific pillars and principles to make schools the anchors of their communities, and to share leadership around meeting student, family, educator, staff, and community needs.

We also have schools that have parent mentors, community programming, and partnerships to provide additional support for mental and physical health across the district. Neighborhood schools like Kelly High, National Teachers Academy, Hanson Park Elementary (despite a horrendous facility situation), Chavez Elementary, Beidler Elementary are all vibrant school communities using culturally relevant curriculum and community partnerships to advance the academic and social/emotional needs of countless children. However, we need to do more and better. That will require greater investments in addressing the needs of homeless children, students with disabilities and all the newcomers who do not speak English as their primary language. It also cannot continue to be the case that selective enrollment schools, which provide students with the most extensive course offerings, extracurriculars and sports opportunities, serve only the wealthiest students in the system.

VALLAS: A high quality is a medium sized neighborhood school that embraces high standards and offers the students a high quality curriculum that ensures students achieve a high level of proficiency in all core areas. The ideal quality school offers key enrichment opportunities in the academic year as well as continuing into the non-traditional school hours (weekends, evenings, summers and holidays) to support students in their growth. My ideal quality school offers key wrap-around services for students to ensure they are holistically growing. This school also needs a well trained and supported local school council that broadly represents the community and can provide a vehicle for community input in school governance and supplemental activities.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago 2023 mayoral election: Former schools chief, teachers union organizer headed to runoff

2023-03-01T04:20:55+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Subscribe to our free Chicago newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and state education policy.

Chicago’s next mayor will either be former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas or Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson. In a stunning upset, the two defeated incumbent Lori Lightfoot and are headed for a runoff on April 4 because neither secured more than 50% of the vote.

Lightfoot called both Vallas and Johnson to congratulate them, she said in a concession speech just before 9 p.m.

“I will be rooting and praying for our next mayor to deliver for the people of the city for years to come,” said Lightfoot.

Vallas led the field of nine candidates with 34% of the vote, according to unofficial preliminary results posted by the Chicago Board of Elections Tuesday night. Johnson secured the second spot with just over 20% of the vote while Lightfoot trailed at 17% as results rolled in.

Shortly before 9 p.m., Vallas gave an impassioned speech in which he congratulated Lightfoot and thanked his supporters, saying it was because of them that he secured a spot in the April run off.

“I want to thank the voters of Chicago for making this campaign about the issues and nothing but the issues,” Vallas said.

In a speech at 9:30 p.m., Johnson said people didn’t know who he was a few months ago. “If you didn’t know, now you know,” he said, before thanking his wife and the “workers of this city.”

Lightfoot made history in 2019 when she became the first Black woman and first openly gay person to be elected Chicago mayor.

“Four years ago, I looked into the camera and spoke directly to young people of color who looked like me and to every kid who felt like I did when I grew up,” Lightfoot said. “I’m going to do that again tonight. I told you back then that anything is possible with hard work. And I want you to know that no matter what happens along the way you should always believe that because it’s true.”

With 98% of precincts reporting as of 10 p.m., U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” García had just under 14% of the vote, businessman Willie Wilson had received 9%, and the remaining candidates each had less than 3% of the vote, according to unofficial results.

Though crime and safety eclipsed education as a top priority for voters this cycle, the candidates’ ties to education run deep. The winner of this election will also be the last Chicago mayor to have control of the city’s public schools — as the shift to an elected school board begins with 10 of 21 members elected in 2024.

As an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson advocated for an elected school board. In 2018, he was elected to the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Johnson taught at Jenner Academy and Westinghouse College Prep before moving into a union organizing role. His education platform promises more staff and free transit for students.

Vallas led Chicago Public Schools from 1995 until 2001 as the district’s first CEO under mayoral control. He later managed the public schools in Philadelphia, post-Katrina New Orleans, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, experience he touted Tuesday night.

“I’ve had success because I’ve always had the good sense to listen to the community, to empower the community and draw my leadership from the community,” Vallas said.

During his speech, Vallas also said schools needed to be part of addressing public safety, noting his platform promises to open school buildings on nights and weekends.

His complicated legacy has served as fodder for opponents who argue Vallas would be a “disaster” as mayor. But supporters have said Vallas’ reputation as a reformer is what Chicago needs. His education plan promises to expand school choice and open school buildings on nights and weekends.

In his speech, Johnson thanked his supporters and his wife, saying he “was so freakin’ proud.” Surrounded by supporters including Ald. Pat Dowell and Ald. Matt Martin, Johnson also thanked his union backers in the Chicago Teachers Union, SEIU, and United Working Families.

“We get to turn the page of the politics of old,” Johnson said.

He said people deserved fully resourced public schools. “Every single child in the city gets to have their needs met,” Johnson said.

During his speech, Johnson attacked Vallas’ education record, saying “he has literally failed everywhere he has gone.”

The unofficial early results include more than 240,000 ballots cast during early voting and those returned by mail as of Monday night. When the polls closed, 507,852 total ballots had been cast, which is roughly 32% of all registered voters, according to Max Bever, spokesperson for the city’s Board of Elections.

Earlier Tuesday, election officials said more than 100,000 mail-in ballots had yet to arrive at the Chicago Board of Elections to be counted. Bever said election officials have until March 14 to “collect and count all stragglers.”

Early and mail-in voting rates surpassed previous years, while overall turnout lagged on election day.

In recent weeks, polls had indicated a four-way toss-up between Lightfoot, García, Johnson, and Vallas. Other candidates include State Rep. Kam Buckner, activist Ja’Mal Green, Ald. Sophia King, Ald. Roderick Sawyer, and Wilson.

In a concession speech shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday night, Buckner said the city couldn’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. “We need to invest in students and not undermine our neighborhood schools,” Buckner said.

Buckner was the first candidate to release an education platform, which called for funding schools based on need not enrollment. As a state legislator, Buckner co-sponsored the bill creating an elected school board. He is also a graduate of Morgan Park High School on the far South Side.

Lightfoot did not make education a central part of her 2019 campaign, but much of her time in office has been characterized by conflict with the Chicago Teachers Union and pandemic school closures that have impacted learning and student mental health.

Tuesday night, she said she was proud of her administration’s work making “record investments in our public schools, adding school social workers, nurses, and special education case managers” and their efforts to “connect youth to mental health services, housing, education, job training, and legal services.”

Though he appeared to finish fourth on Tuesday, García famously took former Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff in 2015, with the backing of the Chicago Teachers Union. But this time around, he relied on other unions for support as the teachers union backed Johnson’s bid for mayor. In announcing his late entry to the race last November, Garcia, a Democrat who represents Illinois’ 4th congressional district, said it was time for the city to “double down” on education. “Your ZIP code, race, and socioeconomic status should not determine your future,” he said.

Green called for universal preschool for 3-year-olds as part of his sweeping $5 billion public safety plan on the campaign trail. His plan also called for creating 10,000 apprenticeships for Chicagoans ages 13 to 25. “I’m a father who loves Chicago and I want a better future for my kids and yours,” Green said earlier this year.

King, who represents the 4th Ward which spans the South Side, serves as the vice chair of the Committee on Education and Child Development. She recently tried to push Chicago Public Schools officials to appear quarterly before aldermen or risk losing city money that supports school construction projects, but the measure failed. King helped found Ariel Community Academy, a public school created in 1996 under then-Mayor Richard M. Daley in partnership with Ariel Investments.

Sawyer, who has served as an alderman on the South Side for over a decade, sponsored a proposal in 2020 to remove Chicago police from public schools, but it was thwarted by one of Lightfoot’s allies and did not pass. His father became mayor in 1987 after the death of the city’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington. Sawyer served on the local school council at McDade Classical School, a public selective enrollment school.

Wilson, a high-profile businessman, has focused on rebuilding from the pandemic through “educational grants, trade and business recovery.” He promised to bolster vocational programs in high schools — a move already being undertaken by the district.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Mayoral hopeful Paul Vallas brings complicated Chicago Public Schools legacy

2023-02-27T15:44:37+00:00

What grade would Paul Vallas get for his tenure leading Chicago Public Schools? Depends who you ask.

Supporters describe the first CEO of Chicago Public Schools — and a current mayoral hopeful — as a reformer with a gift for turning around struggling school districts. But critics raise concerns about financial mismanagement, lackluster academic growth, and harsh punishments for low-performing schools.

Vallas has built his mayoral campaign around reducing crime and improving public safety. He’s also touted his record as a fixer who led public school systems in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.

His message resonated with voters. Vallas led a crowded field of nine candidates in the Feb. 28 election, garnering 34% of the vote, according to unofficial preliminary results posted by the Chicago Board of Elections Tuesday night. Cook County Commissioner and teachers union organizer Brandon Johnson secured the second spot with just over 20% of the vote, denying incumbent Lori Lightfoot a second term.

Vallas and Johnson will face off in a runoff election on April 4.

Before Vallas became CEO, Chicago Public Schools had been labeled the “worst in the nation’’ by then-U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. Now, the city’s schools find themselves in another tumultuous time, coming off three years marked by pandemic disruptions, labor strife, and a drop in test scores.

The years ahead will be critical for the district, which faces declining enrollment, challenges disentangling its finances from the city as it transitions into an elected school board, an increase in student mental health issues, and achievement gaps that widened since the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

Vallas unveiled an education platform in early February that includes keeping schools open nights and weekends, putting alternative schools in empty or underenrolled schools, expanding voucher programs, and creating more charter schools — recycling some policies that have fallen out of favor in recent years.

On his campaign website, Vallas touts his life’s work as restoring “broken education systems” in Chicago, Philadelphia, post-Katrina New Orleans, and Bridgeport, Connecticut.

But other candidates have taken aim at Vallas’ education record, arguing he helped create Chicago schools’ current financial problems and laid the groundwork that ultimately led to the closing of Black and Latino schools under other district CEOs.

He’s faced similar criticisms in Philadelphia and New Orleans. Vallas was hired in Philadelphia after the state took over the public school system and made dramatic changes, but left the district with a deficit. In New Orleans, Vallas closed neighborhood schools and opened charter schools. He faced criticism over “lack of transparency, inattention to the most disadvantaged students,” according to the Times-Picayune. But former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, his successor as CEO at Chicago Public Schools, lauded his efforts in New Orleans as a model for reform.

Vallas’ campaign did not respond to questions and multiple interview requests. But he has defended his record, calling criticisms “not grounded in facts” and “a sign of desperation.”

When unveiling his education platform, Vallas said test scores improved during his tenure as Chicago’s schools CEO, his administration opened 78 new schools, and secured two collective bargaining agreements with 21% pay raises for teachers. His work was praised by President Bill Clinton, Vallas added.

The most controversial part of Vallas’ record may be his decision to forgo pension payments and the most debated may be whether reforms led to enough academic growth.

Teacher pension payments paused when Vallas ran CPS

In recent weeks, opponents have criticized Vallas, arguing his decisions contributed to the city’s financial problems. Johnson, who will now face Vallas in the runoff, said he would be a “disaster” for the city.

During a speech earlier this month at City Club Chicago, Cook County Commissioner and Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson took aim at Paul Vallas, saying the former CEO would be a “disaster” for the city.

“It was his budgetary practices that led us into the economic despair that we have now,” Johnson said. “And now he wants to be trusted with the same budget that he couldn’t get right when he was here? That’s a real threat.”

After serving as the city’s director of budget and finance, Vallas was chosen in 1995 by then-Mayor Richard M. Daley to serve as the school district’s inaugural CEO.

Vallas was tasked with balancing the budget and improving test scores in the school district that less than a decade earlier had been named among the worst by the U.S. Department of Education.

Under Vallas, Chicago Public Schools stopped making regular payments into the teachers’ pension. With the district facing an anticipated $1.4 billion deficit, Vallas trimmed the budget by cutting central office staff and eliminated “wasteful spending” from special education and other departments, according to Chicago Magazine.

The same state law that gave Daley control of the schools also changed the tax levy that directly funded the pension system, allowing Daley and Vallas to use money once earmarked for pensions to help cover operating costs, said Chuck Burbridge, the former executive director of the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund from 2015-2020.

The legislation only required district leaders to make pension contributions if the fund fell below 90% of being fully funded, Burbridge said.

The district did begin making payments again in the early 2000s, Burbridge said, but a “pension holiday” approved amid the great recession further contributed to the Fund’s current condition.

Chicago Public Schools’ teachers’ pensions are currently under 50% funded, according to a report presented to the Board of Education last fall.

Gery Chico, who served as school board president during Vallas’ tenure, defended the decision to direct pension funds toward the operating budget. The pension fund has to be assessed annually and at the time the fund was 90 or 100% funded, Chico said.

“There was no reason to overfund the pension when you had tremendous needs in the classroom,” Chico said.

Under Vallas, Chicago’s student test scores saw marginal improvements

During Vallas’ tenure as Chicago schools chief, he implemented a series of reforms including the end of “social promotion,” summer and after-school programs for failing students, and so-called “academic probation” for low-performing schools.

Vallas faced criticism then and now for these policies being too punitive and paving the way for dramatic — and often destabilizing — changes to school communities in the name of performance. For instance, schools on probation were “reconstituted” or turned around, resulting in dozens of principals and 200 teachers being fired. After Vallas left, the probation policy he put in place was used to close low-performing schools over the course of the following decade..

Despite the drastic steps taken districtwide, test scores showed marginal improvement, according to a Northwestern study commissioned by the Chicago Board of Education. Researchers suggested improvements in high school test scores were largely due to improvements in elementary instruction. At the high school level, instruction was shallow and some high school teachers were only reaching as little as five students in their classes, according to the same study.

At the time, Vallas argued that the district as a whole had higher overall test scores and blamed teachers who resisted reform for the shortcomings, according to the Tribune.

“Test scores are always tricky,” said former Chicago Teachers Union President Deborah Lynch-Walsh, noting the high percentage of CPS students living in poverty. Lynch-Walsh, who is now supporting Vallas’ bid for mayor, said the additional after-school programs and expansion of magnet schools Vallas implemented were notable efforts at improving student achievement.

Nonetheless, Vallas resigned in 2001.

“I would like to think the school system is better off today than it was in 1995,” he said at the time, according to the Chicago Tribune. Earlier that year, Daley had expressed concern over stagnating reading scores, but applauded Vallas’ work and called him “quite simply the best” schools CEO.

Today, critics and opponents, including Johnson and State Rep. Kam Buckner, argue that mayoral control of schools under Vallas would bring back harmful policies to Chicago Public Schools.

In a debate earlier this month, Buckner derided Vallas’ title as a “turnaround specialist” calling his policies harmful. He said Vallas’ formula is one of replacing neighborhood schools in New Orleans with charter schools, not paying into the pension fund, then leaving for the next opportunity.

State Rep. Kam Buckner has said Paul Vallas would bring back harmful policies to Chicago Public Schools.

“Paul Vallas did in New Orleans what Mayor Emanuel did in Chicago: closed huge numbers of neighborhood schools in one fell swoop,” Buckner said. “It was a mistake in Chicago, it was a mistake in New Orleans, and if Vallas gets the keys to the city back, rest assured he’ll keep the closures coming until neighborhood schools like my school, Morgan Park High School, are a thing of the past.”

Before Vallas resigned as CEO, Lynch-Walsh had also been a critic of his, saying he had “left teachers out of the reform process and acted as if students’ performance would improve if only the schools got rid of bad teachers,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Lynch-Walsh, who was elected CTU president just before Vallas resigned, wrote a letter to him at the time advocating for smaller schools and criticizing the reconstitution policy, according to Catalyst Chicago.

Now, two decades later, Lynch-Walsh says his current plan offers an “amalgam of lessons learned” from his time leading public school systems in Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Connecticut.

Lynch-Walsh, who worked with Vallas during his brief stint as chief administrator officer at Chicago State University, believes he has the experience to meet the current challenges the school district faces in the coming years.

“He’s got a plan for those challenges and problems,” Lynch-Walsh said.

And there will certainly be challenges ahead for the next mayor when it comes to Chicago Public Schools. No matter who wins.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Lori Lightfoot could be the last mayor to control Chicago Public Schools. How has she done?

2023-02-16T20:55:50+00:00

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot stood on a freshly-installed rubber wood floor in the gymnasium of the new Belmont-Cragin Elementary and delivered a long list of “thank-you’s” from behind a podium emblazoned with the seal of the City of Chicago.

“I can still smell the freshness and newness of this building,” Lightfoot said before using oversized scissors to cut a blue fabric ribbon at the Jan. 17 opening of the new $44 million school, a project set in motion by her predecessor Rahm Emanuel.

It is one of dozens of ribbon cuttings the incumbent mayor is doing in the weeks before the Feb. 28 election in which voters decide if she gets a second term. Lightfoot is facing eight challengers, some with strong ties to the city’s public schools, including former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas and former teacher and current teachers union organizer Brandon Johnson.

“Our job is to come, like the calvary, to the rescue with those resources so we can help you fulfill your dreams and aspirations,” Lightfoot said at the Belmont-Cragin ribbon-cutting, where she was flanked by students, teachers, and other politicians. “This new building is absolutely what that is about.”

Since 1995, Chicago’s mayor has had control over the city’s public schools — deciding where and when to construct or repair school facilities, appointing school board members and a CEO, and negotiating contracts with the teachers union.

Lightfoot could be the last mayor — or one of the last — to wield this kind of power over education in Chicago as the city begins to transition to an elected school board in 2024.

“This is a pivotal or critical time for schools,” said Dick Simpson, a longtime observer and fixture in Chicago politics and retired professor of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago. “It’s also a critical time overall in Chicago’s history.”

Unlike her predecessors, Lightfoot did not come into office four years ago promising big changes at Chicago Public Schools. She kept existing leadership in place and continued implementing outgoing Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan for universal pre-K for 4-year-olds. The one promise Lightfoot did make – to support an elected school board – shifted once she was in office.

Ald. Scott Waguespack, an ally of the mayor, said Lightfoot deserves credit for leading the school system through a once in a generation pandemic.

“Navigating that was something that was done partially on the fly, but also had a good set of directives that we had to stick to to make sure that the institutions survived, including CPS,” Waguespack said.

But what has Lightfoot done so far when it comes to education and what will she do with another four years?

Lightfoot prioritizes city money for school facilities

Deciding when and where to build new or repair old schools has been a core role of Chicago mayors, past and present.

Richard M. Daley’s Modern Schools Across Chicago program spent $1 billion to build 17 new facilities and renovate two others, mostly on the South and West Sides. Lightfoot’s predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, built new annexes in overcrowded areas where students tended to be more affluent and more white than CPS as a whole. He also closed 50 schools and mothballed or sold off the facilities in majority Black and Latino neighborhoods, before implementing a property tax levy in 2017 to bankroll new school construction.

The newly-constructed $44 million Belmont-Cragin Elementary at 6112 W. Fullerton Ave. sits next door to the Riis Park Fieldhouse on Chicago’s Northwest side. The project was set in motion by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and completed under Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Lightfoot harnessed city funding for school projects, but focused spending on fixing up existing facilities, repairing aging roofs, and boilers.

“We’re picking off these projects that are long overdue all over the city,” Lightfoot said. “Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez is very committed to making sure that we really invest in the infrastructure, not just band aids and trying to patch things up.”

Waguespack, who is also chairman of the City Council’s powerful Committee on Finance, said the mayor wanted to focus more money from special taxing districts known as tax-increment-financing — or TIF — districts on public schools and public parks.

A Chalkbeat analysis of finance committee records shows roughly $215.8 million in TIF money was allocated to school construction projects between when Lightfoot took office in May 2019 and today. Roughly $128.5 million was allocated between May 2015 and May 2019. Many of the projects tackled in the past four years were for long-deferred maintenance, not new construction.

In response to a Chalkbeat Chicago candidate questionnaire, Lightfoot also touted “$600 million in investments for facility improvements at neighborhood schools” in Chicago Public Schools’ 2023 budget.

A review of Chicago Public Schools’ capital plan does show larger portions of the district’s construction budget coming from “outside funding sources,” which is primarily city TIF money and state grants. However, the capital budget has declined in the last four years.

Years ago, community advocates fought to have more say over school construction decisions in Chicago, even passing a state law that created a now-dormant task force to oversee and guide school facilities planning. The city is currently under moratorium on closing schools, which will lift in 2025.

Disagreements over school construction projects have heated up recently around a plan supported by Lightfoot to build a $150 million new high school on the Near South Side, even as the district continues to lose enrollment and grapple with severely underenrolled high schools, including those that currently serve students in the area and sit just south of the site where the new school is to be built.

In an interview with Chalkbeat Chicago, Lightfoot said she sees investments in school facilities as investments in the city as a whole.

“They’ve got to be done in coordination,” Lightfoot said of the city and the school district. “They’ve got to work hand in glove and that’s really what we’ve been trying to do.”

Clashes with the Chicago Teachers Union disrupt learning

By now, it’s no secret: the mayor and the Chicago Teachers Union are anything but allies. From an 11-day teachers strike in 2019 and a delayed return to schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 to five days of canceled classes at the height of the omicron surge in 2022, the relationship has been on a tightrope made worse with every labor strife and a war of words.

Robert Bruno, a labor education professor at University of Illinois, described Lightfoot and CTU’s relationship as “very, very hostile,” and “difficult and strained.”

The deep level of distrust between the mayor and the teachers union is not without consequences.

The fraught relationship between Lightfoot and the union may even have complicated the district’s response to COVID and the return to in-person learning.

Chicago students stayed with remote learning longer than many other cities and states. Data released last fall showed the city’s math and reading scores on the “Nation’s Report Card” fell to what they were about a decade ago.

At the time, Lightfoot argued that a return to in-person learning would curb the adverse impact of remote learning, but the union said remote learning would protect students, their families, and teachers from severe illness and death. The push to return, the union argued, was tied to pressure from the business community.

Bruno said the mayor views the teachers union as a political body with the goal of undermining her leadership, and the union believes she’s “too beholden to corporate interest and not someone who has the best interest” of the school district’s large low-income working class and multi-ethnic population.

But the mayor’s difficult relationship with the teachers union pre-dates the pandemic. The CTU supported Lightfoot’s opponent in 2019 and when she stepped into office in May 2019, the political newcomer fresh off a landslide victory found herself in contract negotiations that dramatically fizzled out, leading to an 11-day strike in October.

Despite the acrimony, the teachers union secured $1.5 billion worth of concessions from the Lightfoot administration in a five-year contract that included raises for educators and support staff, hundreds of new staff positions, and $35 million annually to help reduce overcrowding in some schools.

Five months later, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools once again. Students didn’t return in-person until a year later — after an impasse over safety protocols, a threat to lock out teachers from remote platforms, and finally an agreement that made way for a hybrid model with staggered reopening starting in March 2021. But the following school year was again disrupted after holiday break, leaving parents frustrated and teachers feeling deflated.

These four years are going to be remembered as “dysfunctional,” Bruno said. “She obviously has to take some responsibility for that.”

Chicago teachers picket downtown in May 2022. Lightfoot’s conflicts with the Chicago Teachers Union characterized much of her first term.

Moving forward the person who wins the mayoral election will need “to pick up the pieces of that relationship” with the union, Bruno said.

Turning things around would not be unprecedented. Rahm Emanuel famously clashed with the teachers union early in his first term, prompting the first strike in 25 years. He reportedly used an expletive in a meeting with former CTU President Karen Lewis. But years later, she admitted their tensions had softened. After Lewis died, Emanuel told the Sun-Times that the two had even attended the ballet together.

Responding to the Chalkbeat candidate questionnaire regarding the acrimonious relationship and upcoming contract negotiations, Lightfoot wrote that regardless of their “previous differences,” her team was committed to ensuring Chicago teachers were among the “best compensated in the nation and have the resources and support they need to educate the next generation of Chicagoans.”

“Our children deserve no less,” she wrote.

Lightfoot changes tune on elected school board

While campaigning for mayor in 2019, Lightfoot supported a fully elected school board, saying parents deserved a seat at the table. Elected members should be parents with “skin in the game,” she told WBEZ at the time, and suggested requirements such as first serving on local school councils.

Lightfoot’s first appointees included a group with deep experience in education, including parents who previously served on local school councils, teachers, principals, and community advocates — a departure from her predecessors whose selections were often described as a “rubber stamp” by critics.

Lightfoot told WBEZ in 2019 there would need to be thoughtful discussions on the number of board members, criteria, and how elections for these seats were financed.

But Lightfoot’s support for a fully elected school board dwindled and she instead called for a hybrid model. As legislation moved through Springfield, the mayor criticized the bill, arguing that special interests would pour millions of dollars into the races as had happened in Los Angeles.

She also criticized the 21-seat board as a “recipe for disaster.” Nevertheless, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the approved bill in June 2021, setting the stage for a phased-in elected school board starting in 2025. Next year, the mayor will appoint 11 seats and 10 will be elected. Another election, in 2026, would elect the 11 appointed seats, resulting in a fully elected board by 2027.

Responding to a Chalkbeat election questionnaire, Lightfoot vowed to work with Pritzker to improve the existing law to “establish clarity and ensure that our schools, teachers, and students receive the representation and resources they deserve.” She added that non-citizens, in particular, should be allowed to serve on the school board.

“Non-citizens are a significant part of CPS communities as parents, Local School Council members, and elsewhere,” Lightfoot said. “In a welcoming city, it is unconscionable that Springfield banned non-citizens from serving on the elected school board.”

Her office has created a team focused on education and human services that will work in partnership with the new school board on shared priorities, she said.

The mayor’s record on education will be an important marker in this election, Bruno said.

“As long as mayors have control over the city schools,” he said, “then it’s going to be a big determinant, I think, of how people judge their record while in office.”

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Mayoral hopeful Brandon Johnson promises students free transit, more staff

2023-02-08T23:19:30+00:00

Chicago Teachers Union organizer and former teacher Brandon Johnson released his formal education platform today — one of a few candidates for Chicago mayor to do so with only a few weeks left before the municipal election.

Johnson, a current Cook County commissioner, unveiled his vision for Chicago Public Schools Wednesday afternoon at a City Club of Chicago luncheon. His plan includes free bus and train rides for students on the Chicago Transit Authority, expanding opportunities for students through partnerships with City Colleges and trade schools, and having under-enrolled schools share space with child care and health clinics.

Johnson’s vision draws on the union’s decade-long push to tackle broader issues such as affordable housing and gun violence.

“Educating the whole child means dealing with the root causes,” Johnson said. “And all of the root causes are directly tied to the failures of political insiders and politicians who refuse to actually see people and recognize that poverty is one of the most isolating, awful, excruciating experiences that one could ever live through.”

His platform also calls for the overhaul of the district’s funding model, investments in bilingual educators and clinicians to better serve migrant and vulnerable students, and making school buildings greener and ADA accessible.

Mayoral opponent Kam Buckner, whose platform was released last fall, also called for an overhaul of the district’s funding model. He emphasized the need to fund schools based on need, not enrollment. Former district CEO Paul Vallas released his mayoral education vision last week. Vallas’ plan calls for school buildings to stay open on nights and weekends. He is also pushing for more school choice and wants to add more high school work study programs. Chicago Public Schools currently offers work study programs known as cooperative education.

In an email statement, Buckner said it was “good to see the field of candidates finally” presenting education plans in the last three weeks of the race.

“Chicago needs a new vision, which is why I’ve been having these serious conversations across the city for months,” Buckner said.

Johnson’s platform calls for many of the same things outlined in the union’s latest policy paper released last fall. That document was the third version of a document titled “The Schools Chicago Students Deserve” released by the union in 2012.

Johnson got into the race in late October with CTU’s backing. The union’s governing body voted a month prior to endorse him, even though he hadn’t made an announcement. The Chicago Teachers Union has donated over $764,000 to his campaign, according to Illinois’ Sunshine database.

Johnson took a moment during his speech to honor former CTU president Karen Lewis, who died three years ago yesterday after a years-long struggle with brain cancer. Lewis’s late 2014 diagnosis came as she was mulling a run for mayor against incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Sidelined by her illness, Lewis convinced Jesus ‘Chuy’ Garcia, then a Cook County Commissioner, to challenge Emanuel instead. Garcia took Emanuel into a runoff, but lost with 44% of the vote.

Garcia, now a congressman, is also running for mayor this year. A recent WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times poll puts Garcia in a dead heat with Mayor Lori Lightfoot and former CPS CEO Paul Vallas. Johnson trails in fifth place.

Lightfoot has not released a specific education plan, but much of her first term has been characterized by conflict with the CTU. Shortly after taking office in 2019, teachers went on an 11-day strike that garnered national attention.

Then the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic disrupted schools, and concerns over in-school safety mitigation led to persistent clashes between Lightfoot and the union. Like Lightfoot, Johnson held elected office for a short time. He became a Cook County commissioner serving the city’s West Side in 2018. He has been an organizer for the CTU since 2011 and helped organize the 2012 strike, according to his campaign website.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

If elected Chicago mayor, Paul Vallas promises to open schools on nights and weekends, expand choice

2023-02-03T13:35:00+00:00

Paul Vallas is reaching back to his tenure as Chicago Public Schools CEO in his bid to become Chicago’s next mayor.

The former district leader put out an education platform Thursday that promises to keep school buildings open on nights and weekends, put alternative high schools into empty or underenrolled buildings, and create more charter and magnet schools. He also said he would work to elect school board members in line with his agenda.

Until now, Vallas has largely focused on crime and safety on the campaign trail, not education. Even as he unveiled his plan for the city’s schools, he began by talking about homicide rates.

“Our schools can become sanctuaries for our kids – a place for them to go where they can be safe and secure and where they and their families can access the additional resources they need,” Vallas said, noting that outside community groups and the park district could run programs during non-school hours.

If elected, Vallas would be the last mayor with control of the city’s public school system — bookending an era he ushered in as the first CPS CEO, a role he held from 1995 to 2001.

Chicago begins its transition to an elected school board next year, with 10 elected in fall 2024 and 11 appointed by the mayor. By 2027, the mayor will no longer appoint any of the 21 school board members. Vallas vowed to “aggressively” support candidates who agree with his vision for the public schools.

“You can either complain that the school board is elected or you can get into the game and you can work to run candidates for the school board that you think are going to support your agenda,” he said.

That agenda harkens back to policies Vallas implemented in the past that have fallen out of favor in recent years — like expanding charter schools, funding schools based on enrollment, and holding students back if they don’t meet academic standards.

As schools chief, Vallas implemented an accountability system that placed schools with low test scores on probation — a label that in some cases eventually led to the schools’ closure or the entire staff being fired. He also ended the practice of “social promotion,” which allows kids of a certain age to move to the next grade regardless of whether they passed their classes or met standards.

“Promoting kids (to) high school, when they’re reading at the seventh or eighth grade reading level is just catastrophic, and it’s going to have catastrophic consequences,” Vallas said.

Last month, the Chicago Board of Education overhauled the district’s longstanding promotion policy, eliminating the use of test scores as a factor in holding students back and once again, allowing students to move to the next grade even if they fall short of meeting academic requirements.

Other candidates have criticized Vallas for helping create financial problems for the school district.

It was during Vallas’ tenure that Chicago Public Schools stopped making regular payments into the teachers’ pension fund. According to Politifact, the same state law that gave Mayor Richard M. Daley control of the schools also changed the tax levy that directly funded the pension system, allowing Daley and Vallas to use money once earmarked for pensions to help cover operating costs.

All of the pension funds for government workers in Chicago — teachers, policemen, and firefighters — are underfunded and require hundreds of millions of dollars in payments annually in order to meet their obligations to retirees.

When Vallas was CEO, Chicago Public Schools also enrolled over 430,000 students. That’s at least 100,000 more than it does now. The city’s school-age population has dropped at roughly the same rate. Declining enrollment is felt most acutely at some of the city’s shrinking neighborhood high schools, many of which get additional funding so they can offer a full course load.

The school board is not allowed to close schools until 2025 and most candidates have said they won’t close schools or would only do so as a last resort.

Vallas said he wants to expand work study programs for high schoolers and open “Adult High Schools” inside underenrolled or empty schools to serve people over 18 without a high school diploma. During his time as CEO, Vallas expanded alternative schools through the Youth Connection Charter School network.

After leaving Chicago, Vallas led school systems in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Bridgeport, Conn.

The Philadelphia School Reform Commission hired him in Philadelphia after the state took over the public school system. He made dramatic changes, but left the system with a deficit.

In New Orleans, Vallas closed neighborhood schools while charter schools reopened in their place. He faced criticism over “lack of transparency, inattention to the most disadvantaged students,” according to the Times-Picayune. But former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other experts lauded his efforts as a model for school reform. Under Vallas, student test scores improved at schools converted into charter schools, but at district-run schools, progress was uneven, according to New Orleans magazine.

In Bridgeport, he was “both hailed as savior and demonized as an arrogant, inflexible dictator,” according to the Connecticut Post. Vallas left that position to run for Lt. Governor in Illinois and amid a controversy over whether he had the credentials required to run a school system in that state.

Vallas also built a career as an education consultant — moving between the public and private sectors. While still superintendent in New Orleans, his consulting group worked on contract in hurricane-ravaged Haiti and turned around schools in Chile after a 2010 earthquake.

The Vallas Group got a $1 million contract in 2012 from the Illinois State Board of Education to help with school turnaround efforts in the suburb of North Chicago and East St. Louis.

Mayoral candidate and state Rep. Kam Buckner called Vallas an “opportunist collecting titles.” Cook County Commissioner and Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson, who is also running for mayor, criticized Vallas for “firing hundreds of Black teachers and school staff.”

“As mayor, Vallas would be laughable at best, and unmitigated disaster at worst – especially for Black and Brown educators and families,” Johnson said in a statement.

In a statement, mayoral candidate and U.S. Congressman Jesus ‘Chuy’ Garcia blasted Vallas’ record on education.

“His entire career he has gone from city to city ruining the school systems that children and families depend on, while he made hundreds of thousands of dollars and gave questionable contracts to politically connected firms,” Garcia said.

Vallas defended his record saying it “speaks for itself” and called criticism from other candidates “a sign of desperation.”

This story has been updated to clarify why Vallas left his position as Superintendent of Bridgeport Public Schools.

Mauricio Peña contributed reporting.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Where do the candidates for Chicago mayor stand on education? We asked them 10 questions.

2023-01-26T22:36:19+00:00

Chicago voters will head to the polls Feb. 28 to vote for a new mayor. There are nine candidates on the ballot and if nobody gets more than 50%, the top two will head to a runoff on April 4. The winner will be the last mayor to have control of Chicago Public Schools before the district transitions to being governed by an elected school board.

Once elected, the new or returning mayor will appoint a school district CEO and seven school board members to oversee the nation’s fourth largest school district, its $9.5 billion budget, 635 schools, and the education of 322,000 children.

All nine candidates come to the race with varying experience in education. To better understand how each one would tackle the challenges facing Chicago Public Schools, Chalkbeat asked each candidate the same ten questions — some of which came directly from our readers.

Readers can find the candidates’ answers using the interactive feature below.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Mayor Lightfoot’s campaign faces another watchdog investigation into emails recruiting students

2023-01-24T21:22:58+00:00

Chicago’s Board of Ethics is calling for a deeper investigation into emails sent by Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s reelection campaign to public school teachers and city college staffers soliciting student volunteers in exchange for class credit.

Board of Ethics members voted unanimously Monday to refer the complaint against the mayor’s campaign to the city’s Inspector General and Chicago Public Schools’ Inspector General. The district’s watchdog has already opened an investigation.

The dual inquiries come after Lightfoot’s deputy campaign manager emailed Chicago Public Schools teachers on their work email accounts seeking student volunteers for her re-election campaign in exchange for school credit. The campaign also sent similar emails in the fall to staff at City Colleges, prompting a warning for the community college system’s ethics department.

The emails came to light in a WTTW story and quickly drew condemnation from elected officials, teachers, and challengers in the city’s Feb. 28 mayoral election . Lightfoot is seeking a second term as mayor.

The vote to refer the complaint to the city’s Inspector General and Chicago Public Schools’ Inspector General happened after a closed-door executive session. Now, each inspector general will decide whether the mayor’s campaign emails violated city or school district ethic codes.

The board received a complaint on Jan. 12, which alleged a candidate’s campaign “violated the Ordinance’s gift and prohibited political activity provisions by sending emails asking to governmental employees at their official governmental email addresses,” according to a summary posted Tuesday.

Prior to Monday’s meeting, the board’s monthly agenda did not include the specifics of the case or the subject of the investigation. Following the vote, Chair William Conlon said with most complaints, the board doesn’t yet know if it’s factual or not and therefore, can’t rule on whether there was actually an ethics violation.

“Factual investigations are conducted by the inspector general,” Conlon said. “Those investigations then form the factual basis for this board’s determination and action.”

In a series of three statements on Jan 11, the Lightfoot campaign initially said the request for student volunteers was “common practice,” then said it would alert staff that “a solid wall must exist between campaign and official activities.” The next day, Lightfoot said the staffer made a “mistake” but would not be fired, instead calling it a “teachable moment” for the young staffer.

In an email statement to Chalkbeat Tuesday afternoon, the mayor’s campaign again said the emails to city employees were a mistake.

“While our campaign legal team has asserted that these organizing efforts were legal and did not violate any ethics ordinance, we have halted any such recruitment efforts,” a campaign spokesperson said in the statement.

The city’s Office of the Inspector General and Chicago Public Schools’ investigative arm did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Office of Inspector General Deborah Witzburg told the Sun-Times the investigations were confidential and they were limited in making public statements regarding their work. Still, she noted that in her view, “the abuse of an official position for political gain has no place in Chicago.”

Without addressing the specific complaint, the Board of Ethics has advised public officials, candidates for public office, and their entities to scrub their email lists of any government email addresses, Conlon said during Monday’s meeting.

“We have in the past sent notices to public officials throughout the city and given them advice on matters that we consider important in understanding and complying with the ethics ordinance,” Conlon said.

The board also advises candidates and anyone affiliated with those candidates “that emails and other forms of solicitation may be considered coercive if directed to city employees and or those employed by sister city agencies,” Conlon added.

Lightfoot’s previously said her campaign would cooperate with any investigation.

“There was zero, zero, zero coordination, coercion, or anything else between the campaign and CPS on this issue,” Lightfoot said earlier this month.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools watchdog to investigate Lightfoot campaign’s bid for student volunteers

2023-01-13T15:55:30+00:00

One day after defending the practice, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Thursday it was a “mistake” for her campaign to email educators at Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges of Chicago looking for student volunteers to help in her reelection bid.

The school district’s inspector general has opened an investigation, and the city’s Board of Ethics will look into whether the outreach violated the city’s ethics policy. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Illinois chapter called the emails “inappropriately coercive.”

The Jan. 10 email from a deputy campaign manager to Chicago Public Schools educators implied that students who volunteered for Lightfoot’s reelection effort would get school credit. After the outreach was first reported by WTTW, Lightfoot drew criticism from her challengers in next month’s election and from others.

After initially saying Wednesday that the request for student volunteers was “common practice,” the Lightfoot campaign said it would alert staff that “a solid wall must exist between campaign and official activities.”

“There was zero, zero, zero coordination, coercion, or anything else between the campaign and CPS on this issue,” Lightfoot said at a press conference Thursday.

Lightfoot, who was elected in 2019 promising transparency and a more accountable government, said a staffer made an “honest mistake” in sending the emails.

But City Colleges of Chicago said it raised the ethics concerns with the Lightfoot campaign after receiving similar emails in August and consulting its ethics department.

“Following the Department’s guidance, City Colleges notified the campaign of CCC’s ethics policy and purged the emails from CCC accounts,” according to City Colleges.

City Colleges said it was not aware of any subsequent campaign emails, but was looking into the matter.

During Thursday’s press conference, the mayor said she met with the staffer and explained the severity of the situation but declined to fire the staffer, calling the incident a teachable moment.

“There was absolutely no nefarious intent on the part of the staff person,” Lightfoot said.

The mayor said she apologized to Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez and Chicago Board of Education President Miguel Del Valle.

A copy of the Jan. 10 email to Chicago Public Schools employees was shared with Chalkbeat by the Chicago Teachers Union.

It’s unclear how many emails to Chicago Public Schools teachers and City Colleges of Chicago were sent out, but Lightfoot said her campaign was taking an accounting and would cooperate with investigations.

The district’s Office of the Inspector General said in a statement that it has opened an investigation into the emails “to determine which, if any, policies have been violated.”

The district’s ethical guidelines for political activity state that political campaigns should not use the Chicago Public Schools’ email system to solicit donations or volunteers.

Meanwhile, Steven Berlin, the executive director of the city’s Board of Ethics, said the matter will be on the agenda for the board’s next meeting on Jan. 23, which will be live-streamed via Zoom.

The city’s Office of Inspector General also said it’s tracking the issue, in consultation with the district.

Nora Flanagan, an English teacher at Northside College Prep, said she found out about the email from colleagues. So far she’s heard from about eight or nine teachers or staff in the building who received the email.

“In 25 years, I have never seen anything like this,” Flanagan said. “I’ve never seen this happen from any elected official, at any level.”

Teachers who received the email are scared to talk to the press for fear of retaliation, she said. Her colleagues called the emails “wildly unethical, probably illegal,” she said.

District employee email addresses are public information, and often listed on school websites, the district noted. Email addresses can also be obtained through a public records request, though there is no record of such a request from any political campaigns, the district said.

The Chicago Election Board had not received any complaints as of late Thursday morning, said spokesperson Max Bever. The election board isn’t authorized to investigate or penalize candidates over city ethics rules, Bever said.

Colleen K. Connell of the ACLU of Illinois said in a statement that the Lightfoot campaign’s email outreach to teachers was “inappropriately coercive and raises First Amendment concerns.” She noted the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that elected officials cannot use their office to pressure public employees to participate in political campaigns.

“Because the Mayor has the ultimate authority over the Chicago schools, teachers may feel coercion in this ask from the Mayor’s campaign or fear negative consequences for lack of participation,” Connell said.

She urged the mayor to make clear that no one in the city should feel compelled to participate in her campaign.

The student advocacy group Good Kids Mad City, a frequent critic of the mayor, also bashed her campaign’s move. Arseny Acosta, one of the group’s leaders, said it’s “morally wrong” to solicit students to volunteer by dangling a chance to earn credits.

“At the end of the day, this free labor would only benefit Lightfoot,” she said.

In New York City in 2021, then-mayoral candidate Eric Adams drew criticism from parents and others after his campaign reached out to educators with its own request to offer students who volunteered on the campaign school credit, according to reporting in the New York Post.

This story was updated to include a comment from Good Kids Mad City.

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org. Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Lightfoot campaign facing scrutiny for emailing teachers to recruit student volunteers

2023-01-12T15:05:03+00:00

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s campaign asked public school teachers to recruit student volunteers to “help Mayor Lightfoot win this spring,” a possible violation of the district’s code of ethics.

According to the Chicago Teachers Union, a Lightfoot campaign staffer sent an email to teachers on their work emails ending in cps.edu asking them tell students the campaign is “looking for enthusiastic, curious and hard-working young people” to volunteer 12 hours per week and said students would be “eligible to earn class credit.”

It’s not clear how many teachers received the email.

Guidance on political activity issued by the school district last April said campaigns “should not be using the CPS email system to solicit volunteers and donations” and asked staff to report that behavior to the school board’s ethics adviser.

In a statement, Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman Mary Fergus said the district “does not coordinate with any political candidates or campaigns. It has not done so to date and will not be doing so.”

A Lightfoot campaign spokesperson initially issued a statement characterizing its efforts to involve young people as a “common practice that has been utilized in city, state, and federal level campaigns for decades.”

Later, the campaign issued another statement saying its staff has been alerted that a “solid wall must exist between campaign and official activities.” The statement said contacting “city of Chicago, or other sister agency employees, including CPS employees, even through publicly available sources is off limits. Period.”

Lightfoot’s challengers swiftly condemned the move shortly after Chicago’s local public television station WTTW first reported the news.

Alderman Sophia King, who represents the 4th Ward on the South side, called it “pay to play except with unsuspecting and vulnerable victims.”

“As a teacher, I’d give her an F,” King, who previously taught at Latin School of Chicago, wrote on Twitter. “Actually she’d be expelled.”

State Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago, and former CPS CEO Paul Vallas demanded investigations by the City’s Inspector General, the Board of Elections, and Chicago Public Schools’ Inspector General.

“The manipulation of teachers and children is unspeakable,” Vallas wrote in an email. “Mayor Lightfoot should be ashamed of herself for allowing her campaign to violate her own ethics policy by contacting city government employees on their official email accounts for political purposes.”

Alderman Roderick Sawyer, of the 6th Ward on the South side, said it was a “hypocritical contradiction” to her campaign promise of better government.

“I don’t know what kind of lesson Lightfoot believes she is teaching, but the extra credit must be in government corruption,” he said in a statement.

Congressman Jesus “Chuy” Garcia and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson both said on Twitter the mayor should be more focused on fully funding schools, not recruiting from them.

Ja’Mal Green, the youngest candidate in the race, tweeted: “Young people aren’t going to vote for you with class credits, gas cards, or anything else.”

Some non-profit organizations in Chicago, including Mikva Challenge, encourage students to get involved in politics and work closely with high school teachers. In Chicago, high school students work the polls on election day, as well. But there are rules for elected officials to keep their political activities and government duties separate.

Over the summer, the Chicago Board of Education voted against a district recommendation to fire two teachers at Washington High School on the city’s Southeast side for offering students incentives to protest General Iron’s plan to move its metal scrapping operations to their neighborhood.

The current head of Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, Troy LaRaviere, also came under scrutiny in 2016 for possibly violating district policy on political activity in 2016 when he appeared in a campaign ad for Sen. Bernie Sanders during his presidential bid.

In 2015, a high school teacher running for 33rd Ward alderman was also reprimanded for offering students credit for volunteering on his campaign or others.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Nine people are running for Chicago mayor. Here’s a look at their education records.

2023-01-11T22:15:09+00:00

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A drop in test scores. Declining enrollment. The COVID pandemic’s impact on student mental health. The transition to a 21-member elected school board.

These are just a handful of the challenges facing Chicago’s next mayor.

Nine people, including incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are running to lead the city for the next four years. All have some tie to Chicago Public Schools. Chalkbeat Chicago took a look at each mayoral hopeful’s track record on education.

We also surveyed readers and created a list of 10 important education questions for the Chicago mayoral candidates. Read through their answers and remember to cast your ballot on or before Feb. 28.

Here’s more information about each candidate and their records on education:

Kam Buckner

Illinois State Rep. Kam Buckner (D-Chicago) represents a district that extends from Chicago’s Gold Coast to the South Shore. He cosponsored legislation to set a minimum salary for teachers, limit police in arresting or questioning students at school, and create an elected school board in Chicago.

Buckner jumped into the mayor’s race last May and unveiled a sweeping education platform last fall outside a vacant elementary school in Garfield Park.

Standing alongside former school board member Dwayne Truss, Buckner promised to expand universal preschool to 3-year-olds; hire at least one nurse, one librarian, and one social worker per school, and do an external audit of CPS special education practices to improve services.

Buckner, the son of a school teacher and a police officer, also said he would recruit teachers from Chicago neighborhoods.

Before being elected to the Illinois legislature, Buckner sat on the board of trustees for Chicago State University and led World Sport Chicago, a nonprofit aimed at bringing Olympic sports to underserved youth in Chicago. According to WBEZ, he later oversaw the dissolution of the program in 2018.

Jesús “Chuy” García

U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, a Democrat who represents Illinois’ 4th congressional district, is well known in Chicago politics and education. He’s served as alderman, Cook County commissioner, and Illinois state senator.

In announcing his bid for mayor last November, Garcia said it was time for the city to “double down” on education.

“Your ZIP code, race, and socioeconomic status should not determine your future,” he said.

Garcia also promised to support teachers, saying, “It’s time that we treat them with dignity and respect — and the value they have earned and deserve.”

Garcia forced former Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff election in 2015 after being nudged into the race by the late Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis. This time, the teachers union has endorsed one of their own members, Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, instead.

But Garcia has a long history advocating for public schools. As a community organizer in Little Village, Garcia helped lead a 19-day hunger strike in 2001 to get a new high school built. Fellow mayoral hopeful Paul Vallas was the school district’s CEO at the time. The campus, Little Village Lawndale High School, opened in 2005 and has four schools: Infinity STEM, World Language, Social Justice, and Multicultural Arts.

Ja’Mal Green

After dropping out of the mayoral race in 2019, activist Ja’Mal Green will be listed at the top of the ballot in 2023. He also is the youngest candidate at age 27.

In a campaign video, Green champions universal preschool for 3-year-olds — a promise also outlined in a sweeping $5 billion public safety plan he released last week. That plan also calls for creating 10,000 apprenticeships for Chicagoans ages 13 to 25.

“I’m a father who loves Chicago and I want a better future for my kids and yours,” Green says in the video. He also opens up about being kicked out of nine schools that he said didn’t have the resources to meet his needs while growing up on the city’s South and West sides.

Green rose to prominence as an activist with the Black Lives Matter movement, protesting throughout Chicago after a video recording showed police officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times. In 2016, Green faced felony charges after being accused of hitting a police officer during a protest at Taste of Chicago.

Brandon Johnson

Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson entered the mayoral race last fall with endorsements from the Chicago Teachers Union and other independent political organizations.

During a kickoff rally, Johnson recalled his time as a teacher at Jenner Academy and Westinghouse College Prep, detailing conversations with students displaced by the demolition of Cabrini Green high-rises.

“I experienced the painful impact of disinvestment on my students and their families,” Johnson said. “And this personal experience seeing children endure inequity fuels my commitment to building a stronger, safer, and more equitable Chicago.”

Johnson said in October the pathway to revitalizing the city is fully funding neighborhood schools, providing students health care services, and ensuring they have affordable housing.

He promises to expand “Sustainable Community Schools” from prekindergarten to city colleges, while also providing academic, health and social support beyond the school day, according to his campaign website.

Sophia King

Ald. Sophia King, 4th Ward, represents many of the same south lakefront neighborhoods as Buckner does on Chicago’s City Council. King was appointed to the seat in 2016 by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel and went on to win reelection in 2019.

As vice chair of the Committee on Education and Child Development, she recently pushed to have Chicago Public Schools officials appear before aldermen on a quarterly basis or risk losing city money that supports school construction projects. The measure failed on a split vote and came after Lightfoot declined to promote her to chair of the committee.

Before entering politics, King helped found Ariel Community Academy, a public school created in 1996 under then-Mayor Richard M. Daley in partnership with Ariel Investments. According to her campaign, she taught at Latin School of Chicago in Lincoln Park. King has a master’s degree in education and social policy from Northwestern University.

King has not yet released an education plan, but has outlined a public safety strategy on her campaign website that promises to invest more in schools in communities experiencing the most gun violence and vows to “enlist both public and private sector employers to hire more high school students, disconnected youth, young adults, and formerly incarcerated citizens.”

Lori Lightfoot

Current Mayor Lori Lightfoot in 2019 unveiled a 15-point education plan to transform Chicago Public Schools. It outlined her support for an elected school board; a nurse, social worker, and librarian at every school; and early childhood education zones to promote equity at public schools.

But in October 2019, just months into her tenure, union contract negotiations stalled and the Chicago Teachers Union led an 11-day strike. The two sides got stuck on teacher prep time and sick days, and also on the union’s push to discuss broader topics like affordable housing and an elected school board versus Lightfoot’s desire to focus on pay and benefits.

After backing an elected school board on the campaign trail, Lightfoot pushed for a hybrid board, allowing for the mayor to continue to appoint some seats. Ultimately, the state legislature passed a bill allowing for a 21-member, fully elected school board. The mayor had raised concerns about the size of the board, representation for undocumented families, and campaign financing.

Lightfoot finished the rollout of universal 4-year-old preschool promised by her predecessor and on her campaign website touts a continued rise in graduation rates during her first term.

Last summer, Lightfoot unveiled a comprehensive blueprint for Chicago that included hubs for Lifelong Learning. It proposed an Office of Learning, which would transform shuttered school buildings into learning hubs in every neighborhood.

The plan aims to increase education resources and coordinate existing programs across Chicago Public Schools, City Colleges of Chicago, Chicago Public Library, and other education-focused agencies and organizations.

Roderick Sawyer

Ald. Roderick Sawyer, 6th Ward, has served for over a decade, after being elected in 2011 to represent South Side neighborhoods, including Chatham, Greater Grand Crossing, and Auburn Gresham.

His campaign website does not outline a plan for the city’s public school system. On the City Council, Sawyer sponsored a proposal in 2020 to remove Chicago police from public schools, but it was thwarted by one of Mayor Lightfoot’s allies and did not pass.

Sawyer’s father, Eugene, became mayor in 1987 after the sudden death of the city’s first Black mayor Harold Washington. Growing up, Sawyer attended private school, first at Howalton Day School, a now-shuttered unique school founded during the Black Renaissance. He graduated from St. Ignatius College Prep and DePaul University and is a licensed attorney.

According to his aldermanic website, Sawyer served on the local school council at McDade Classical School, a public selective enrollment school. He also co-chairs a fundraiser to provide “financial assistance for disadvantaged African-Americans who attend his high school alma mater.”

Paul Vallas

Paul Vallas is a familiar name to Chicagoans — particularly those in education. Vallas ran Chicago Public Schools from 1995 to 2001, taking the helm after the state legislature gave control of the school system to then-Mayor Richard M. Daley. Vallas oversaw the system during an era characterized by more stringent academic accountability for students and schools and more stability with the teachers union, which had gone on strike repeatedly in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Though he finished ninth in the crowded 2019 mayoral race, Vallas is running once again with a promise to make Chicago safer and expand school choice. As CPS CEO, he oversaw the early growth of charter schools and advocated for turning around so-called failing schools.

Vallas’ political ambitions led to him stepping down from Chicago Public Schools to run for Illinois governor in 2002. After an unsuccessful bid, he was appointed as CEO of the School District of Philadelphia, where he implemented a standardized curriculum, created small high schools, sold district headquarters and updated aging buildings. After four years, he headed to New Orleans to lead the city’s new Recovery School District in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. His last job as a schools chief in Bridgeport, Connecticut ended in controversy amid a court battle over whether he had the credentials needed to serve as a superintendent in Connecticut.

He returned to Illinois and ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor alongside Pat Quinn in 2014. In 2017, then-Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner appointed Vallas to turn around Chicago State University, but the institution cut its contract with Vallas after he confirmed plans to run for mayor in 2019.

Willie Wilson

Willie Wilson, a high-profile businessman, launched his campaign for mayor last spring. His campaign focuses on rebuilding from the pandemic through “educational grants, trade and business recovery,” according to his campaign website.

Wilson told the Chicago Crusader last fall that, if elected mayor, he wants to work with state legislators to bring back vocational education to high schools, churches, and Illinois prisons. He also wants to “establish a trade school at CTA bus terminals,” according to the publication. Current Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez has talked about revamping the district’s career and technical education programs in coming years.

When running for mayor in 2019, Wilson promised to reopen all 50 Chicago Public Schools closed by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, he called the mass closings a “racist move.”

“If I had closed 50 schools in the white community, they would have hung me on State and Madison upside down,” Wilson said at the time. He also ran unsuccessfully for Chicago mayor in 2015, for the presidency in 2016, and U.S. Senate in 2020.

This story has been updated to clarify why Vallas left his position as Superintendent of Bridgeport Public Schools.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

U.S. Rep. Jesus ‘Chuy’ Garcia announces second run for Chicago mayor

2022-11-10T15:48:10+00:00

U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia is officially joining the crowded race to unseat Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Garcia, a Democrat who represents Illinois’ 4th district, is a well-known name in Chicago politics and won reelection to a third term in Congress on Tuesday.

Before heading to Congress in 2019, he forced former Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff election in 2015 with the backing of the Chicago Teachers Union.

This time Garcia will not have the support of the Chicago Teachers Union, which has already endorsed Cook County Commissioner and teachers union organizer Brandon Johnson.

In a video posted on YouTube, Garcia formally announced his second bid for mayor after months of speculation, saying he wanted to lead the city during a critical juncture and unite all Chicagoans.

“Now is the time to revitalize our communities, strengthen our schools, and bring safety back to our streets,” Garcia said in the video.

Garcia joins nearly a dozen candidates challenging Lightfoot, who is seeking a second term. He previously endorsed Lightfoot in 2019. Three aldermen and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas are also among the candidates.

If he succeeds in the mayoral race, a special election would be held to elect a replacement for his congressional seat.

Flanked by supporters at Offshore Rooftop at Navy Pier on Thursday, Garcia said it was time for the city to “double down” on education. “Your ZIP code, race, and socioeconomic status should not determine your future,” Garcia said.

Garcia also promised to support teachers, saying “It’s time that we treat them with dignity and respect—and the value they have earned and deserve.”

In Congress, Garcia serves on the House Financial Services Committee, House Committee of Transportation and Infrastructure, and House Committee of Natural Resources.

Garcia and his family immigrated in 1965 from Mexico to Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood on the Southwest Side. As a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Garcia advocated for workers rights, according to his congressional website.

He was one of the first two Latinos elected to City Council in 1986 during a special election following a court-ordered redistricting to reflect the city’s increasing Latino population. Garcia was an ally of then-Mayor Harold Washington and his election came amid the so-called “Council Wars” — when 29 white aldermen frequently stymied Washington, the city’s first Black mayor.

Garcia served as 22nd Ward Alderman for seven years.

As a community organizer in Little Village, he helped lead a 19-day hunger strike in 2001 to get a new high school built in the community. Vallas was CPS CEO at the time. The campus — Little Village Lawndale High School — opened in 2005 and has four schools: Infinity STEM, World Language, Social Justice, and Multicultural Arts.

Garcia has also served as a Cook County commissioner and an Illinois state senator.

As of mid-October, Garcia had $180,000 in his congressional campaign fund. His mayoral campaign fund is currently empty.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Cook County commissioner, teachers union organizer announces bid for Chicago mayor

2022-10-27T11:00:00+00:00

Cook County commissioner and union organizer Brandon Johnson announced early Thursday he is running for Chicago mayor, entering the race with backing from the teachers union and independent political organizations.

Johnson, a former teacher at Jenner Academy and Westinghouse College Prep, is one of at least eight people challenging Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who is seeking a second term. Three aldermen and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas are among the candidates. The union endorsement and Johnson’s union organizing background almost assures education issues will take center stage in the 2023 Chicago mayoral election.

“As a teacher, I experienced the painful impact of disinvestment on my students and their families,” Johnson said in a press release. “And this personal experience seeing children endure inequity fuels my commitment to building a stronger, safer, and more equitable Chicago.”

Before announcing his run, Johnson’s campaign saw an influx of donations.

Last week, the American Federation of Teachers announced a $1 million donation to Johnson’s campaign.

Earlier this month, the Illinois Federation of Teachers COPE donated $150,000 and the Chicago Teachers Union’s political action committee donated $60,000. At the end of September, Johnson’s campaign reported having just over $70,000 in the bank.

The Chicago Teachers Union’s governing body last month voted to endorse Johnson for the municipal election.

The union, which also endorsed rank-and-file educators Mueze Bawany and Leonor “Lori” Torres in their respective aldermanic races in the 50th and 36th wards, said the educators were “uniquely attuned to the needs of students and families.”

Johnson recently received endorsements from the 30th, 33rd, 35th, and 39th ward independent political groups.

“I continue to be humbled, and honored, by the outpouring of support I have received in coming to this decision,” he said.

The union is pushing to unseat Lightfoot, with whom it has clashed several times, including during an 11-day teacher strike in 2019 and in two actions amid COVID safety concerns in 2021 and 2022.

“Each of them believes strongly in partnership, and coalition, and is committed to representing educator values of nurture and care for children and community,” the union said of Johnson, Bawany, and Torres in a series of tweets last month.

Johnson has been a Cook County commissioner serving the city’s West Side since 2018. After teaching at Jenner and Westinghouse, he became an organizer for the CTU in 2011 and helped organize the 2012 strike, according to his campaign website.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Mayoral candidate wants to fund Chicago Public Schools based on need, not enrollment

2022-09-22T20:27:40+00:00

Mayoral hopeful Kambium “Kam” Buckner is promising to transform Chicago Public Schools by funding schools based on need, not enrollment; staffing every school with a nurse, librarian, and social worker; and expanding universal preschool to all 3-year-olds.

Buckner is the first 2023 mayoral candidate to hold an event releasing his education platform. He detailed the plan outside the shuttered Laura S. Ward Elementary School in Garfield Park on the West Side, one of the 50 schools closed in 2013 by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Buckner is one of seven people planning to challenge Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who is seeking a second term. Three aldermen and former CPS CEO Paul Vallas are among the candidates.

The Chicago Teachers Union has yet to throw their support behind a candidate. Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and union organizer, last month said he was exploring a possible run for mayor.

If elected mayor, Buckner said he plans to change how schools within the district are funded.

“As mayor, I will continue to work with Springfield to hold CPS accountable for directing state funds to schools based on need, and not on any other criteria,” Buckner said, adding that funding should not be strictly based on enrollment.

Currently, schools get a set amount of money per student, plus a few centrally-funded positions, such as principal and school clerk. This system – implemented in the wake of the 2013 closings – has been criticized by the Chicago Teachers Union because it penalizes schools with fewer students and sets them on a downward spiral of declining enrollment and disinvestment. Others – including former CPS CEO Janice Jackson – have said the method is more equitable because money follows students.

Chicago’s schools have seen a significant decline in enrollment over the past two decades. Though this year’s official enrollment numbers have yet to be released, preliminary data posted to the city’s data portal and first reported by WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times indicates there are roughly 320,000 students in CPS. Twenty years ago, there were more than 438,000.

“We have to have a plan forward on how we maintain the number,” Buckner said. “But to bring more young people into our school system, we have to provide better options, better choices in our neighborhood schools.”

The proposed switch in how schools are funded also comes with a promise to staff every school with at least one nurse, one librarian, and one social worker. Currently, many social workers and nurses split time across two or more schools and librarians are becoming something of an endangered species in CPS, with about 90 librarians across more than 650 schools.

Chicago Public Schools has added about 90 school social workers since 2020, going from around 500 positions to roughly 590 this summer, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of staffing files posted on the district’s website. The number of nurses on staff is more difficult to track because the district hires different types of school nurses and relies on outside agencies to provide school nurses.

Buckner’s promise to expand universal preschool to 3-year-olds comes as the school district continues to recruit families to enroll their 4-year-olds. This is the first year Chicago has offered universal access to preschool, regardless of income, a push set in motion in 2018 by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has also expanded public preschool to 3-year-olds, using a windfall of federal stimulus money.

The plan outlined on Thursday also calls for an external audit of CPS special education practices to improve services, a leadership academy for principals to address morale, and targeted recruitment for teachers from Chicago communities.

Dwayne Truss, a former member of the Chicago Board of Education, introduced Buckner, who stood in a vacant lot across from the abandoned elementary school, and endorsed Buckner’s education plan. Truss previously told Chalkbeat he was asked to continue on the board after his term expired, but was replaced by Lightfoot. Truss was critical of a plan for a new high school on land intended for public housing.

Buckner declined to comment specifically about Truss’ ouster but said the school board should be composed of representative voices that reflect the community, are passionate about education, and who aren’t afraid to push back.

“Dawyne Truss is a lifelong Chicagoan,” Buckner said. “He understands the South Side and the West Side. He has worked to better education around the city for a very long time. Not listening to somebody like him is a huge detriment to all of us in the city.”

Buckner currently serves as Illinois House of Representative for the 26th District, which includes Bronzeville, Douglas, the Gold Coast, Near South Side, South Chicago, and South Shore. He has been in office since 2019.

The state representative was raised in Roseland and Washington Heights. His mother was a public school teacher for more than 30 years. She worked at Scott Joplin Elementary School in Auburn Gresham and Alcott Elementary in Lincoln Park before retiring about five years ago, he said.

Buckner previously worked as an aide for Sen. Dick Durbin and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. He also worked as a manager of neighborhood and government relations for the Chicago Cubs, and executive director of a youth development nonprofit World Sport Chicago.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.