For years, Chicago was ground zero for the Democratic Party’s big transition on education.
With the support of longtime resident Barack Obama, who was in the White House, and his close ally Rahm Emanuel, then in the mayor’s office, the city turned away from policies favored by teachers’ unions and toward policies meant to provide families with choices and accountability, like charter schools and school-grading systems based on student test scores.
That was then.
Now, Chicago is in the midst of a radically different experiment: What would happen if one of the nation’s feistiest teachers’ unions was able to elevate the mayor of its choice, who then embraced the union’s agenda almost unequivocally?
On one hand, results have been good. The district’s 300,000 students have demonstrated unusually strong recovery from pandemic-era learning loss in reading, and more students than ever are enrolling in college-level courses.
On the other hand, there has been financial and political turmoil. The school district used federal Covid-19 relief money to hire thousands of teachers, instructional coaches, counselors, nurses and social workers, even as student enrollment shrunk.
That money is now running out, and the system is hundreds of millions of dollars in the red. Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former social studies teacher and teachers’ union organizer, has been trying to oust the schools chief executive, Pedro Martinez, who resisted the mayor’s proposal for the district to take out a high-interest loan to help cover the gap.
Amid this dispute, the entire school board resigned en masse this month, and was replaced by a new group of mayoral appointees.
The dynamic could shift again in the coming weeks. On Election Day, voters will have their first chance to elect 10 school board members, after the Chicago Teachers Union lobbied for years to end mayoral control of the school system.
“The Chicago Teachers Union has really become the political machine in Chicago,” said Paul Vallas, a former schools superintendent in the city and a longtime critic of the union. He ran against Mr. Johnson for mayor last year and lost.
The mayor’s critics say he should be willing to say “no” to the union: to close under-enrolled schools, reduce the size of the staff and refuse the union’s demand for a 9 percent raise.
But Mr. Johnson says he has little reason to say no, because he believes the agenda he and the union share is the right one. He argued that children in Chicago’s low-income neighborhoods have never had equal access to school libraries or robust programs in the arts, languages, athletics, advanced academics or quality career training.
Adversarial relationships between past mayors and teachers’ union officials led to poor outcomes for Black and Hispanic students, he said, and the loss of Black teaching jobs.
“What are we going to lean into and say yes to?” Mr. Johnson asked in an interview. “I was elected to invest in people. Guess what I’m doing? I’m investing in people.”
As a former educator with a strongly pro-union approach to education policy, Mr. Johnson is part of a rising group of Democrats that includes the party’s vice-presidential candidate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.
Their prominence has been all the more notable because the unions’ support for lengthy pandemic school closures caused deep division in liberal parts of the country.
But the political salience of that debate faded when schools reopened. For big cities like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, one of the most pressing issues now is maintaining services as student populations decline in size, since schools are funded on a per-pupil basis.
Families have left big-city school systems over the past decade for a variety of reasons, including high housing costs, frustration with virtual learning during the pandemic and the draw of charter and private schools.
Enrollment numbers have ticked up in Chicago and other cities over the past two years, but still remain well below prepandemic levels.
But in the view of Mr. Johnson and his close ally — the Chicago Teachers Union president, Stacy Davis Gates, another former social studies teacher — fewer students should not mean fewer schools.
They point to research suggesting that when Mr. Emanuel closed 50 schools in 2013, the financial benefits were modest, while students who had attended the shuttered schools seemed to suffer academic setbacks in subsequent years.
Mr. Johnson and Ms. Davis Gates are instead suggesting putting more money into schools that few families currently attend. An example is Frederick Douglass Academy High School on the city’s West Side, which served more than 500 students in 2007, and now has only 34 enrolled.
Mr. Johnson and Ms. Davis Gates speak in sweeping, historical terms, casting their agenda as a form of “reconstruction” for Black and Latino students.
“The goal of Chicago Public Schools in its inception was to do two things: to maintain segregation and to offer the working class an entry into the stockyards and the factories,” Ms. Davis Gates said.
What’s needed in 2024, she argued, is a wholesale rethinking of the system’s purpose, which she defined as providing every Chicago student with a high-quality school they can walk to, rich with bilingual programs, extracurricular activities and the arts.
The mayor, she said, is rightfully “impatient and intolerant about waiting longer.”
The two of them are personal friends, Ms. Davis Gates noted. She and the mayor have both said their commitment to preserving every neighborhood’s school was informed by the compromises they have made in their own lives as Black parents living in historically Black neighborhoods with struggling institutions.
Mr. Johnson’s oldest son travels to a magnet school in a different neighborhood, attracted there by its orchestra and Advanced Placement classes, he said.
Ms. Davis Gates said one of her three children had enrolled in a private school because it had stronger athletics.
Mr. Martinez, the schools chief executive, also has his own children enrolled in the district. He said he agreed with the goal of creating new programs to draw students back to under-enrolled schools, and noted that Black students travel farthest across the city to find a school they prefer.
The core of his disagreement with the mayor, Mr. Martinez said in an interview, is that while the mayor has said no funding stream should be left off the table, Mr. Martinez believes taking out a loan would replicate past mistakes and leave the district saddled with debt. Instead, he would like the city to tap property tax surpluses and lobby for greater state and federal investment.
Andrew Broy, president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, said that instead of flooding low-performing, under-enrolled schools with more money, Chicago school leaders should support policies that allow more parents to make the choices they have made — picking high-quality schools that work for their families.
He argued that students were losing out because two parties that typically sit across the negotiating table — the mayor and the teachers’ union president — are so closely allied.
“When you have two people on the same side of the table, the only ones not represented are students and taxpayers,” he said. “When they’re not at the table, they end up being on the menu.”
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Chicago and several other cities transitioned away from elected school boards to mayoral control of schools, part of a national movement meant to streamline accountability for public education. But academic and political results were mixed. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, signed a bill in 2021 transitioning Chicago to an elected board. Now, with the first vote to seat new board members approaching on Election Day, the union and its critics in the charter-school world are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into direct mail.
Union allies have accused their Democratic critics of embracing a Trump-like agenda. Charter school supporters are pushing back against Mr. Johnson’s promise to prioritize traditional neighborhood schools over charters, magnet schools and selective enrollment options.
The union has long seen the elected board as a way to influence the system’s governance. But shifting to elections also means its opponents could gain seats.
Even some left-leaning members of the Chicago City Council have become skeptical of the mayor’s budget strategy, worrying about piling up new debt when the district cannot afford its existing pension commitments.
Andre Vasquez, a City Council member, noted that he, like the mayor, had come into elected office with a background in progressive activism. But the two roles, he argued, were fundamentally different.
“A lot of us are used to holding up picket signs,” he said. “Now you have to deliver the results. You start realizing it’s a lot more nuanced.”