New Year, New Board, Same Old Power Struggles

Happy 2025! While Chicago Public Schools families were on winter break, the news out of CPS did not take a vacation. The latest goings-on will affect the incoming Board of Education, who take their seats on January 15, a week from today. Let’s walk through the highlights of events over the last two weeks.

Who’s the boss? At least for now, CPS CEO Pedro Martinez is still in charge, despite the board’s vote to fire him in late December.  Over winter break, negotiations continued between CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union and became a battleground in the struggle for authority between Martinez and the fully-appointed interim board. On December 23, board president Sean Harden and members Olga Bautista and Frank Niles Thomas attended contract talks. CTU hailed their presence as a breakthrough in speeding up negotiations. But in Cook County Circuit Court the next day, Martinez won a temporary restraining order preventing board members from attending contract talks without his permission.

That order may also have squashed the possibility of having board president Harden act as a co-CEO, which was floated before Christmas. Judge Joel Chupak ruled that the board cannot diminish Martinez’s authority or manage his staff. The judge has yet to rule on other issues Martinez has raised in his suit, including whether he was illegitimately fired because the interim board of education had not received required training. The next hearing in the case takes place tomorrow, January 9.

What’s holding up contract negotiations? Competing visions of what’s financially possible, plus a few key issues that don’t have direct financial costs. CTU wants more prep time for elementary school teachers, more autonomy over curriculum, and a lighter hand with teacher evaluation. This recent Chalkbeat Chicago analysis goes into more depth on the issues. Three points of note:

Prep time CTU is holding up the Acero charter contract's approach to elementary teacher prep time as a possible model for CPS. (See pages 53-54 of the contract.)

Teacher Autonomy/"Academic Freedom" Publicly, CTU is calling for "academic freedom" to ensure teachers can teach accurate science and history in the face of book bans or pressure from the Trump administration. But the real issue in Chicago is that the union wants teachers to have freedom from the district-created, $160 million Skyline curriculum. Skyline was created with input from hundreds of CPS teachers, but a 2024 report from Educators 4 Excellence, based on surveys and interviews with teachers, shows they need a better technical interface and more support to put the curriculum to work effectively. The Chicago Principals and Administrators Association has expressed concerns that the union's demands for more teacher autonomy could make it harder to create consistent schoolwide academic expectations and common curriculum across classrooms in the same grade.

REACH Teacher Evaluation The CTU has pointed to research showing that Black teachers in high-poverty schools consistently receive lower REACH evaluation ratings. I'm told researchers suggested a statistical fix that could control for differences across schools, but the district hasn't taken up on it.

An additional issue–the CTU’s push to hire teacher assistants (TAs) to fill vacant special education classroom assistant (SECA) positions is creating tension with the union that represents SECAs, SEIU Local 73. For a close look at the role of a SECA, check out Nell Salzman's recent Chicago Tribune story if you can get around the paywall.

Ultimately, the board will have to approve a mid-year budget amendment to fund the contract whenever an agreement is reached, which will require 14 yes votes. Getting to yes could be harder than expected. Though the mayoral appointees and CTU-backed electeds total 15 votes, I predict this board will demonstrate a level of independence from the mayor that we haven’t seen for decades in Chicago, if ever. I further predict that CTU-backed electeds and appointees who ran unsuccessfully with union support may not toe the union line as much as expected.

What’s up with the incoming board? Based on what is known about where the other 20 members live, Johnson’s final appointee probably has to live in subdistrict 8b, home to unsuccessful candidate Felix Ponce. But he has not spoken publicly since the election, and from speaking with him during his run, my guess is he’s probably delighted to return to being a suburban high school band director and a new father. I'm watching for a 21st board member with ties to CTU ally Brighton Park Neighborhood Council or one from Chicago's growing Greater Chinatown area, which includes Bridgeport and McKinley Park.

This week, the 20 members of the incoming board are in five full days of training. I was told they spent Monday afternoon in a deep dive into the role of the board, facilitated by staff from the Illinois Association of School Boards.

A Bit of History: Acero Charter Network

Before the holidays, I had an interesting conversation with an LSC member from Logan Square who wondered why the interim board resolved to save five of seven Acero charter schools from closure, which was a departure from the hands-off approach of the previous board.

In short, the former board played by the established rules: a charter has the autonomy to do as it sees fit with school management, including close schools. With December's resolution, the interim board opened the door to new possibilities grounded in two political realities: adamant community opposition to closing more schools in the wake of the mass school closures of 2013, and Acero's unusual status as a unionized charter network within the Chicago Teachers Union.

The Acero network's complex history and how that figures into the push to save the schools deserve a deeper treatment in a later newsletter. For now, it's important to note that though the Board of Education has directed the district to come up with a plan to bring five of the seven closing campuses into CPS, Acero has to agree to the plan, and that's not guaranteed.

Six Degrees of Helen Shiller Over the holidays I read Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win, Shiller's memoir. Though I didn't find the exact Jitu Brown connection, I found that her relationship with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, where Brown was the lead education organizer for many years, stretched back to 1973 and the Chicago 21 Plan, a business-backed $15 billion master plan to remake downtown and gentrify surrounding working-class neighborhoods. Activists across the city who were committed to stabilizing neighborhoods from Uptown to Humboldt Park to Kenwood-Oakland joined forces to defeat the plan. The flashpoint of the struggle became the South Loop's Dearborn Park development. Though the activist coalition didn't stop the development--Shiller says in the book that they likely gave up too soon--the struggle built ties among legendary organizers citywide: from Marion Stamps and Rudy Lozano to Nancy Jefferson and Dorothy Tillman.

Ebony DeBerry also works for an organization with longstanding ties to Shiller. ONE Northside was created in 2013 through the merger of two north lakefront community groups: Organization of the North East (ONE) and Lakeview Action Coalition. ONE and Shiller's Heart of Uptown Coalition partnered on many struggles to preserve affordable housing. In her memoir, Shiller mentions a late 80s joint effort to preserve affordability in HUD-mortgaged buildings where owners could pre-pay their mortgages and release themselves from their affordability commitments.

Virtual Trading Cards Update: As the saying goes, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, especially when the team–in this case, the Chicago Board of Education–is about to triple in size and many of the new players are unknown rookies in the world of Chicago politics. So, to help you out, I’ve recruited two Chicago Public Schools alumni artists to draw caricature-style sketches of each board member. They’ll be the centerpieces of a set of virtual trading cards that give some quick facts and stats to help us all get familiar with the new board. 

We’ll have them online by the end of January for sure–fingers crossed to have them for you all next week.