Q & A with Sendhil Revuluri

There's a lot going on this week, with a special board meeting happening on Thursday morning to address the threatened closure of EPIC Charter and ensure CPS makes the contested $175 million pension payment, contingent upon receiving the full, record-breaking $1 billion TIF surplus recently promised by Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Board Rule will publish a special edition tomorrow, previewing the board meeting and examining the question of how virtual learning could be deployed to help CPS students and families stay safer during Operation Midway Blitz.

For today, instead of an InFocus feature with a current board member, we have an interview with Sendhil Revuluri, who recently announced he is running to become president of the Chicago Board of Education.

As a school board candidate, he brings an unusual background, combining experience in math education with a management role at an equity derivatives trading company. Though this is his first run for elected office, he previously served as the board's appointed vice president during former Mayor Lori Lightfoot's administration. He is also a graduate of the Academy of Local Leadership fellowship for aspiring school board candidates.

Q. I know that you're very focused on the model of effective school governance championed by A. J. Crabill of the Council of the Great City Schools. He calls for school boards to focus at least half their time on student learning. This year we've seen a lot of other issues get in the way. How do you think the current board is doing when it comes to governance?

A. So far, I don't really see very effective practice on this board from January to October. The residents of Chicago want results. They want their kids to be safe. They want their kids to be learning. They want a district that is functioning in a sustainable way. Those are the results they want, and the board has to make sure that those results are happening.

We need a board that actually makes student learning the priority. When they have adopted goals, they actually check what progress looks like and ensure that we're making the adjustments needed to stay on track to achieve those goals.

They need meetings that are focused on board work: not on political issues, not on operational issues, but on ensuring those student outcomes are achieved.

We need much better CEO evaluation. CEO evaluation has been very inconsistent, both whether and when it happens, and also how it happens. The criteria are not transparent. They're not aligned with the most important goals of the district. They are a massive missed opportunity to drive more understanding and trust and buy-in both from staff and from the community.

There are a lot of things the board could be doing differently. Making that better really is the job and the authority of board leadership. We need board leadership that is very clear on the purpose of the district and the job of the board, and is willing to do the work required to be successful.

Q. You've had prior experience in board service. What are the lessons learned from your previous role?

A. I think the biggest evolution is being much clearer on the purpose of our district being for all of our students to learn, and also the purpose of our board being to make sure that happens. That's not what our board has done in the past, and from what I can tell, it's not how most of the 13,000 school boards in the country are functioning. But when it does work that way, the board creates the conditions to align the community and the district, to prepare for students to learn a lot more.

Going back much further, my background is as an educator, and I've seen that when educators change their practice, we can change how much students learn. It's not written in stone based on context or funding or demographics. It matters how educators interact with their kids and their content. We can achieve much, much greater learning than is the norm at this point, but it takes effort. It also takes focus and alignment. That's really what I recognized, that the board plays a role in making the conditions for that to happen.

It's not the board's job to manage or to teach or to drive a bus or to clean a school, so many folks would say it's not clear what the board does. The board's job is to really represent the community and keep the focus where it needs to be. To be the people who are constantly speaking up for the students, that's the board's job.

Q. How has your personal understanding of yourself as a leader evolved from your first round as a board member to this campaign?

A. There's a couple things that come to mind. One is that the leader's contribution is truly to serve. With the community, that's to listen to understand what their vision is. It's really to listen; it's not to tell. That also pertains to how the leader works with the CEO and their staff. It's not the board president's job to tell them how to do their jobs, but to say what success looks like. From listening to the community, we've figured out what's most important to them. We are going to be your partners in establishing clarity around those goals. Then the staff's job is to ensure that they do the execution so those goals are met. I think that clarity has been lacking.

Q. So, how do you envision your campaign as an opportunity to demonstrate the kind of listening you're talking about?

A. What I've heard so far is very clear. A decisive majority of conversations have been very clear that the purpose of our district is for all of our students to learn. That comes before politics. We need to focus on learning for all of our students in all the decisions we are making. Now I believe there's a lot of connecting the dots to do about how that plays out in the selection of board members at the polls.

Q. What are your plans to build grassroots support as a campaigner?

A. Well, it's a large city, and there are a lot of people, and it will be a challenge to reach them all. What it will take is really engaging with everyone who cares about kids in every neighborhood. It will be collaborating with community leaders, with residents and families. It will be collaborating with people who are already in elected office who serve the same constituencies, even if their responsibilities aren't directly around schools. They have insights and perspectives that need to be elevated, and to get them engaged with understanding the board is their representative in making the district focus on student learning.

Q. Looking at your website, I noticed that a lot of your initial endorsements are from folks who are out of state. How are you planning to build the relationships at the city and local levels that will enhance your candidacy?

A. You know that I'm a first-time candidate. I am not a politician, so I don't really know what endorsements will enhance standing with local voters. The people I reached out to to endorse my campaign at this early stage are those who I've worked with as a board member, as an LSC member, as an educator, as a CPS parent, as a member of our community. At this point, I've had hundreds of conversations over decades about what our public schools need to do and what CPS needs to do better. So I welcome partnership with other folks who care about student learning. I believe there are plenty of local elected official for whom that's their priority. Many of them are busy right now, so that will be an ongoing process over the coming 12 and a half months.

Q. We know that Chicago politics is inextricably tied to race and geography. No one is a monolith, but we have Black communities that have concerns, we have Latine communities that have concerns, we have white folks that have concerns, we have Asians with concerns. Someone running for citywide office needs to balance all these things. How does this context inform your campaign and your messaging to voters?

A. We have a very segregated city, and that, as you said, affects the lives of all Chicagoans, including our students and their families. That's a reality. I believe the emphasis is sometimes a little too much on what is different. In going to, now, dozens of CPS-organized and community-organized town halls where people have come together to talk about education, people actually agree on the most important goals for kids. When we recognize that the outcomes we want for kids are not only widely shared but also clear and consistent, then we can get to work on prioritizing how we are going to achieve these outcomes. The other part of the reality is, even though those goals are widely shared, the reality right now is we're very far from those goals.

It's going to take work to change what we're doing so that we get closer to where we want to be. And we need to prioritize that work.

Q. What are your views about what the board's role is in solving the district's financial challenges, and in making decisions about capital planning? And potentially, once the moratorium [on school closings] lifts, school consolidations?

A. We have to make our decisions based on one clear criterion, which is: will it help more kids learn? We need to do that in a way that is honest about the current reality without being alarmist. One key aspect of that is to take advantage of the time we do have. We need to tell the truth, and we need to tell it early.

The Government Finance Officers Association has pretty clear recommendations about how all public entities should share, not just their current budgets, but what the forecasts look like. There will always be assumptions; that's what a forecast is. It's about the future, not the present or the past, but saying nothing is not a good option. CPS has not been as proactive as it could be on being candid about what the future looks like, right?

Once we get to making the decisions, we have to be clear about how the resources we are spending are aligned to our goals. If we're transparent, if we're honest, if we're forward-looking, I believe that will build trust and understanding in the community. That will set us up to make better decisions that lead to better outcomes for kids.

Q. Can you speak specifically to the financial challenges of CPS, both in its efforts to disentangle from the City of Chicago and to stabilize its finances by working with Springfield and the city?

A. So we, as Chicagoans, really own both budgets. We own the district budget; we own the city budget. So there's been a lot of coverage about which budget does an expense go on, or what advocacy are we going to do to push for a different revenue model? It leaves out the much greater degree of agency we hold around how we spend our money. We need to decide what our inputs are based on the outcomes we care about for kids.

I don't think people actually care about line items on budgets. They care whether our kids are learning. We have to make decisions about how we spend our resources aligned with what's going to help our kids.