Special Edition: Acero

After an emotional board meeting full of anger, tears and prayers from parents and teachers affiliated with the Acero Schools charter network, the Chicago Board of Education reaffirmed its December decision directing school district leaders to work with Acero to save five of the seven campuses marked for closure. But rather than try to keep all seven open for an extra year while planning for families to transition out of two schools, the board agreed to let Acero’s Paz and Cruz campuses close at the end of the current school year.

Citing financial and legal concerns, school district staff had recommended walking back the board’s December commitment. The initial resolution before the board yesterday would have closed three Acero sites at the end of the current school year and removed the guarantee that all four of the other campuses would remain open, giving Chicago Public Schools more wiggle room to back out if the finances proved unsustainable. 

A handful of elected board members concerned about the financial implications of having the district take over the five campuses supported that proposal. “This is a vote between making a financially responsible decision that doesn’t have greater effects across the district and saves some of these schools, or keeping these schools open at the cost of teacher and staff jobs in millions of dollars across the entire district,” said Jenni Custer.

But Debby Pope led the charge to override the change, proposing amended language that restored the guarantee to keep a subset of Acero campuses open and added Cisneros, the fifth campus, back to that subset.  “We’ve been talking about financial risk,” she said. “We’ve been talking about liability risk. What we haven’t been talking about is the risk to the children of the Acero schools.”

Multiple board members noted that the decision was made to save all five campuses in December and expressed frustration that they were being asked to revisit that decision.  “If this board made a resolution in December, that was not an opinion, it was not an advisory board’s suggestion -- it was a directive,” said Brown.

After lengthy debate, the board voted 16-3 with one abstention (new board member Cydney Wallace) to reaffirm its December commitment to keep five campuses open. The process actually required two votes: one to amend the resolution per Pope’s language, then the second and final vote to enshrine the board’s decision. Three board members—Gutierrez, Rivas, and Smith—changed their minds from the first to the second vote. Boyle, Custer, and Rosenfeld voted no both times.

For more nitty-gritty from yesterday’s board meeting, I recommend the news stories from Chalkbeat and WBEZ.

How We Got Here

During yesterday’s board meeting, member Jitu Brown observed, “We also have to ask ourselves how a bad actor like UNO ended up with 16 campuses throughout the city of Chicago.”  Two factors combined to produce this situation: poor oversight of charter finances and poor capital planning by the district, which led them to look to UNO to reduce school overcrowding on the Southwest Side.

To understand the lack of controls on UNO back in the day, I highly recommend Cassie Walker Burke’s 2014 investigation for Chicago Magazine into the rise and fall of Juan Rangel, who led the once-powerful United Neighborhood Organization’s foray into charter schools. The network’s rapid expansion flamed out in 2013, when a Sun-Times investigation into nepotism and crony contracts led the state to claw back $15 million of an unprecedented $98 million school construction grant. The Sun-Times stories also sparked a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into a 2011 bond deal that started UNO’s building spree. UNO teachers expressed their frustration by unionizing, and eventually the network separated from UNO and rebranded as Acero Schools.

There’s one factor that often gets underestimated in discussions of UNO’s history: the persistent problems with overcrowding in some parts of town. While the city overall is facing huge enrollment declines and scores of buildings with very few students, especially in high schools, overcrowding remains a problem in certain areas, especially on the Northwest and Southwest side. In UNO’s stronghold, the Southwest Side, it appears CPS encouraged the charter network to grow when it couldn’t keep up with its own schools’ needs for additions or annexes to open up sufficient space for all students.

An investigation my Catalyst Chicago colleague John Myers and I did back in the mid-2000s showed that the major capital spending plan launched back in the late 1990s under CEO Paul Vallas and Board President Gery Chico made little headway in relieving this persistent school overcrowding. By the mid-2000s, the glory days of capital spending in CPS were over. Essentially, CEO Arne Duncan looked to UNO as a well-funded intermediary to lease and reopen closed Catholic schools and take on its own school building projects, relieving overcrowding in areas where the district could no longer promise its schools additions or annexes.  

Not long after Acero announced its plan to close seven campuses, an LSC member who opposes charters and was not familiar with this history asked me why CPS should assume responsibility for a bunch of charter schools. I think the board’s primary motives for saving Acero campuses center on popular unwillingness to close any more schools after the devastating mass closures in 2013. Plus, the majority of board members have close ties with the Chicago Teachers Union, which organizes Acero’s teachers. But this history suggests to me, and likely to Brown and others with long memories, that since the district handed off its responsibilities to UNO about 15 years ago, now might be an appropriate time to resume them.

What’s Next for Charters?

Historically, Chicago Public Schools has taken a hands-off approach to charter closures, in keeping with the idea that charter schools should have substantial autonomy from school districts in order to innovate. But when they run into trouble, it’s up to the operator to decide when to call it quits, unless the problems are so egregious the district refuses to renew the charter agreement.

Comments yesterday about both the Acero situation and the charter renewal process that is taking longer than usual this year, suggest the majority of board members want to curb charter autonomy further.  “I believe our job as board members is … to prevent this kind of crisis from ever happening again,” said Anusha Thotakura, in remarks pushing for stronger financial accountability from charters. 

But board members will continue to find themselves bumping into the limits of their authority when dealing with charters. Though the board has directed district leadership to make an agreement with Acero to transfer responsibility for the five campuses to CPS, the school district can’t make Acero do it. This means Acero has the upper hand in negotiating the agreement’s details. “We have no leverage,” warned Alfonso Carmona, the district’s chief portfolio officer and charter school liaison.

Next week: The board meets again on Wednesday March 5, to debut its committee structure and review agenda items for its next high-stakes showdown. At the March 20 board meeting, members will decide whether to agree to Mayor Brandon Johnson’s demand that the district pay $175 million toward pensions for non-teaching staff.

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