What to know about what’s going on with the Chicago School Board

Unpacking a very big mess.

In general, I try to keep content here away from whatever’s the latest breaking story in Chicago politics. You can get a lot of that content elsewhere, and I don’t really like the idea of just chasing whatever the latest thing is. We have enough long-term problems that don’t get enough focus in the daily news that I think it’s more valuable to keep the attention on those things.

All that said, I’ve had enough questions from friends and subscribers in the past few days about what’s going on with the Chicago Public Schools board resignations that I thought it’s worth talking about. That said, because I think it’s important, you’re going to have to put up with a lot of background explanation before we talk about what’s happening right now (though I suppose you can jump to the section entitled “What’s Happening Right Now” if you really want. I don’t recommend it, though).

A brief summary of the current thing

This Pedro Martinez, not the pitcher.

Last Friday, all seven members of the Chicago Board of Education resigned en masse. This was the latest development in an escalating conflict between Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Pedro Martinez and Mayor Brandon Johnson over Martinez’s approach to the CPS budget and outlook. Johnson appointed the board, which has authority over Martinez. This resignation was met with significant concern from city stakeholders, including an open letter signed by 41 of 50 city aldermen (including many of the mayor’s allies in City Council) criticizing the mayor’s approach. On Monday morning, Mayor Brandon Johnson named six new board members to take their place.

Let’s talk about how we got here.

What is the Chicago Board of Education, anyways?

First, some background. Chicago Public Schools is the public school district covering the City of Chicago. The school district is a separate government entity from the City. It has its own budget and ability to collect property taxes¹.

The Chicago Board of Education oversees CPS. The board has existed in roughly its current form since 1995, when the Chicago School Reform Amendatory Act created a five person board (later expanded to seven members in 1999) with all members appointed by the Mayor of Chicago. Notably, unlike many other boards - like the Chicago Transit or Housing Authorities - these appointments are explicitly not subject to City Council approval, per the law.

Throughout this time period, CPS has been the only school district in Illinois which didn’t elect its school board. Obviously Chicago is unique compared to the rest of the state, and an appointed board isn’t atypical for big cities - New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, D.C. all have appointed school boards - but it was enough to merit the attention of some advocates who thought Chicago needed an elected school board as well. The Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) was among those advocates, promoting an elected school board going back at least to Rahm Emanuel’s tenure as mayor. In the race to replace him, Lori Lightfoot campaigned in support of a fully elected board before making an about-face and pushing instead for a hybrid board structure with a majority of seats remaining appointed.

This idea lost, and in June 2021 Springfield instead passed a bill transitioning Chicago to a fully elected board by 2027. Details on how the transition would work out took a while to resolve. For a while it even seemed that we might make an immediate transition to a fully elected board - until March 2024 when Springfield passed a structure backed by Johnson and the CTU calling for 10 seats to be elected this November, with the remaining 11 seats subject to mayoral approval.²

That brings us nearly up to date. Until very recently, the board did consist of seven Johnson appointees, none of whom are running for election for the ten seats up for grabs in November’s election. Those races are expected to be quite competitive, with a fair amount of money from both the CTU (who have endorsed a full slate of candidates) and other groups, including charter school advocates and business interests, backing candidates seen as more opposed to (or at least more independent from) the CTU.

Another interesting note: while the mayor and City Council are elected in off-years, the school board elections are occurring during the normal even-year election cycle (a practice that I’ve advocated for in the past). That means that turnout is much higher: only 39% of the city turned out for the 2023 run-off that Mayor Johnson won, but 73% of the registered voters turned out during the 2020 November election. We’ll see how the results shake out, but hard-core partisans (who reliably show up) may actually have less influence over this election than they did over the mayoral race.

How is CPS doing financially?

Amidst all of this, I think it’s also important to have a sense of CPS’s current fiscal position. I would explain in detail, but it really merits its own post - there is too much, so let me sum up:

• Much like the city’s four pension systems, the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund (CTPF) is in pretty poor shape. The fund currently stands at 47.2% funded, with $12.4 billion in assets against $26.2 billion in liabilities as of 6/30/23, for a net $13.8 billion unfunded liability.³ Like the four other funds, the CTPF is currently catching up for this shortfall, with annual contributions large enough to get the fund up to 90% funded by 2059. This is an expensive game of catch up - this year’s budget requires just over $1 billion to be contributed to the fund.

• CPS also has pretty significant debts - around $9.3 billion in outstanding long-term debt. We’re currently junk rated by S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch (though BBB rated by Kroll), which results in that debt coming with a pretty high service cost - $816 million in the upcoming fiscal year. For context, the overall CPS budget for FY2025 is $9.9 billion, so that’s around 19% of their total budget going towards pension and debt service this year.

• That $9.9 billion budget for 2025, which was approved this summer, also featured a number of one-time revenue sources to plug a $505 million budget gap. This includes the last $233 million of COVID relief funds the district received. The budget gap is only expected to grow in coming years.

• That budget passed this summer also didn’t include two other components which need to be dealt with, totaling an expected $300 million:

  • First, a $175 million contribution which CPS is supposed to make to the City to cover the pension cost for non-teacher employees (aides, crossing guards, etc), who are covered by the municipal employees’ pension fund. These contributions have been a bit of a hot potato - the City generally covered the cost itself for many years until Mayor Lightfoot began requiring CPS to cover the cost as of 2021.

  • Second, the district is currently negotiating a new labor agreement with the CTU - but the budget set aside no new money for the increases in teacher compensation expected to come out of those negotiations. Somewhere in the ballpark of $120 million is expected there.

Some more recent CPS context worth mentioning

• As of last fall, CPS enrolled around 320,000 students, which is down about 20% from 400,000 in 2011. Against that kind of trend, and facing a budget shortfall, you might expect the district to look into measures like consolidating schools where low enrollments have become particularly pronounced issues (see this Block Club story on an Austin neighborhood high school with only 33 students). That’s instead very much not the case. After CPS controversially closed 50 underperforming schools in 2013, backlash was strong enough to create a 5-year moratorium on any further school closures. They closed another few schools in 2018 when that expired, but we’ve had a moratorium on further closures ever since, eliminating this as a pathway to cost savings in the district.

• Notably, many of the CTU’s talking points regarding the current funding crisis point to resourcing issues at the school level (like the lack of a school librarian at every school in the district). CPS actually spends more per student than the state average. Some of that is because the needs of the CPS student population are greater than other districts in the state. But even if CPS is spending much more, individual schools will still be under-resourced if they’re operating well below capacity - it’s a lot harder to come up with the funds for a librarian at a school that’s only half full. 

• Taking a different approach to neighborhood school enrollment, late last year the Johnson-appointed school board passed a resolution supporting a transition away from selective enrollment, magnet and charter schools in the CPS system, which would force students who’d otherwise been enrolled in such institutions back into their neighborhood schools. Such schools are quite popular with students - per Chalkbeat, over 70% of CPS high schoolers attend somewhere other than their neighborhood high school - but are very unpopular with the CTU, who view them as a threat to neighborhood schools and their resources. This resolution made a lot of people quite nervous about the direction CPS was heading, which prompted a bill in Springfield this spring - H.B. 303 - to create a moratorium on closing charter and other selective enrollment CPS schools until February 2027 (when the first fully elected school board takes over). The bill was later amended to apply to all schools - SES and neighborhood alike - and - despite being opposed by Johnson and derided as racist by the CTU - passed the House by a 92-8 vote before stalling in the Senate (Johnson lobbied Senate President Don Harmon not to bring the bill to a vote).

• Later in the spring, Johnson also spent some time lobbying Springfield for an extra $1.1 billion in state funding that he argued the school district is owed - nearly a 50% increase over what the district current receives. Let’s talk about that figure for a minute. As you may know, most schools as funded at a pretty local level (often from local property tax revenue) which can lead to inequities between schools in wealthy neighborhoods (who have lots of resources) and those in poor communities (who don’t). That’s bad. To counterbalance that, in 2017 Illinois passed a bipartisan education funding reform measure which changed the way we allocate state funds to local school districts. The idea is that the state funds should offset the local resource imbalance, so every district ends up with adequate funding, and the law’s goal was to get each district to 90% adequacy by 2027, with funding ramping up over time. As of the state’s latest calculations, CPS stands at around 79% adequacy. To reach 100% adequacy would take roughly $1.1 billion in additional funding - which is the source of the $1.1 billion figure we’re referencing here. That of course ignores both the ramp over time and the state’s target of 90% adequacy, not 100%. It also ignores the fact that a lot of other school districts are also, by Johnson’s definition, “owed” this money by the state. Per the Illinois State Board of Education, funding every district in the state up to 90% immediately would cost us $2.5 billion, with around $503 million going to Chicago to get us there. Funding every district up to 100% immediately would cost us $4.85 billion (with that $1.1 billion coming to Chicago). So fundamentally we’re not talking about money the state has taken away from CPS to fund somebody else - we’re talking about money that isn’t going anywhere yet, but which is ramping up over time for every district.

Regardless, while this $1.1 billion ask has been echoed repeatedly, it didn’t coalesce into anything this spring, and Johnson’s lobbying efforts in Springfield seemed to focus on other requests instead.

• All of this is happening, by the way, as the district continues to attempt to negotiate with the CTU over a new contract. Things don’t seem to be progressing particularly well.

What’s happening right now

Okay, now back to CPS’s current $300 million deficit, caused by the non-teacher pension expense and the CTU’s new contract. Finding a way to pay for that has been the key question at stake prior to the board drama. Mayor Johnson pushed for the district to simply borrow the money and take out a short-term high interest loan to cover the costs. CPS CEO Pedro Martinez rejected this idea as fiscally irresponsible and sought other cost-saving solutions, including program cuts and furloughs, which Johnson has steadfastly opposed.

In late September, this came to a head. The CTU also took vote of no-confidence in Martinez and accused him of preparing a plan to close schools, and⁴ Johnson asked Martinez to resign. Martinez declined to do so and penned an op-ed in the Tribune outlining his commitment to CPS the following week⁵. Later that week⁶, the Johnson-appointed school board met and voted unanimously to prohibit any public school closures until summer 2027, but took no action regarding Martinez (the board, not the mayor, has the power to fire Martinez). Reports continued of the board getting significant pressure from the mayor’s office to take action on both Martinez and the $300 million short-term loan.

The following Friday, on October 4th, the entire board announced that they’d be resigning. This was pretty shocking, considering how close we are to the school board elections and the tension that’d been ramping up between Johnson and Martinez. Exactly why they all resigned seems unclear - and to be honest, the resignations are quite strange to me. The board had been largely supportive of Martinez overall and was reluctant to take on the $300 million loan Johnson has been pushing for - so on the one hand, their resignations support the idea that they weren’t willing to do what the mayor wanted and didn’t want to be left in the middle. On the other hand, as best I can tell Johnson didn’t have the authority to fire them so by resigning they cleared the path for him to pick a new board which can do exactly what he’d like. If you have conviction that the mayor’s idea are wrong, it seems odd to just remove yourselves as roadblocks? The manner of the resignations certainly seemed intended to draw attention to the issues and embarrass the mayor - the reaction it’s garnered from state and local leaders supports that - but the act itself is just very puzzling to me. A profile in political courage it is not.

About that reaction: over the weekend, a stunning 41 of 50 aldermen in City Council signed an open letter lambasting the situation. The letter criticizes the idea of the short-term loan and specifically calls out the mayor’s office for spending too much time lobbying Springfield for $2 billion in public funding for a new Bears stadium (we’ve already covered how bad an idea that would be) instead of prioritizing lobbying for more school funding from the state. It’s worth noting that those 41 aldermen include 13 of 19 members of the city’s Progressive Caucus, who had been some of Mayor Johnson’s most ardent supporters in City Council. State Rep. Ann Williams - sponsor of the bill which created the elected school board - also issued a statement implying that more guardrails and state oversight of the district may be necessary depending on how things unfold in coming weeks.

Things remain quite messy. On Monday, Johnson announced six new members of the board⁷ in a combative press conference⁸ which included him comparing arguments in favor of fiscal responsibility for CPS to a pro-slavery position and attacking a reporter for asking the nominees if they supported the $300 million loan.

What’s next

City Council had also announced a new special meeting to be held later this afternoon in which they hoped to hear from both the outgoing and incoming board members, though it seems this will likely end up occurring at a future committee meeting instead. I imagine testimony might be interesting, but it’s likely to do little to change any of the actual facts. Johnson has the authority to appoint these members without Council oversight. Once they are installed, I expect they are likely to fire Martinez, and may pursue the $300 million loan after all. There’s very little City Council can actually do to prevent any of that.

On the other, the city is also yet to pass a budget this year - and the mayor’s office has already delayed their timeline of rolling out a budget proposal to early November. That is something he very much needs City Council to support, and I’d expect budget season to be particularly combative in the wake of all of this.

Then this afternoon (October 9^th), the CTU announced a new plan to immediately end all tax increment financing (TIF) districts in the city, and immediately sweep the fund balances over to CPS. It’s unclear how this would work or how it would impact other programs or city finances⁹.

Finally, November 5th is election day, where for the first time ever we’ll elect 10 of 21 board members to the school board. We’ll be coming out with an official City That Works Voter’s Guide sometime soon, but I’d encourage everyone to think very hard before voting for any CTU-backed candidates for those ten seats.

1. Although it can only *increase* its property tax levy each year by the lesser of CPI or 5%, according to state law.

2. You may find it interesting that the CTU, after pushing for a fully elected board for so many years, was instead backing for this transitional plan which left more seats in control of the mayor. If you wanted to take a cynical view, you might note that this switch happened immediately upon a particularly staunch ally of the CTU being elected that controlling mayor. I would join you in that cynical view.

3. See page 97 of the CTPF’s latest annual report here.

4. On September 20th.

5. On September 24th.

6. On September 26th.

7. The mayor had planned to appoint a seventh – Margarita Ramirez, the mother of his close City Council ally, Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa. She’d have to resign from the local school council she serves on first. It’s not clear if that will happen yet.

8. At a church, oddly enough.

9. This is particularly true given that the Mayor’s office already intends for a lot of those funds to go towards supporting the Housing and Economic Development Bond deal they rolled out this spring.