Johnson's missteps have destabilized Chicago schools. But it's not all his doing.
Chronic underfunding of CPS and the teacher’s pension fund has left him with some terrible choices.
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s team has told city department leaders to prepare to cull their staff budgets through what his office has described as an “exercise” in case layoffs are needed to close the city’s $982 million 2025 budget shortfall. — Crain’s
Brandon Johnson, who I voted for in the last election, and who’s been a repeat guest in years past on my radio show, is being bashed, at times unfairly, for his education and budget policies. Unfairly, because the chronic underfunding of CPS and the teacher’s pension fund has left him with some terrible choices, ie. either have taxpayers ripped off by the banks by taking out high-interest loans or laying off hundreds of teachers and making draconian cuts in services for Chicago school children.
Johnson has opted for the former although he’s run into massive opposition from the City Council and even his own appointed school board, which resigned in mass rather than enter into open conflict.
Johnson’s response to the opposition, unfortunately, has been to lash out at opponents and City Hall reporters who are asking the obvious questions while his backers in the CTU leadership, circle the wagons against any criticism of themselves or the mayor. His often irrational behavior and bullying style of work have left him increasingly isolated and vulnerable to attacks from the right, center, and left and have opened the door to a right-wing revival led by his defeated opponent Paul Vallas.
Forty-one of 50 alderpeople, including some from the council’s progressive caucus, signed a letter Saturday criticizing Johnson’s handling of the Chicago School Board, saying the resignations bring “further instability” to CPS.
“There is extreme cause for concern now that those voices have been diminished,” the letter says regarding the departing school board members.
Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th), the co-chair of the City Council’s Progressive Caucus, said in a social media post that Johnson’s plan to plug the CPS budget with a short-term loan was “risky and irresponsible.”
Johnson, Stacy Davis Gates, and the rest of his team obviously need to find a way to broaden their circle of allies before the rest of his term turns into one big train wreck.
The surface issues are, 1) Johnson’s push to arbitrarily fire former Mayor Lightfoot appointee, CEO Pedro Martinez, a push that led to the mass resignations. The outgoing board appeared to back Martinez’s approach to growing fiscal challenges. 2) Johnson wants to borrow hundreds of millions in high-interest loans or raise property taxes to cover a part of the budget deficit, and 3) his attempted appointment of a more compliant board only three weeks before the next school board elections and in the middle of contract negotiations with the CTU.
The elected school board initiative, which I supported in its earlier form — before Sen. Martwick and the CTU leaders made a mess of it — predictably has turned the upcoming elections into a big-money affair, freezing out nearly all potential candidates not receiving heavy campaign funding from the CTU, or conservative groups pushing vouchers and privately-run charter schools.
This is what I wrote about Martwick’s bill three years ago.
It also sucks because a 21-member board, coming from 21 politically defined districts, is much too unwieldy, too politicized (in the bad sense of the word), and bureaucratic. Its size makes it too easy for big-monied, reactionary, anti-public-school political interests to influence the outcomes of small-turnout elections, as they are now doing in state after state.
Lost in all this are any plans for changes in school learning environments, school curriculum, or standardized assessments. Changes that we thought might occur post-pandemic. This whole blow-up over the Mayor’s board appointments, the loan, the firing (or not) of the CEO, or the mayor’s demeanor, has little or nothing to do with needed post-pandemic school transformation in Chicago schools.