New York, Chicago and mayoral control of the schools.
What a mess.
In my new hometown of New York City, the sordid scandals surrounding Mayor Eric Adams include the forced resignation of schools Chancellor David Banks.
It was just a few months ago that the New York legislature extended mayoral control of the schools for another two years.
So I don’t expect that the mess at the top of the system to get any better any time soon.
Back in Chicago.
About a decade ago I joined the effort to give Chicago a democratically elected school board. It was the easiest signature gathering effort I have ever been involved with.
Knocking on door after door in my northside neighborhood, the petitions basically signed themselves. And not in the usual shady Chicago way. It was just that there was almost universal support for ending Chicago’s mayoral dictatorship of the schools and putting the schools back in the hands of the people.
And then the Illinois legislature created a monster. The elected school board the devised looked nothing like the one we had imagined.
There will be 10 electoral districts for the 2024 election and 20 for the 2026 election and beyond.
The first hybrid board will be seated on Jan. 15, 2025. The mayor will appoint 10 members to serve two-year terms and will also appoint a board president, subject to City Council approval. The remaining 10 seats, with four-year terms, will go to those who voters choose in the 2024 election.
Voters will take to the polls in 2026 to elect a board president and 10 members who will serve four-year terms.
And while the 2027 board will be fully elected it will be made up of a huge number of board members. No city has a larger school board.
To those of us who have watched the 50 member Chicago City Council act crazy, a huge board of this size is cause for concern.
So from 2025 to 2027, each of the 10 Chicago districts will be represented by one elected board member and one appointed member. Starting with the 2027 board, there will be one elected member for each of the 20 districts, plus the board president.
But now Mayor Johnson has thrown a wrench into the entire process and not in a good way.
Just months before the election of ten board members Johnson has forced the resignation of the entire current board and has appointed his own members.
Why?
It appears that the current board was not quite the rubber stamp the Mayor wanted.
They wouldn’t agree to his demand to fire the current CPS CEO, Pedro Martinez, and the wouldn’t go along with the Mayor’s desire to solve the current school budget short fall with the equivalent of a same-day loan.
The names of the new board members are being announced today.
Whether they will be good or bad is less important than the fact that the Chicago mayor, who ran as a former teacher, union guy and supporter of an elected board, is acting in the very tradition of the mayoral practice he said he opposed.
On the eve of what was supposed to be an era of greater citizen control of the schools, he acts like a mayor who clings to mayoral control.