Chicago’s Next Mayor Will Be a Former Educator

Chicago’s Next Mayor Will Be a Former Educator

Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas speaks at his election night event
in Chicago, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023. Mayor Lori Lightfoot conceded defeat
Tuesday night, ending her efforts for a second term and setting the stage for
Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson to run against former Chicago 

Public Schools CEO Vallas for Chicago mayor.
Chicago mayoral candidate
Paul Vallas speaks at his election night event in Chicago, on Feb. 28, 2023.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot conceded defeat, ending her efforts for a second term.
Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, a former teacher, will compete
against Vallas, a former schools chief in the city.

Whoever wins an April 4 runoff, Chicago’s next mayor will be a
former educator, and will be in charge of the city as the nation’s
fourth-largest school district enters a new era.

Cook County
Commissioner Brandon Johnson, a former public school teacher and Chicago
Teachers Union organizer, and Paul Vallas, who served as CEO of Chicago Public
Schools from 1995 to 2001, beat Mayor Lori Lightfoot and six other candidates
in the Feb. 28 election for mayor.

Neither Johnson nor Vallas
secured more than the necessary 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff, so
Chicago voters will choose between the two on April 4. (Vallas received almost
34 percent of the first-round vote to Johnson’s 20.3 percent.)

While
their conflicting stances on crime and policing have garnered the most
attention, the rivals’ education priorities also represent starkly different
sides of the national education debate, with Johnson firmly allied with the
city’s teachers’ union and Vallas championing school choice.

In
addition, Vallas or Johnson will become mayor as the city reverts to an
elected school board. Chicago was one of the first major U.S. school districts
to come under mayoral control—a popular education reform measure in some of
the nation’s biggest cities in the 1990s and 2000s.

Their
backgrounds in education don’t mean they have much in common
Vallas and
Johnson may share backgrounds in education, but their approaches are starkly
different. Vallas, who led school districts in New Orleans, Philadelphia, and
Bridgeport, Conn., after Chicago, is in many ways the face of school
executives Johnson has spent years fighting as an organizer for the Chicago
Teachers Union.

Johnson used his speech after polls closed on Feb.
28 to take aim at Vallas’ time as chief of schools, criticizing him for
stopping regular payments to the teachers’ pension fund.

“As head
of the Chicago Public Schools, he ran the teachers’ pension fund into the
ground, closed neighborhood schools, and punished students who are in need,”
Johnson said, adding claims that Vallas’s leadership in New Orleans,
Connecticut, and Philadelphia also led to more privatization of schools. “He
has literally failed everywhere he has gone.”

Chicago mayoral
candidate and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson celebrates with
supporters, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023, in Chicago. Johnson and Paul Vallas will
meet in a runoff to be the next mayor of Chicago after voters denied incumbent
Lori Lightfoot a second term.
Chicago mayoral candidate and Cook County
Commissioner Brandon Johnson celebrates with supporters on Feb. 28, 2023, in
Chicago. Johnson, a former teacher, and Paul Vallas, who has run several large
school districts including Chicago’s, will meet in a runoff to be the next
mayor after voters denied incumbent Lori Lightfoot a second term.

Paul Beaty/AP
Vallas didn’t mention Johnson in his speech on
election night. The former school district executive has focused his campaign
on public safety, stating that it’s the No. 1 issue facing Chicago and
promising to invest in and expand the city’s police force. A major part of
improving public safety, Vallas said, is investments in schools.

“We
will not have true public safety in this city until the schools become part of
the public safety solution,” he said. “That means we need to have the type of
educational quality and educational opportunities so that we can provide for a
future for all of Chicago’s residents regardless of their income, regardless
of their ZIP code.”

Chicago was the site of two school shootings
last year, according to Education Week’s 2022 national school shooting
tracker.

Vallas is advocating for more school options in his
education agenda, specifically pointing to magnet schools. He also wants more
oversight of school spending, criticizing current school leaders for failing
to raise student performance.

Only 20 percent of Chicago students
met or exceeded expectations in reading and 15 percent met or exceeded
expectations in math in 2022, according to the Illinois State Report Card.
(Chicago students in 3rd through 8th grades did show more growth than the
average U.S. student from 2009 to 2014, according to a 2017 study from the
Stanford University Center for Education Policy Analysis.)

Johnson,
who is endorsed by the city’s teachers’ union, has prioritized investments in
community schools that offer school-based health centers and trauma support
for students and families affected by community violence. The former teacher
also wants to prevent the closure of schools, especially those that primarily
serve Black and Hispanic students, and increase preschool enrollment.

The
next mayor will take over following a decade in which Chicago’s schools saw
enrollment drop by nearly 20 percent and the closure of 50 schools
predominantly serving Black and Hispanic students.

The next mayor
will lose direct control of city schools
Chicago’s mayoral election is
notable because it signals the beginning of the end for the city’s
mayoral-control model of school governance.

Since 1995, Chicago’s
mayor has appointed both the district’s chief executive officer and the entire
school board. In fact, Vallas became the first appointed CEO, after then-Mayor
Richard Daley tapped him for the job.

But that model will begin to
change next year thanks to a 2021 law that requires the city to transition to
a fully elected, 21-person school board by 2027.

The change makes
Chicago the first major city to abandon the mayoral control model, which
became popular in the ‘90s. City school districts in Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, and the District of Columbia all operate under a mayoral control
model.

The model has proven beneficial for some districts. A 2013
Center for American Progress study found that mayor-led districts had more
resources per student, leading to lower student-to-teacher ratios and
increases in student achievement.

But teachers’ unions and
community organizers have decried the model, saying it gives mayors too much
power and pushes school board members to ignore community desires.

“Students,
families, and educators will now have the voice they have long been denied for
a quarter of a century by failed mayoral control of our schools,” the Chicago
Teachers Union wrote in a statement after Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the bill
to end mayoral control.

In Boston, residents voted overwhelmingly
in favor of restoring an elected school board in 2021, but Mayor Michelle Wu
last month vetoed a City Council-approved bill to make the switch.

The
United States has seen more educators run for office in recent election
cycles
Johnson’s candidacy follows recent midterm election cycles during
which waves of teachers ran for office.

In 2018, for example,
Education Week counted 177 teachers around the country who ran for state
legislative seats, following a series of teacher strikes across the country
demanding better pay and working conditions that were part of the Red for Ed
movement.

In the last Congress, 113 U.S. House and Senate members
had previously worked in education, according to the Congressional Research
Service. And a handful of governors, including Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, Alaska
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, have backgrounds as public
school teachers and school leaders.

Teachers have been motivated to run to have a voice in solving a
number of problems, such as teachers shortages in many parts of the country,
worsening mental health among students, and gun violence in schools, said
Katrina Mendiola, the national political director for the National Education
Association. NEA trains its members on how to run for office through its See
Educators Run program and has anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 members run each
cycle.

“For a lot of [educators], it really is their students, and
it really is the type of public education system that they want to create for
their communities and their students” that motivate them to run, Mendiola
said.