Mayoral candidates face Chicago public schools

Chicago mayoral candidates face a myriad of problems, and just behind filling the pension debt hole, is the state of the Chicago public schools --- nearly all of which confront inadequate funding, an aging physical plant, and meeting the needs of a mostly low-income student population of color that was decimated by the closing of nearly 50 schools, in 2013, by incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

With competition for resource equity, versus the more profitable demands of gentrification in increasingly less African American neighborhoods, the struggle with gentrification has also bumped against the continuing tug of war between traditional neighborhood schools and charter schools, both of whom are vying for the attention of discerning parents.

Some parents, and their educators, have also expressed their goal of persuading local school officials to prevent the education deficit that often leads some young people to prison, keenly felt in many low-income communities of color, especially on the city's South and West sides, which, over several decades, has experienced economic disinvestment.

School closings are also widely recognized, by residents, as a loss of cultural anchors to their communities; and, the prospect of crossing dangerous gang-dominated neighborhoods has added to the controversy.

A conundrum has appeared with declining CPS enrollment, as many students, (especially those from African American families), leave Chicago, yet CPS continues to build schools built to meet the needs of white middle class families moving to the city.

The moratorium on new charters is ending soon, and many are complaining, especially the Chicago Teachers Union, that they continue to be a drain of money and resources from neighborhood schools.

For the uninitiated, charter schools are essentially private schools within a public school system.

What the candidates say

Taking the issue headlong was The Chicago Sun-Times, who said: “In an Editorial Board questionnaire emailed to the 18 mayoral candidates, asked, “What is the appropriate role of charter schools within the Chicago Public Schools system?”

Fourteen answered, “and only three candidates expressed support of charters without pointed caveats: Bill Daley, Garry McCarthy and John Kenneth Kozlar. Kozlar didn’t mention charters specifically, but he embraced a central tenet of the charter movement: giving parents school choice through competition.

“Competition within our education is much needed,” he wrote, “so that schools in every area can be good schools.”

Daley wrote: “It’s time to move beyond the debate of charters vs. traditional public schools and recognize that they are all public schools. Parents just want a good school and the debate should focus on what is in the best interests of kids.”

And McCarthy, saying that his views on charters “evolved” as he saw more labor union involvement, wrote that charters “can be good neighborhood schools, especially in communities where neighborhood schools have been closed.” McCarthy, though, didn’t say why charters might make sense in those neighborhoods, and the logic is not obvious, given that those neighborhood schools usually were closed because of under-enrollment.”

The role of big money

If this all seems a bit skittish, then consider that big money is being donated to the cause of charter schools, despite the five-year moratorium that is near, “Members of the pro-charter Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, are shoring up — with $1 million in December and counting — the PACs associated with the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, as Sun-Times Washington Bureau Chief Lynn Sweet recently wrote.

“The old expression about money that “talks” might be behind some of these statements, as the candidates look to a near distant political  landscape, where their words may come back to haunt them.

Less cautious are “Dorothy Brown, Amara Enyia and Toni Preckwinkle [who] clearly are more skeptical, having little or nothing good to say about charters.

Brown wrote that she opposes charters and supports more unionizing by charter school teachers. That’s a trend in full swing here in Chicago, where the nation’s first strike by charter teachers recently was settled.

Preckwinkle, who has been endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, wrote that charters are “a weapon for corporate privatization of education.” She called for “a freeze on any new charter schools until a fully elected school board can be implemented.”

Enyia did not make clear what role charters should play in Chicago, but she offered an extended critique. “With few exceptions,” she wrote, charters create a “separate and unequal” education system that reinforces class and racial bias.”

A new era dawns

Charters are also losing their chief supporter, Emanuel, who from the onset of his first term touted his support, despite stumbling over quoting test store stats, that he thought were from charters, but were, in fact, culled from traditional neighborhood schools, who have, despite conventional wisdom, exceeded the charters.

Continuing from the Sun-Times format, “Six candidates took more of a middle ground on charters. Gery Chico, Bob Fioretti, Jerry Joyce, Lori Lightfoot, Paul Vallas, La Shawn Ford and Susana Mendoza saw some good in charters, with caveats or restrictions.

Chico, a longtime charter supporter, said he would call for a “a full review of all charters before opening new ones.” Fioretti said there should be a moratorium on charters until the next mayor has an “education strategy.”

Lightfoot wrote that charters “play a significant role in educating our children,” but she said she would impose a freeze on new charters. “We must change the relationship between CPS and charters,” she wrote, somewhat vaguely.”

Part of the relationship and the recent strike from Acero, and the almost strike with Passages, was on the investment of money into the classroom and the academy, versus the corporate sponsorship.

“We care deeply about our students,” says third grade teacher Gina Mengarelli, a member of Passages’ ChiACTS bargaining team. “Many of our kids, as refugees and immigrants, look to the school as an environment to support the hopes and dreams they bring to their new country. It is simply wrong for management to invest so little in these children and the frontline workers who are responsible for their education.”

What teachers need

For CPS, the lack of so-called “wrap around services” are needed to support children in a wide variety of issues, not just a subsidized lunch voucher many of whom come from single-parent households, where the principal caregiver may be working two jobs to make ends meet.

Many of the services from additional social workers, nurses, and teacher aides have been missing from the budgets, and that also includes special needs students who need trained staff and faculty to help them matriculate.

One lone teacher, even if embedded in the classroom cannot do it alone.

Can a new mayor help, or hinder?

The Chicago Tribune reported that recently, “. . . union President Jesse Sharkey and top deputies delivered a sheaf of written demands to lame-duck Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office at City Hall. CTU officials said their proposals include a 5 percent pay raise for union members. The union is also demanding maximum classroom sizes that range between 20 and 24 students in early grades, counselors for every 250 students, and librarians and nurses staffed at every school.”

“We intend to bargain hard,” Sharkey said. “We intend to bring both our allies and our members into a fight for the schools that our students deserve. We’re going to support a new mayor to the extent they do the right thing by our schools, and we’re going to act independently of them and fight them to the extent they don’t.”

It seems that some candidate ideas might outweigh reality, and in a statement from December of 2018, Sharkey said, ”Shortly after we release poll results that show Chicagoans want a mayor who prioritizes education and is willing to support new methods to increase revenue for our schools, Bill Daley suggests one of the more ridiculous ideas we’ve heard in recent memory. His plan to combine Chicago Public Schools and the City College of Chicago is the kind of tone deaf proposal you hear at thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners frequented by the donors supporting his campaign, and would add multiple layers of bureaucracy to two systems already struggling under their own weight.”

Show me the money

The Emanuel administration became infamous for a raft of new taxes, some of them regressive, and “the district has used money from new taxes and state aid to manage a still-woefully underfunded pension system but faces ongoing fiscal stress and a lack of public details on how lawmakers will pump billions of new dollars into an overhauled state education funding formula.”

To note, “Two-thirds of this year’s roughly $6 billion CPS budget is already devoted to educators’ salary and benefits, according to the district., the Trib notes, and “There’s also this: While CTU and CPS may negotiate over many of the subjects the union identified as priorities . . . state law largely prohibits city public school educators from striking over those issues.”

An elected school board to the rescue?

Perhaps no issue is more contentious in the donnybrook for local education, than the desire for an elected school board for Chicago. And, as noted, and quoted before: an elected school board may not be the answer to all of the problems all of the time.

Former Alderman Dick Simpson, has said, “there are problems. First, if we held school board elections citywide rather than by district, we could end up with racial imbalance. Ninety percent of the students in the system are black and Hispanic but most of the elected board could be white. Second, with more than 600 schools to supervise, it is unclear how much any school board -- appointed or elected -- can do to really govern the system. Third, when we had elections of other local agencies like Model Cities, the political machine controlled the outcome in order to control the patronage jobs. The Democratic Party could control the outcome of school board elections as well.”

“In 1995, at the behest of Mayor Richard M. Daley, the Illinois General Assembly returned control over CPS to City Hall. This means that all members of the Board of Education are picked by the mayor, making Chicago the only city in Illinois to not elect its own school board. While there are a handful of cities nationally that employ mayoral control over the school system, there is inconclusive evidence that this leads to better outcomes,” noted the Tribune.

Chalkbeat recently submitted questionnaires on this issue and 15 of the 21 candidates submitted their answers, “And while the majority said they support an elected board outright, two of the candidates who’ve raised the most cash in the race so far — Bill Daley and Gery Chico — each described visions of a “hybrid” school board whose majority would be appointed by the mayor, while community members would select the remainder.”

“But, it’s important to note: Researchers lack consensus about whether elected school boards or mayoral control results in better fiscal management and student performance. Many factors affect those outcomes, like student demographics, funding levels, and quality of leadership at schools, districts, and in city and state government. But, as noted in this 2016 analysis of school governance systems by Pew Charitable Trusts, “there is broad agreement on at least one conclusion:

“Governance systems that produce uncertainty, distrust, and ambiguous accountability can impede districts’ progress on any front,” regardless of how they are constituted.”

Getting there may be the most contentious and the severe cold weather cancelled a candidate forum on education, this Thursday, but looking at the results of their questions, we can see gauge candidate reactions, and response.

“Five candidates support creating a school board with some members appointed by the mayor and the rest chosen by community members:

Bill Daley, Gery Chico, Susana Mendoza, Garry McCarthy and Paul Vallas

This camp includes candidates with ties to former Mayor Daley: his former budget director and schools chief Paul Vallas; Daley’s first board appointee Gery Chico; and Daley’s brother Bill Daley, who like Mayor Emanuel, once was chief of staff to former President Barack Obama.

“. . . , Bill Daley proposed a seven-member school board with four members, including the board president, appointed by the mayor, while three board members would be recommended by Local School Councils.”

“CPS has taken steps in the right direction under mayoral accountability, including rising graduation rates,” Daley said in his statement. “Removing mayoral accountability would result in multimillion-dollar politicized elections and risk derailing tentative progress at a time when we need to take big, bold steps for the future of our kids.”

Last December, “Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza appeared . . . at a breakfast for the City Club of Chicago, whose membership includes business and civic leaders, she characterized a fully elected school board as “just plain bad policy.”

“A purely elected school board, that leaves the mayor out and lets the mayor, frankly, off the hook,” said Mendoza, who served as a campaign surrogate on Emanuel’s 2015 re-election bid. “And we need more accountability from the mayor, not less.”

With the dustup over the raid on Ed Burke’s office and the federal charges of a shakedown, and the subsequent revelation of incestuous political relationships, among the leading candidates, t’s easy to see that the road ahead has already been travelled.

Most candidates for mayor do support a fully elected school board, and they include:

Catherine Brown D’Tycoon, Amara Enyia, Bob Fioretti, LaShawn K. Ford, Ja’Mal Green
Jerry Joyce, Lori Lightfoot, Toni Preckwinkle ,Neal Sales-Griffin, and Willie Wilson.

“Fioretti, a former alderman, maintains that elected school boards empower and return control to people. Every other district in Illinois has one, Fioretti said, and denying Chicago theirs “was part of a grand scheme by a Daley in the first place,” referring to the 1995 state law backed by Daley that granted him power over the school board.”

Plans have not been announced, yet, for a rescheduled candidate forum on education, but it’s a safe bet that it will be contentious.