Chicago mayoral race: Runoff candidates offer two perspectives on education
Rachel Schilke
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With less than two weeks until the runoff election, Chicago mayoral candidates Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson are working to present themselves as the only person that can redefine and restructure the city’s declining education sector.
Both Vallas and Johnson have deep roots in Chicago’s educational sphere but carry widely contrasting perspectives. Vallas served as CEO for the Chicago Public Schools district, while Johnson was a longtime Chicago Teachers Union organizer and teacher at the Jenner Academy of the Arts.
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The runoff election comes at a time when Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who was ousted in the general election, is set to be one of the last mayors to have direct authority over Illinois’s largest public school system before it transitions to an elected school board — the first time since the 1990s.
The next mayor of Chicago will need to oversee contract negotiations with the teachers’ union — as its deal expires in 2024 — and find solutions to declining enrollment as the moratorium on closing schools ends.
“It feels very historic and significant to have two people who have absolutely diametrically opposed careers and policy positions,” Cassie Creswell, director of Illinois Families for Public Schools, said to the Chicago Tribune. “It’s like being on the precipice of possibly good change — or possibly a continuation of the last 30 years of school reform in Chicago.”
Brandon Johnson
Johnson approaches changes in education the way he does with similar areas of interest, such as crime — he draws on personal, emotional experiences from conversations he has with students, parents, and community members.
During his victory speech and recent debates, he shared memories from his past students and his connection to the 2015 hunger strike when residents pressured the school district to reopen a high school on the South Side of Chicago.
“One of my students looked me in the face and said, ‘Mr. Johnson, you should not be teaching here. … You should be teaching at a good school,’” Johnson said during his victory speech on Feb. 28. “It broke my heart then. It breaks my heart today. I wanted to change the system.”
Johnson ran his campaign primarily on comprehensive change for both crime and education, voters’ top issues heading into the runoff. In education, Johnson said he hopes to increase funding to expand staffing and increase clinicians and counselors.
Part of his school system reconstruction includes expanding partnerships with city colleges and trade schools and improving under-enrolled schools to accommodate child care and health clinics.
Johnson has pledged to switch from an enrollment-based to a needs-based funding model, as well as place an emphasis on areas sometimes pushed to the side, such as bilingual and special education programs and accessibility for students with disabilities.
One of his more progressive stances includes partnering with the Department of Family and Support Services to house the district’s nearly 4,000 homeless students, as well as provide free transit services to students in tandem with the Chicago Transit Authority.
While gaining support from parents and teachers, some critics have placed his ideas under scrutiny as financially unrealistic given the difficulty in securing additional funds from the state.
Teachers are overwhelmingly backing Johnson in the runoff race. The Chicago Teachers Union is one of Johnson’s strongest endorsements. Between Jan. 1 and March 6, the Chicago Teachers Union, its PAC, and other union affiliates donated $3.2 million to Johnson’s campaign.
However, Johnson has been forced to address criticism over his connection to the teachers union, with some believing he would be too close to the union to represent the district at large fairly during contract negotiations.
“I have a fiduciary responsibility to the people of the city of Chicago, and once I’m mayor of the city of Chicago, I will no longer be a member of the Chicago Teachers Union,” Johnson said.
He also has spoken out against standardized testing for racial disparities.
“This narrative that our children are not proficient, keep in mind that it’s based on the standardized test that has history in eugenics that was trying to prove that black people were inferior,” Johnson said at a mayoral forum.
“Under my administration, we’re going to invest in people,” Johnson continued. “How about we actually do something better than a standardized test?”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Johnson’s campaign for comment.
Paul Vallas
Vallas has leaned heavily on his prior experience as a school administrator throughout his campaign, drawing on experience not only from Chicago Public Schools but also stints completed in New Orleans and Philadelphia.
Compared to Johnson, the former district CEO appeals to voters through statistics and frank statements relating to his background in education. He regularly cites the impact he had on the Chicago Public Schools system when he served as CEO from 1995 to 2001.
“You know, (Johnson) talks about being an elementary school teacher. Did he ever mention that the school that he taught in was the Jenner School that I built right in the heart of Cabrini-Green?” Vallas said during a forum. “Next to the (Walter Payton College Prep), which I also built when Cabrini was still standing, and we had basically guaranteed slots for the (Cabrini) kids?”
Vallas has come under severe scrutiny for stressing the importance of standardized test scores and asked to defend the way he dealt with the district’s pension payments and expanding for school privatization — ideas that have grown unpopular with the rising strength of unions. He also has been asked to explain his work in New Orleans and Philadelphia.
In Philadelphia, where he joined after losing his first bid for mayor in 2002, Vallas ran the school system there, leaving the school with a $73.3 million hole in the district’s budget that led to cuts and layoffs.
“Paul’s never seen a dollar that he wasn’t willing to spend three times,” said former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who served as a councilmember when Vallas was The School District of Philadelphia’s CEO.
After leaving Philadelphia in 2007, he moved on to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, embracing the city’s use of charter schools — a method he said he would focus on heavily if elected mayor. While he bolstered test scores, he was scrutinized for creating a gap in school coverage.
Lance Hill, the co-founder of the now-shuttered Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, told the Chicago Tribune that students with special needs, in particular, “drop through the cracks” because they did not get all of the programs that addressed their issues — something Johnson has vocally vowed to prioritize.
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However, Vallas’s extensive experience in school budgets has made him a favorite among more fiscally conservative voters. He regularly brings up the school district’s per-pupil spending — which is double the official state number — and advocates heavily for expanding the Chicago school district’s charter schools and school choice, which he says is the “civil rights issue of our generation.”
“I am going to trust you — the parents, the community, the teachers in the classroom,” Vallas said on his campaign website. “That starts with dismantling the central administration and empowering the community through elected Local School Councils. It’s time to push the money down to the local level and let it flow into the classroom.”