While most eyes are on Chicago’s messy budget process, Chicago Public Schools has been laboring for months to find a new leader. And the process isn’t going well.
The 21-member hybrid Chicago school board, made up of elected members and those appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson, launched a traditional search for a new CEO in the spring. The board hired a search firm and solicited applications to succeed Pedro Martinez, whom Johnson maneuvered out of the role after the two battled for the better part of a year over school budget issues.
All was going more or less as planned, with the board narrowing its choice to two finalists about a month ago. But then the chaotic politics of public education in Chicago reared its familiar head.
The identity of the two finalists — top school administrators in Denver and New York City — quickly was leaked. Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero subsequently withdrew his name, leaving former New York schools Chancellor Meisha Porter as the only remaining choice.
Johnson, as well as his allies at the Chicago Teachers Union, criticized the process, saying the search should be broadened to allow for submittal of new applications. Now, the hunt for a new CEO appears to be on hold.
And that’s where it should remain,
Selection of the next permanent CEO of Chicago Public Schools, who will be asked to lead a district uncomfortably close to insolvency, should wait for a fully elected school board to take charge of CPS. Elections for a new board president (current President Sean Harden is a Johnson appointee) and the 20 other members are less than a year away.
In the meantime, CPS has an interim CEO, Macquline King, who took the reins in June with the approval of the mayor. He may well be less favorably disposed to her now following her resistance last summer to his demands that CPS cover a $175 million pension payment the district didn’t have the means to pay.
But nonetheless, the school year is well underway, and there have been few obvious operational problems so far under her leadership. King appears to be handling the caretaker role under awkward circumstances that included the board’s recent decision not to name her as a finalist for the full-time job.
We’ll allow it’s not ideal to keep an interim boss in place for well over a year, which would be the case if the search for a permanent CEO is delayed until 2027. Senior administrators already have departed following Martinez’s exit in June, making management of the nation’s fourth largest public schools system acutely challenging.
But the alternative is worse. On the ballot next year in the school board races will be nothing less than the future of CPS, which is burdened with dozens of half-empty schools (or worse), a massive debt load and a credit rating in the toilet.
Johnson and CTU continue to resist any and all suggestions of consolidation and have attempted without success to shame Springfield into providing a billion-dollar bailout it’s in no position to deliver. CTU was largely repudiated at the ballot box in the first-ever school board elections that took place last year; some of those elected board members have acknowledged, albeit ever so delicately, the likely need for future school closures.
How CPS’ unsustainable present course is addressed will be a focal point of next year’s campaign. Hiring a new CEO, who surely will insist on a multi-year employment contract, as these major questions remain unanswered would be folly. The new CPS boss should have a clear idea what their task is before they take the job.
As it is, under Johnson, the CEO’s job is somehow to balance deficit-plagued budgets year after year without being allowed to consider consolidation of schools — even facilities where teachers and other staff nearly outnumber the students. The Houdini act can’t go on much longer, so the next CEO’s job description is likely to be far different than it is under this mayor. It will probably entail making finite resources go as far as possible, whether that means lost CTU jobs or not.
What’s more, Johnson, who remains deeply unpopular in poll after poll, may well no longer be mayor beginning 18 months from now. Having played such an instrumental role in removing the CPS CEO he agreed to keep on when he first took office and being tied to the hip with a teachers union implacably opposed to addressing CPS’ fiscal issues realistically, there’s no good reason this mayor should get a say in who will run CPS for the next five years or longer.
Chicago is a scant year away from having a public school system in which the mayor — on paper, anyway — will have no control. It will be a new era, for better or for worse.
Whoever takes on the job of righting the ship at CPS must be in sync with the fully elected school board, not Brandon Johnson and CTU.
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