At an eighth grade graduation last week at his alma mater, John A. Walsh Elementary School in Pilsen, outgoing schools chief Pedro Martinez recounted to parents and students how one teacher — Mr. Asher — turned the trajectory of his life around.
“I was below grade level. I was struggling, frankly. You know, I grew up in poverty,” Martinez said. “And (he) just saw something in me.”
Martinez is leaving the district on Wednesday. In an interview with the Tribune on Thursday, he emotionally recounted his passion for Chicago Public Schools and for the city where he found a home as the child of Mexican immigrants. He urged the next leader of the district to practice empathy in order to set an example for the more than 320,000 kids they will oversee.
The top district official drew national attention this school year amid a showdown between CPS and Mayor Brandon Johnson, who was backed by the mayor’s close ally, the Chicago Teachers Union. That conflict culminated Wednesday in a claim of defamation Martinez filed against CTU, its president, Stacy Davis Gates, and Chicago Board of Education President Sean Harden. Martinez hopes to add the claim as an amendment to an ongoing lawsuit he filed against the board after he was fired in late December.
He starts a new job as the commissioner of elementary and secondary education in Massachusetts on July 1. In the interview with the Tribune, Martinez did not hold back from describing the toll the drama-laden back-and-forth had taken on him and his family. He compared the political positions of the board members and officials who led the charge to fire him to the polarization under President Donald Trump.
“What you see on both sides is that they both feel they’re right. They don’t care what the evidence shows. They don’t care what the truth really is. They just feel they’re right,” he said.
An immigrant from Mexico
Martinez was the first Latino appointee to head CPS on a permanent basis. The eldest of 12 children, he credits Pilsen’s churches for welcoming his family to the city from Mexico. He didn’t get his visa until his junior year at Benito Juarez High School in Pilsen.
He said he feels “blessed” to have attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and to have received his MBA from DePaul University, noting that many undocumented students aren’t being afforded the same opportunities because of the federal immigration crackdown.
“I feel for our community, because I understand the fear. I understand the uncertainty,” he said.
Martinez worked as the chief financial officer for CPS from 2003 to 2009 under then-CEO Arne Duncan. He was a network chief before leaving to serve as superintendent of school districts in Nevada and San Antonio. He returned as CPS CEO in 2021 under then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot, just as the world was emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though Martinez was born in Mexico, he said he always considered himself a Chicagoan first.
“When I came back, they started calling me the son of Chicago,” he said. “I’ve gotta tell you, it’s probably the best compliment I’ve ever received in my entire career.”
The ouster
A 96-page amended lawsuit, filed late Wednesday by Martinez’s lawyer, William Quinlan, lays bare the CPS CEO’s fight to retain his title.
The conflict began in September when the mayor, a former teacher and CTU organizer, pushed for Martinez’s removal after Martinez opposed a $300 million loan meant to fund a new teachers contract and a $175 million pension payment to nonteacher CPS employees.
“I really thought (the mayor and I) were aligned,” Martinez reflected Thursday. “He knew my financial background. He even told me, ‘Pedro, you have credibility.’”
Martinez said he was caught off guard when Johnson asked him to step down at the September meeting due to his opposition to the loan, which he believed relied on short-term fixes for long-term financial needs. He said he had warned the mayor at least five times before their meeting that the city’s financial advisers offered flawed guidance.
He believes his differing stance from the mayor on borrowing stems from his tenure as CPS’ chief financial officer in the 2000s. Between 2003 and 2007, when he was CFO, the Tribune found CPS issued $1 billion in a type of long-term debt called auction-rate securities. Martinez later defended the borrowing.
But he contends that after his time away from the district in Nevada and San Antonio, he returned to find that CPS had relied on high-interest borrowing from 2015 to 2018, more straightforwardly expensive than the auction-rate borrowing under his leadership.
When Martinez left CPS, the district “had over a billion dollars in the bank,” he said. Upon returning as CEO in 2021, he said he was stunned to find the district was “the second-largest junk bond producer in the country, second only to Puerto Rico.”
“I really didn’t feel it would be a responsible path forward to just push issues to the future for somebody else,” he explained, when asked about the controversial $300 million loan that made headlines for months.
The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After the mayor-appointed school board refused to fire Martinez at Johnson’s bidding, all seven members resigned in early October. Johnson quickly replaced them, and the new handpicked board — allegedly “inadequately vetted,” according to Martinez’s suit — moved to terminate the CEO “without cause.” Martinez’s lawsuit claims the board tried to “manufacture” a cause to justify his removal.
He was allowed to stay on for 180 days.
‘This is what we deserve’
In the months that followed his December firing, Martinez’s relationships with the mayor-appointed board members and CTU grew increasingly complicated.
The week after the ouster and amid contract negotiations, Cook County Judge Joel Chupack granted Martinez a temporary restraining order barring the school board from interfering with his duties or assuming control over the CPS staff.
The recent defamation claims against Davis Gates were added to Martinez’s ongoing lawsuit. Judge Chupack is expected to rule on whether to accept the amended complaint. Chalkbeat Chicago first reported the complaint.
On Thursday, Martinez spoke with the Tribune about the “obvious” relationship between mayor-appointed board members and the CTU. He said Davis Gates was pushing 700 proposals in the new teachers contract that would have cost billions in debt.
“It was (the mindset of), ‘This is what we deserve,’” he said. “And the mayor was right there with her.”
In the complaint, Martinez cites multiple public statements and social media posts Davis Gates made during contract negotiations that he says falsely portrayed him as unfit to lead.
Among the examples: a graphic depicting him as “the Grinch,” a CTU statement accusing him of putting “personal politics” and “media stardom” ahead of students, and a comment from Davis Gates comparing him to a disruptive student who should have an individualized education program — a remark that she later apologized for.
In a statement, Steve Mandell, representing CTU in the lawsuit, called the complaint a “brazen attempt to silence legitimate public advocacy” and stated that Davis Gates and CTU were advocating for change to improve the lives of students and teachers.
“If this sort of advocacy were actionable, the courts would literally be flooded with baseless defamation claims arising out of everyday labor disputes,” said the statement from Mandell, who also is on retainer to represent the Chicago Tribune in some legal matters.
On Thursday, Martinez denounced Davis Gates’ leadership style. He said it’s important for parents to have CPS leadership they can trust, because “we are the ones that are educating their children.”
“We’re seeing this across the country … individuals who are now in power just want what they want,” he said. “You will never see me bashing people, lying and insulting people.”
Martinez claims in the suit that the union falsely blamed him for proposing mass school closures, including the shutdown of seven of 15 Acero charter schools in October — a decision he says he had no role in. He also alleges that board President Harden publicly criticized his budget plans for the coming year and stated that his departure from CPS should be accelerated.
Martinez is seeking damages and a court order to enforce the terms of his contract. At a board meeting on Wednesday, the board voted to raise the payment cap for its law firm, Cozen O’Connor, from $75,000 to $135,000.
The firm, along with Davis Gates and Harden, did not respond to requests for comment.
A budget crunch, division
This summer, the district again faces challenging budget circumstances, but under considerably different leadership dynamics.
At Wednesday’s board meeting, members appointed Macquline King as the new interim CPS chief. King comes from a post as the city’s senior director of educational policy, so in theory, she is aligned with the mayor’s priorities. She may clash with him less than Martinez did.
The search for a permanent replacement is ongoing, and the district aims to pick a candidate later this fall.
Before King’s appointment, the Chicago Westside Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sent a letter to Harden, requesting that board members “hire a Black person who is a qualified Educator” for both the interim and permanent roles. The Tribune obtained a copy of the letter.
Last week, the City Council’s Latino Caucus sent a letter to Johnson requesting the appointment of a “qualified Latino leader to serve as interim CEO.” The caucus’s letter cites data that schools are 47% Latino, but states that “our communities remain underrepresented in key leadership roles across City government and its sister agencies.”
Asked about the optics of the two groups fighting each other through open letters to city leadership, Martinez pointed out that both Black and Latino students have seen significant improvements in literacy rates under his tenure.
“We’re seeing so many of our students doing so much better,” he said.
Thursday morning, he teared up as he talked about what this job has meant to him.
“I am a product of this system and all of the complexities,” he said.
