The firing of Chicago Public Schools chief executive officer Pedro Martinez has been top of mind for months now, the fallout of a long fight between leaders of the teachers union aligned with the mayor and leaders of a district facing serious budget headwinds.
According to an internal memo obtained by the Tribune, the mayor gave directives for the ousting of Martinez back in September. Then, on the last day before the district’s holiday break and in the middle of tense contract negotiations, the current Board of Education called a special meeting for Friday.
To many onlookers, the board’s last-minute move to include two agenda items — either to terminate or approve a settlement with Martinez — signal the end of a drawn-out leadership blood bath that has dominated conversations at meetings and behind closed doors.
“There’s a lot at stake here when you see this kind of chaos,” said Peter Cunningham, former assistant secretary for communications and outreach in the U.S. Department of Education who worked with Arne Duncan when he was CEO of Chicago Public Schools in a recent interview with the Tribune.
“When you’re talking about a ten billion school system that serves 330,000 people … you’re talking about something that is the biggest driver of property taxes, so it affects every homeowner. You’re talking about the city’s reputation, around the country, in the world.”
Product of the district
Martinez was the first permanent Latino leader to head the district. An immigrant from Mexico and the eldest of 12 children, he credits Pilsen’s churches for welcoming his family to the city.
Martinez has a finance background, not a teaching background, which he was questioned about when he first took the role. He majored in accounting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before getting an MBA at DePaul University. He worked in the private sector as an audit supervisor before joining the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago.
Martinez then went on to work under former CEO Arne Duncan at CPS, and at a Nevada public school system as superintendent. Martinez’s stint there ended after he was fired illegally by the school board and then offered a buyout.
He continued as a superintendent in San Antonio before returning to his home city in 2021 to lead one of the largest school districts in the nation as it was emerging from COVID.
Sept. 15, 2021: An uphill battle
Martinez’s appointment by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot was announced at his alma mater Benito Juarez High School in the Pilsen neighborhood on Sept. 15, 2021.
Though Martinez took over for ex-CEO Janice Jackson during the COVID-19 pandemic, he had bright hopes. He pledged to keep schools open for in-person learning. He wanted to earn the trust of Black and Latino families enrolled in district schools.
CPS is about six times the size of San Antonio’s school district, and Martinez did not fall into his role at an easy time. He was staring down a transition to an elected school board and long-standing structural debt problems of hundreds of millions brought on by financial disentanglement with the city under Lightfoot.
As he learned the ropes of his new position, the Chicago Teachers Union cited a “lagging” COVID-19 testing program, bus driver shortages and flaws in special education services, issuing a statement after his appointment saying Martinez “must exceed expectations in a struggling school district.”
“We cannot be fighting within ourselves,” Martinez said then. “The enemy is the systemic racism we’ve had in our country. The enemy is poverty.”
The pandemic dominated Martinez’s first year as all the while he faced steady, declining enrollment rates. There were constant disagreements over whether to hold in-person classes or remote learning options, to mask or un-mask.
CPS and CTU negotiated a safety agreement for months. Classes were canceled when teachers refused to give their lessons in person. But the district, like the rest of Chicago, emerged slowly — and bumpily — from intermittent quarantine.
June 9, 2022: Pandemic relief funds and improvements in student achievement
Facing a looming deficit, the union has long criticized the district for not spending more of its COVID-19 dollars. When the CPS released its $9.5 billion budget proposal in June of 2022, it had used about half of the $2.8 billion it was allocated for federal pandemic relief funding — claiming it didn’t want to pay for positions it couldn’t afford when that money expired.
“We’re investing these funds strategically, setting a new foundation for success to ensure schools have the resources and capacity to move every student forward,” said Martinez.
Still, the teachers union pushed for more investment, saying that “what (students) need is recovery, with compassionate, competent leadership that is leading that recovery — not cuts to their schools and classrooms.” Today, the CTU has not let go of that argument.
(The district did invest in budgeted positions, adding hundreds of teachers, classroom assistants, social workers, nurses and coordinators since 2019, according to a recent CPS presentation. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona later commended Martinez’s deliberate approach to strategically spending pandemic relief dollars over the maximum allotted time.)
A seismic shift came when Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teacher buoyed by more than $2 million in support from the CTU, was sworn into office in the spring of 2023. Although Johnson has long been affiliated with unions that are critical of leaders like Duncan, who Martinez worked with, the new mayor chose to keep Martinez as his CEO.
And the district, which had faced years of conflict between the powerful union and CPS leadership, saw a brief detente between the Chicago Teachers Union and Martinez.
Johnson promised to bring momentum for CPS. He proposed finding alternatives to standardized tests, filling the funding gap with state support and reversing declining enrollment.
The district saw some real signs of improvement. There was the first enrollment increase in 12 years, and post-pandemic academic gains. Martinez and CTU President Stacy Davis Gates went out together to celebrate the first day of school that fall.
Martinez said he had big hopes to work with the mayor. The two saw eye to eye on shifting priorities back to neighborhood schools and getting rid of security officers in schools.
But the good feelings did not last.
Dec. 27, 2023: A financial cliff, an expired contract, a clash of interests
After decades of lacking investment, pandemic relief money gave CPS “a fighting chance” to show what’s possible when resources are made available to meet students’ needs, Martinez said at one CPS event celebrating graduation rate increases.
Those funds were set to expire in 2025, a phenomenon facing school systems across the country. To fill the gap, CPS officials said they were advocating for increased aid from the city and state.
Then, in late May, the Illinois Senate approved a state spending plan without additional funds for the district. The teachers contract expired in June and the district approved a nearly $10 billion budget the following month without accounting for a pension payment to the city and the cost of a new teachers contract.
That caused tensions to boil over, culminating in the mayor requesting Martinez resign from his role for refusing to take out a loan to fill the budget gap.
Martinez has said covering all the costs of the union’s demands would not be a healthy financial decision for CPS. He’s said he does not want to plunge the district further into debt.
The union, meanwhile, is still in contract negotiations with the district. Observers say CTU is uniquely positioned, with a close ally in the mayor, to push its demands through — especially after Johnson’s previous hand-picked board resigned under pressure to fire Martinez and the mayor quickly appointed a new one.
The city’s record tax increment financing surplus is bringing some extra cash to the district, but there is lasting disagreement over how many of the union’s demands can feasibly met with that surplus.
The school board gets to fire or hire the CPS CEO. That has raised alarm from 10 newly elected members who will be seated in January when the board expands to 21 members.
Ultimately, the fate of Chicago’s Pilsen-grown leader lies in the board’s hands Friday evening.
Although Johnson has sought Martinez’s ouster for months, the district could throw a curveball by appointing someone to be “co-CEO” and attempt to keep him around for the remainder of his contract but cut him out of important decisions. The board meets at 5:45pm. on Friday.
Chicago Tribune’s Gregory Royal Pratt and Alice Yin contributed.
