It’s a long-standing Chicago tradition that the Chicago Teachers Union president, in the heat of contract negotiations, begins demonizing Chicago’s mayor.
Karen Lewis so befuddled Mayor Rahm Emanuel — to the point he reportedly dropped an F-bomb during a fiery City Hall meeting — that supporters began urging her to run for mayor. And Jesse Sharkey ran circles around Lori Lightfoot, taking CTU out on a 15-day strike.
The emasculation of mayors served a purpose for these CTU leaders: It got them contracts that have helped make CPS teachers among the most richly compensated in the nation.
But what’s a CTU president to do after one of her own — Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former union organizer — takes office? Why, go after the schools CEO instead.
In an op-ed published by Tribune Opinion this week, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates publicly denounced CEO Pedro Martinez, timing her blast just as talk of an impending ouster is peaking.
Davis Gates, as key a Johnson adviser as anyone on the mayor’s staff, reportedly has pushed for weeks to purge Martinez from CPS. Publication of Davis Gates’ critique, not long after Martinez rebuffed Johnson’s directives regarding this year’s CPS budget, seems designed to bring the Martinez era at CPS to a close.
Davis Gates listed an extensive bill of particulars. One that stands out is an accusation of poor fiscal management. “In the corporate world, a CEO is charged with the financial health of the company. CPS CEO Pedro Martinez saw the fiscal cliff that the end of federal COVID-19 relief funds signified and sat on his hands as he drove the district over the edge,” she wrote.
The critique has elements of truth. Martinez has put large chunks of COVID-19 relief funds toward new hires and other obligations that will last long after the money runs out next month. And Martinez has laid out no meaningful long-term plan to replace the lost revenue — $670 million of this year’s $9.9 billion CPS budget.
In that, Martinez hardly stands alone. “Fiscal cliff” is quite the talk in school systems nationwide, as big-city school chiefs struggle to adapt to the looming cutoff of COVID-19 relief. Studies show that urban districts with high proportions of poor students were most likely to spend their COVID-19 money on new staff and other long-term obligations.
Martinez does stand out, not in a good way, in how he “balanced” this school year’s budget only by ignoring bills that will soon come due: the cost of an expected 4% CTU pay raise once a new contract is reached and a $175 million pension bill shifted by Johnson from the city to CPS.
Bad as that is, Davis Gates’ laying blame on Martinez selectively ignores the way Johnson tried to make matters even worse. It was Johnson who sought to force Martinez to book $300 million in high-interest loans in order to help cover CPS operating costs this year. Martinez and the Chicago Board of Education refused — an act of valor almost unheard of among people who owe their jobs to Chicago’s mayors.
Davis Gates, for her part, had a far tidier solution for closing this year’s $500 million budget gap: Like Johnson, she believes the state of Illinois should cut a check to cover the CPS deficit. Johnson traveled to Springfield, boldly claiming the state “owes” Chicago $1 billion because of chronic underfunding of a program designed to reduce economic inequities among Illinois schools. Gates and Martinez also made a joint Springfield pilgrimage seeking more state money.
The body of Davis Gates’ opinion piece strikes a pose as if Martinez singularly stands in the way of CTU efforts to reverse decades of “racism, privatization, austerity and gender inequality.” As regards a tolerance for structural inequities, she compares him to former CPS chiefs Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan — names that draw boos at CTU rallies.
It’s all a pose because while Martinez may not be moving as aggressively as Davis Gates wants, he does seem headed in a similar direction. CPS is moving away from using student headcount to allocate spending, toward an approach designed to more equitably distribute funds to low-enrollment schools. Direct CPS grants to such schools, many on the South and West sides, are up 10% this year, to $55 million — not nearly what’s needed, but it’s a start.
Teachers and other staff positions this year are allocated in part according to an “Opportunity Index” designed to direct additional resources toward schools affected by historic structural inequities. And the new hiring under Martinez, some of it with COVID-19 funds, was targeted in part to help CPS enroll additional unhoused students last year, teach more English learners and serve an additional 4,000 students with disabilities.
Would Davis Gates have preferred Martinez act more like a “corporate CEO” and either bank that money, use it to pay down debt or spend it on more administrators? Hardly. Rather, she would hire more librarians, social workers and others.
Davis Gates concludes that the schools CEO’s job is “to stand up for Chicago’s students and deliver the resources they deserve.” By what means? She offers not a word on where the money should come from or what tradeoffs may be needed in order to realize her overarching vision for Chicago’s schools — a vision that, to date, has largely left out the question of fiscal stability.
Davis Gates likely will get her way: Martinez out and someone new to take his place. She’ll have a voice in the hire, no doubt. And that person, like Martinez before them, will soon learn it’s a lot easier to conjure a vision for transformational change than it is to find some way to pay for it.
David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association.
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