Less than two months ago, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously to require the next head of Chicago Public Schools to possess the credentials to be a school superintendent.
The thinking was that future leaders of the city’s public schools should be educators rather than business leaders, which past mayors have hired at times to wrestle with CPS’ knotty financial challenges.
But now school board President Sean Harden, a close ally of Mayor Brandon Johnson, is strong-arming board members into overturning that resolution so that a minion of the mayor can be hired on an interim basis to succeed outgoing CPS CEO Pedro Martinez. We fear Harden will succeed at the May meeting.
What’s happening at a school board recently celebrated for electing at least some of its members for the first time in Chicago history is an affront to democracy.
According to Tribune reporting Wednesday, the effort is aimed at making Cristina Pacione-Zayas, Johnson’s chief of staff, interim CPS boss. Pacione-Zayas, who played a significant role in the mayor’s unsuccessful efforts last year to remove Martinez when he wouldn’t sink a deeply indebted school district even further into hock to pay for an exorbitant teachers contract, obviously would be ensconced to ensure the mayor’s agenda for the schools is pursued vigorously.
Martinez, who will finish his CPS stint in mid-June after a previous iteration of the school board fired him without cause in December at the mayor’s urging, has been a thorn in Johnson’s side for nearly a year, refusing to capitulate to unaffordable demands of the Chicago Teachers Union and angering its former-employee-turned-Chicago-mayor in the process. The board has begun a search for a full-time successor, but all agree there isn’t time to find that person before Martinez departs. Hence the need for an interim.
It doesn’t take sophisticated political skills to understand what Johnson and Harden are doing. With just two years left in the mayor’s term, Pacione-Zayas could easily be an “interim” CEO for the remainder of Johnson’s mayoralty. After all, election season begins again next year. Then the argument will be that hiring a permanent superintendent should wait for Chicago’s first-ever fully elected school board to take their seats in 2027 and make the selection.
If all goes to Johnson and Harden’s plan, Pacione-Zayas surely will be tasked with doing whatever it takes to keep from instituting layoffs as CPS contends with a budget deficit of $529 million for the coming school year. As it stands, in the absence of new revenue sources that are highly unlikely, CPS projects it may have to cut up to 1,700 positions to balance the budget
For the better part of a year, the mayor and Pacione-Zayas have pushed the school board to borrow hundreds of millions at high interest rates to fund CPS’ persistent operational shortfalls — an extremely irresponsible course of action for a junk bond-rated system. Martinez, along with seven board members who were elected in November as part of a hybrid board made up of mayoral appointees and elected officeholders, have stood in the way until now.
On the 21-member board, those seven board members aren’t enough to keep Johnson and Harden from installing Pacione-Zayas in the top role. So at least a few board members appointed by the mayor will need to stand up to Harden’s extreme pressure tactics and stay true to their belief that a schools boss should possess the appropriate credentials to keep the mayor’s gambit from succeeding.
To be sure, Pacione-Zayas is well educated, holding a doctorate in educational policy studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. But she doesn’t have the superintendent’s license that the board voted unanimously to require in March, both for an interim and permanent CPS CEO.
You know who does? For all the vilification he’s unfairly endured from the mayor and Pacione-Zayas, Martinez is an accredited school superintendent. There also are at least dozens if not hundreds of CPS employees who hold the license, including several who are current executives. The board has no shortage of options if the idea truly is to find someone qualified to hold down the fort while the search for a successor to Martinez is conducted.
In a Tuesday news conference, Johnson was asked whether he believes CPS bosses should hold the accreditation. He effectively said no. “There are a number of individuals that have education backgrounds that understand my vision for public schools that could lead the district,” he said.
Perhaps he should have let his appointed board members know his thinking before they all voted that lacking a superintendent’s license was a deal-breaker. Now he’s put them in the position of appearing ridiculous in order to kowtow yet again to CTU.
Credit is due to elected board member and noted rapper Che ‘Rhymefest’ Smith for calling out what he sees as a Trumpian level of hypocrisy.
As for Pacione-Zayas and her qualifications for such a critical post, several episodes during her tenure in the Johnson administration give us pause. In the early months of Johnson’s term, she was a key architect of the plan (scotched at the eleventh hour) to house as many as 2,000 migrants in winterized tents on a Brighton Park brownfield contaminated by toxic metals.
Last year, three city workers complained that Pacione-Zayas, as Johnson’s chief of staff, badly mishandled their complaints about alleged harassment by Ronnie Reese, Johnson’s chief communications officer. Reese was fired in November but only after a widely derided intervention by Pacione-Zayas in which she’d asked the complainants to meet with Reese to hash out their differences.
For not the first time, Chicago taxpayers will look to neophyte school board members to show courage in the face of unseemly power politics.
Stay true to your March vote, board members, and hire an interim CPS boss who won’t risk the system’s insolvency because of the mayor’s myopic ideological rigidity.
And stand up for democracy at the same time.
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