For months, prominent Chicagoans in for-profit commerce and nonprofit governance, Democrats all, have fretted and shaken their heads as Mayor Brandon Johnson lurched from one crisis to another. So far, they’ve mostly focused their efforts on quietly trying to identify and coalesce around a single potential candidate who can successfully challenge the mayor when he comes up for reelection in 2027. Such a consensus candidate, they know all too well, was missing the last time around.
But we’ve detected a notable shift in thinking in the past few days. A coalition is emerging that believes by 2027, the potential fiscal damage to Chicago could be too severe to allow for an easy recovery.
There now is more talk of mobilizing to try to prevent Johnson and his ruthless Chicago Teachers Union allies from tipping the city’s school system, or even the city itself, into insolvency as a dangerous tactic to force the hand of Gov. JB Pritzker and inject state money into the contracts (and the broader educational ecosystem) the CTU desires.
Johnson’s obedience to the CTU is nakedly clear. He tried to do the union’s bidding in asking the CPS chief, Pedro Martinez, to resign, only for that to backfire last week when Martinez refused to go quietly. Martinez laid out his reasons for the unusual denial of the mayor in an opinion piece we published Tuesday.
For anyone who has kept their head under the covers, union President Stacy Davis Gates made her loathing of Martinez yet clearer Tuesday when she described him for the nightly news as a “clown show CEO.” Hardly subtle negotiating tactics.
As we have written before, the union’s disdain for Martinez boils down to his refusal to authorize a risky payday-style loan that would plunge debt-laden CPS into further indebtedness with bankruptcy as a real risk, as well as the union’s perception that Martinez is open to consolidating schools (although he wrote he had no intention of doing so during his current term).
Only the Chicago Board of Education can fire Martinez, and their intentions are not yet fully clear. Chicago Public Schools said Tuesday that the board doesn’t have the Martinez contract on its Thursday agenda nor do they have any plans to vote on the controversial loan. More precisely, CPS initially said that they were making a joint statement with the Chicago Board of Education on those matters only for them to retract the “joint” part shortly afterward, forcing reporters all over town to update their stories. Jianan Shi, chairman of that board, implied on X that he only had seen the statement after it was released.
This is, of course, epic dysfunction that does nada, zero, nothing to help Chicago’s kids.
Johnson could have avoided much of this if he had done the right thing and recused himself from the negotiations with CTU on the grounds that his ties with the union, which worked to ensure his election, were too public and too close. As most all of Chicago knows. He should have nominated a proxy who was capable of putting the city of Chicago’s interests first in said negotiations (Martinez comes to mind). But that would have required more courage than this mayor has yet shown. Even failing recusal, he could have clarified his separation from the union in terms of whose interests he served. The very notion of the person in charge of a massive educational system tacitly supporting its potential bankruptcy at a union’s behest is (to us, a least) a dereliction of duty.
We’re hardly alone in this view. On Tuesday, forces began to amass against the Johnson-CTU coalition and they did not come from the right-wing fringes. On the contrary, they included former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former CPS CEO Janice Jackson, City Clerk Anna Valencia and at least 28 aldermen, all of whom signed a letter that said they “strongly call upon the School Board to continue its support for Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez and to stand its ground against the unprecedented demands of the Chicago Teachers Union to fire him.” We had said the same thing in an editorial on Monday.
When they write the history books about the Johnson administration, his absurd and failed attempt to get Martinez to quietly resign may well feature as his biggest mistake, the one that brought down a roaring opposition on his administration’s head.
Also on Tuesday, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce weighed in with a statement, not just on the attempting ousting of Martinez but on the notorious $300 million potential loan. “We strongly urge the board to keep CEO Martinez in place,” these concerned entities wrote, “reject the proposal to borrow more money, and work with all parties to bring long-term fiscal stability and quality of education to the school system.”
So is this a tipping point? Certainly, the whispers have grown into open discussion of putting up opposition with funding behind it. There is a real, and we think well-justified, fear that the Board of Education merely is stalling this week to get the legalities set regarding ousting Martinez and any subsequent severance needed to forestall a lawsuit. No doubt the Johnson administration is going over his contract, which reportedly requires six months’ notice if he is fired without cause, to look for any loopholes. One worry is that Johnson will install a loyal ally in Martinez’s position, someone akin to current chief of staff Cristina Pacione-Zayas, as an example, who then will pursue the CTU’s and the de facto mayor’s agenda. Whatever the fiscal risk.
We’ve heard no contrary statement from the mayor to give us confidence none of this will be the case. And it is difficult to discern the board’s position at this juncture or even know its level of unification. On either of these matters. But there still is time for everyone to climb down from the barricades — as unlikely as that now appears.
“Someone should start running for Mayor of Chicago … now,” tweeted the tech entrepreneur and restaurateur Nick Kokanas Wednesday, summarizing a broader sentiment. “Imagine if a candidate proposed real, detailed and logical solutions to counteract the current admin (sic). Perhaps we could avoid 14 people running and improve policy.”
Those in opposition to Johnson include many of the city’s best and brightest. The mayor, whose approval rating even before the past week’s debacle hovered around 25%, should remove his blinders.
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